MIL practitioner guide - chapter 1

Chapter 1: The objectives and overview of managerial intellectual learning (MIL)

The objectives

Today's business environment is dynamic and complex. Management education and training, both done within and without companies, is prevailing. Nevertheless, management education and training programmes can be expensive and not necessarily effective. Management knowledge from the academic sources is valuable and sophisticated. Learning it, i.e., intellectual learning, is vital for developing managerial competence for practitioners, e.g., managers in commercial and non-commercial organizations. However, there is additional pitfalls of this form of management education and training: academic management knowledge is not always relevant for enhancing managerial practices; even if it does, academic management knowledge, for many learners, is uneasy to comprehend and time-consuming to study. All these concerns, among others, need to be coped with reasonably well for effective intellectual learning on management knowledge to be carried out. This guide is written to respond to this intellectual learning need of practitioners in the field of management. This type of learning is called managerial intellectual learning (MIL), though the kind of MIL dealt with here takes on a narrower scope of learning activity. In particular, this practitioner guide primarily elucidates on a specific way to pursue managerial intellectual learning, which promotes certain characteristics. These characteristics are engaging, self-directed, informal, effective, enjoyable, life-long, agile, enlightening, affordable, and systems thinking-based.

The overview

The elaboration of the managerial intellectual learning in this guide covers the required conditions and resources for MIL (chapter 2), the process framework on MIL (chapter 3), literature review practice for MIL (chapter 4), MIL for managerial practices (chapter 5), coaching and e-learning support for MIL (chapter 6) and MIL for scholar-practitioners (chapter 7). These topics indicate the overview of MIL for practitioners as well as delineate the scope of guidance coverage of this practitioner guide.

As a practitioner guide, it avoids the academic writing style that uses quite some quotations and referencing and academic jargons. The guide does include an ending section of further readings on each chapter for readers who want to take a closer look at the associated academic writings.

Further readings

Ho, J.K.K. 2013. “A Research Note: An exploration on the intellectual learning process of systems thinking by managers in the digital social media ecosystem” European Academic Research 1(5) August: 636-649.

Ho, J.K.K. 2015. “An examination on the study scope and theoretical principles of managerial intellectual learning (MIL)” European Academic Research 3(4) July: 4602-4618.

Ho, J.K.K. 2016. “Using mind mapping literature to enrich the subject of managerial intellectual learning (MIL): an exploratory exercise” European Academic Research 4(4) July: 3483-3497.