Management education and animal spirits

The more sophisticated any technology becomes, the greater our need to know about ourselves. It took our ancestors some time to understand that steam locomotives went so fast that it was a good thing to keep out of their way, after the former leader of the House of Commons was knocked down and killed by one at the opening ceremony of the Manchester to Liverpool line. Now we must learn to discriminate between various branches of information technology, of which some are known as 'corporate fraud', others as 'white collar crime'; moral and ethical issues, no less than quantitative and logical, may be forced into the university curriculum. We need to study human values no less than computer science. The notion within this paper is that such study must be intuitive and at first hand. It has been advocated by the writer for more than forty years, is called action learning, and can be traced to many sources other than the writer himself. An early inspiration was from John Maynard Keynes at Cambridge in the early 1930s; he later wrote (p. 161 in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money): "Most, probably, of our decision to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits--of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities." This essay not only tries to stress the need for some of us to grasp what ethics may have to tell us, but also suggests that we shall grasp such novelties (or even practise them) only if we learn about them simultaneously as we learn about ourselves.