Here is an excerpt from an article written by Warren Bennis for the BloombergBusinessweek website. To read the complete arricle, check out others, and obtain subsctiption information, please click here.

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In my last blog I argued that while cognitive skills were a necessary, indeed, an indispensable component of management education, “it wasn’t nearly enough.” Most B-schools manifest this cognitive emphasis in the way we organize our schools: departments of finance, marketing, IT, and such are variations on the essential cognitive functions of business. The admission tests do the same, skewing the questions to the left side of the brain, stressing quantitative and analytical skills. This is not too different from the “Moneyball” syndrome, relying exclusively on stats and numbers to choose gifted players. Rex Ryan, the talented coach of the New York Jets, recently lamented to his general manager, “The one thing you can’t measure is damn heart.” (Emphasis his.) As the “most trusted” Walter Cronkite used to say at the end of his TV program: “And that’s the way it is.”

And the way it is isn’t good enough.

It isn’t good enough because it ignores noncognitive skills which, in a word, I summarized as character. The word itself is a problem. More than 15 years ago when I looked to the OED for a definition, I found 37, going from “character actor” to a kind of print. Wikipedia is more current and more daunting: 4,354 definitions, 420 etymologies, thousands of phrases. More serious than this clumsy consensus about its meaning is the absence of agreement on how character develops or doesn’t. Or how malleable one’s character is at any given age. There are too many factors involved, and for every theory advanced, you can count on several disconfirming theories before the previous ones are in print.

Given all the ambiguity and confusion—no, because of the ambiguity and confusion—I feel emboldened to hold forth about the significance of character. I’ll go further: Without including character as an integral part of management education, we will not produce the masters of business our society, especially today, requires. Maybe good and competent managers are fine; you know, fine. In the old, pre-politically correct days they were referred to as journeymen. (Don’t even think about “journeypersons,” please.) But if we want to educate “masters,” attention must be paid to character.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Warren Bennis is a distinguished professor of business administration and chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. One of the world’s foremost experts on leadership, Bennis has written 30 books and numerous articles on leadership, change and creative collaboration. In 2005, he co-authored, with James O’Toole, a seminal article on the problems confronting management education, “How Business Schools Lost Their Way.” His latest work is Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership, written with Patricia Ward Biedeman.