**4. The main challenges of the present organizational contexts and of the new generations**

To be able to redesign the right management education system, it is necessary to do an adequate analysis of both the internal and the external challenges that most organizations are—and will be—confronted with. This is a logical requirement in a fast-changing organizational world instead of maintaining an old management education system and only adding the modern information and communication technologies as most specialized institutions are presently doing.

We will briefly quote some major organizational and managerial challenges that should question the present mainstream management education and should argue for profound changes.

The first is the growing complexity of organizations, especially the larger ones, with heavy multilayer hierarchies, a lot of bureaucracy, and constraints of many regulations and standards that are limiting their agility, creativity, and global performances and creating many employee frustrations and demotivation [2, 3, 14].

The traditional hierarchical and pyramidal organizational structures and operating modes are increasingly criticized in agreed and widespread talks but indeed are still dominant in most organizations and companies, reflecting the strong resistance of the old top-down management model (as well as its power distribution model) dating from the "Industrial Age," a century ago! This way of operating and managing is no longer tolerated by the new generation of employees.

The second big managerial challenge is linked to the work behavior of these new generations of millennials used to collaborative and informal work relationships, critical of getting orders from senior executives whose positions are more tied to

their status than to their actual competences. They are very reluctant about the traditional hierarchical pyramidal model, and they are yearning for sharing information and reflections and participating in the decisions that have an impact on them.

They praise new collective intelligence methods of teamworks and simple direct relationships. This is why they quite appreciate new leadership models such as the servant leadership, learning organizations, liberation management, etc. that all support new ways of managing people and of leading with far less hierarchy, flatter organizational structures, simpler operating modes, more individual and team autonomy, more possibilities for initiative, and more employee participation in decision- making (at least the operational decisions).

All these new people management and leadership models are fostering another type of power sharing and leadership philosophy within the organizations and other ways of working that requires new competences, new responsibilities, and new roles for "managers-leaders" than those still taught in most mainstream business schools.

The third great managerial challenge has to do with the organization's so-called "digital revolution" of organizations and the digital relationship processes as well as the development of the "artificial intelligence" approaches which in fact means the use of algorithms to make decisions and to perform various tasks which are supposed to cost less, be faster, and have better solutions.

A lot of excitements and literature have been devoted to these issues for some years focusing mainly on their advantages. This technological phenomenon appears as a necessary modernization to remain efficient and competitive in the markets. It reflects the present fascination for these technologies and their instrumental capabilities which are considered as the new panacea for business success!

But far less analysis and reflections have been devoted to its "human" impacts and the related drawbacks which are often far less positive. It leads to a very risky "dehumanization" of the managerial and leadership relationships with putting more stress and more constraints on employees that generate frustrations and professional illnesses.

In addition, one can notice that these information and communication technologies are making a virtual world that tends to reinforce a kind of "neo-Taylorism" with less real human contacts and direct person-to-person exchanges and with more pressure put on employees who are often "prisoners" of their screen and software with less freedom, less initiative, and more real-time control on their performances. The drawbacks of the "digitalization revolution" are in fact very serious and too often overlooked in the present management education system which also tends to focus on these technologies as the new requirement to be modern without having enough critical view on its serious human limits and risks.

This is especially important to adequately prepare the present and future "managers-leaders" to their new roles, real added values, and human responsibilities. One can already notice a weak point of the mainstream business schools which always emphasize a discipline based, instrumental, tools and techniques oriented management education with poor studies in the field of the human behavioral sciences, innovative people management and leadership models, and corresponding operational practices.

This is a paradox in the present organizational and corporate world where the most cutting edge managerial mantra is to put the people first, as exemplified by the famous and praised book of Nayar [15] that emphasizes the needs of enhancing people initiative at all hierarchical levels with more trust, encouraging creativity and innovation and improving social responsibility and real human managerial ethics that is also very inspired by the "servant leadership" model [16].

The fourth major challenge for the corporate and organizational world is the growing importance of CSR and sustainability. This new business philosophy requires

#### *Renewing Management Education with Action Learning DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.88670*

a change in the focus on the outcome from only shareholders to the main stakeholders. It is often summarized by the pursuit of the triple bottom line (economic, environmental, and social performances) instead of the purely traditional economic and financial goals of maximizing the profit for the shareholders in the short term.

This is a drastic change that many top managements still have many difficulties to integrate and to implement. One main reason is that most top managers are still nominated and thus very dependent on Boards of directors essentially made up of shareholder representatives.

But new CSR standards are increasingly considered as a major importance for the image and the global sustainable performances of a business. Besides the obvious environmental concerns to which the present society is made aware, one must also look at the social sides of the business which includes managerial aspects.

Even if mainstream management education has been developing its CSR teachings for about a decade, one can notice that the social aspects of CSR are still far less developed, and especially its people management and governance principles such as specified, for example, in the ISO 26000 international standard.

Why? Because this standard implies profound changes in most present managerial, organizational, and governance principles.

Another major educational challenge for the mainstream management education system would be to much better incorporate this social and managerial aspects of CSR in their curricula, not only in their human resources management courses but also in their own management processes in order to become a living example for the students of this new approach of people management and leadership practices.

To overcome these main challenges and to much better prepare the students to handle the adequate skills and the best people management and leadership principles and practices, it appears necessary to design new models of management education with new and more efficient learning principles and modes [17, 18]. This task is facilitated by looking at an alternative management education model (which has already existed for many years) and at its very positive results: the remarkable example of the "Team Academy" in Finland.

But may be the most needed field of progress for the present management education system and the mainstream business schools to better face the previous challenges is to put much greater emphasis on student's learning of the human and leadership competences or "soft skills." This appears as quite necessary not only because it is a major weak point in mainstream management education delivered by most business schools but also because it has become a top priority and requirement for hiring and promoting managers-leaders as clearly shown in most recent studies [19].

Last but not the least, another major effort needed to better develop managerial human and leadership competences of the managers is linked to the process of change in their actual role and the added value that can be summarized as follows: from a hierarchical status and function to a true people leader capable of creating the motivation and the free adhesion of his/her employees or partners to their work and mission. New leadership models will become the right and the best way to manage people in the twenty-first century. One of the main goals of future management education will be to develop current "managers-leaders" instead of training traditional discipline-specialized managers as most business schools are still doing.
