The complexity of management decisionsIn this post, César González Cantón, Professor of the Official University Master's Degree in Corporate Responsibility and the Official University Master's Degree in Management of Occupational Risk Prevention, Excellence, the Environment and Corporate Responsibility at Bureau Veritas University Center , talks to us about the importance of educating future managers in prudence for correct decision-making in business management.
If there is one thing that characterizes our world, it is uncertainty and continuous change. It is of great importance that the training provided in business schools helps develop conceptual tools to adapt, predict and generate that change .
Management theorizing in the 20th century has twitter data been characterized by the predominance of a model of rationality in the manner of the natural sciences : conceptual models, hypotheses, experimentation, etc. This undoubtedly has its advantages, the least of which is not its predictive capacity or the certainty that the results will come from the hand of the method.
In particular, it is a particularly effective methodology when it comes to elucidating the appropriate means to achieve an end , such as when pursuing an efficient use of resources, exploiting a habitual market, increasing the value of a share, creating barriers to entry for a competitor, etc. This is what Aristotle characterized as " instrumental reason ."
But what happens when we do not know the end? Or when we have only one exemplary case to guide us, from which we cannot generalize a law? Or when the relationships between the elements are so complex that it is impossible to compute them? Or when we have to create something radically new, for which there are no previous instances?
This is the realm of practical reason, which Aristotle called "phronesis" and which later came to be called "prudence."
Although later identified with the virtue of the merchant and, therefore, devalued from its original meaning, the prudent man is the one who knows how to find the meaning of the concrete situation by contextualizing it in a greater whole. The one who knows how to answer the question, not only by how, but by why.
A kind of rationality that does not separate means from ends, but rather facilitates a holistic view. Also, a specifically human kind of rationality, since it has to do with the ends of action . A monkey can be trained to reach the banana overcoming all kinds of obstacles. But only a person can stop and ask himself why he wants that banana or whether, perhaps, it would not be better to start a hunger strike.