Without good education there will never be good management

What is the most important thing for a country’s companies, in general, to have high-level management?

Good business schools? Good graduate programs available? Sophisticated consultancies? Advanced technologies? Companies capable of developing their people?

All of this may certainly be important. But there is something even more fundamental, without which excellent management will never become widespread in companies.

We are talking about the “quality basic education” that the country should have. Without education, not only management but very little will truly work in any nation.

And since managing an organization increasingly requires solid educational foundations, in a country where education is generally poor, management will tend to follow the same path.

Unfortunately, this seems to be our current reality. Once again PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), one of the most important international tests measuring the quality of a country’s education, recently administered in Brazil, showed, yet again, that Brazilian education continues to do poorly.

The test taken by our students detected a decline in all three areas assessed: science, reading and mathematics. As a result, Brazil once again fell in the world ranking. It placed 63rd in science, 59th in reading and 66th in mathematics. That is out of 70 countries measured. In other words, we remain among the last places. And getting worse.

In terms of management, this is very significant. These are three fundamental disciplines – science, reading and mathematics – for the development of the individual, including so that we can have good managers, so that everyone who works in an organization has the basic conditions to work with excellence.

Solid knowledge of mathematics, for example, is fundamental not only because much of the management done in a company depends on it, but mainly because mathematical logic, on which problem solving is built, is a sine qua non condition for running a company.

And then there is science. Without proper scientific thinking, it is also impossible to solve problems adequately and definitively within a company. You cannot set up experiments, develop and test projects, make improvements... This is the basics. And what we see most are problems perpetuating themselves within organizations, without effective resolution, and so on.

The quality of reading, in turn, is more than fundamental. It is evident that “knowing how to read,” which means correctly and deeply understanding and interpreting a text, is essential for any and all learning to take place. Without proper reading fluency, there can be no personal development in any area, including organizational management.

About two years ago, I had already drawn attention to the failure of our performance in PISA and how much it reflected our difficulty in solving problems in companies, in the column “Confronting our inability to solve problems”.

Now, two years later, I reaffirm what I wrote in that earlier column. But I would like to complement the thought. The idea is that with the basic education we have in Brazil today, we will hardly have high-level management.

Companies that adopt lean management know that the development of people’s capabilities comes from the work itself. People need to be able to reflect and learn as they carry out their day-to-day tasks.

But this takes time. And since the shortfall is so great, the effort required of companies is immense. If we want to change this situation in the near future, we need to start changing the game immediately, radically transforming the quality of our basic education.

Companies are made of people. People are developed primarily by the educational process. In Brazil, this continues to go very badly.