Sofija Mijalkovic

Management schools love theory more than reality. We’re told to memorize definitions, frameworks, and lists we’ll forget by next week, as if that builds real managers. Exams reward memory, not understanding. We can recite the five functions of management, but we’re never taught how to actually manage people, make decisions, or fix problems.

And it’s not just management. Most subjects follow the same pattern of empty learning. Even languages are taught like math: rules, tenses, and definitions instead of real conversation. You can’t learn to speak by reading grammar tables, just like you can’t learn leadership by repeating textbook phrases. The entire education system is obsessed with measurable outcomes, not meaningful learning.

Real knowledge comes from doing, from trying, failing, and improving, yet universities fear that chaos. It’s easier to test definitions than to test understanding. So we graduate with perfect notes and no idea how to apply them. The system doesn’t teach us to think; it teaches us to repeat.

Modern management has made a religion out of safety. Every process, decision, and idea now passes through a filter of caution. The goal is not to build something new, it’s to make sure nothing goes wrong. But without risk, there is no innovation. Playing it safe may keep companies alive, but it also keeps them irrelevant.

Innovation is born from uncertainty, from trying things that might fail. Yet managers today are trained to fear failure more than stagnation. Every idea must be justified, tested, approved, measured, until it’s no longer an idea, just paperwork.

The irony is that the greatest companies in history were built by people who ignored the rules. Now, those same companies hire managers to make sure no one else does the same.

The safest path is now the most dangerous one, it leads straight to irrelevance. A culture that kills risk kills its own future. No risk, no innovation, no improvement, irrelevance, failure. It’s that simple.

Meetings are the most accepted form of collective procrastination in modern management. Everyone knows they waste time, yet no one dares to cancel them. They exist not to solve problems but to create the illusion of control. Managers call them to feel relevant, and employees attend them to look engaged. Real work pauses so that fake work can be performed in PowerPoint.

Decisions that could take five minutes by email turn into hour-long performances of agreement. Each participant speaks just enough to sound important, while saying absolutely nothing. That’s why meetings are loved: they’re the safest place to hide from responsibility.

The modern manager’s calendar isn’t a schedule; it’s a defense mechanism. The fuller it is, the more it proves they’re “needed.” A packed schedule has become a status symbol, even if every meeting is pointless. Efficiency is preached, yet the most inefficient ritual remains sacred.

The worst part is that meetings reward performance over progress. You don’t need to do good work, you just need to look like you’re doing it.

A good meeting today isn’t one that achieves something, it’s one that ends early. And yet they keep multiplying, like an infection nobody wants to treat. Maybe the real question isn’t why meetings still exist, but what management would look like if they didn’t.

Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive is one of those books everyone in management worships, but few actually question.

It teaches how to be efficient, focused, and decisive, but never asks why or for whom. Drucker assumes that organizations are inherently good, that being “effective” automatically means doing the right thing. But what if you’re effective at something destructive? What if the system itself is broken? His world was built on clear hierarchies and rational decisions, not the chaotic, politicized, short-term world of management today.

Drucker believes you can learn effectiveness through discipline and self-control, but that logic collapses when executives don’t even control their own purpose, shareholders and politics do. Modern managers aren’t executives; they’re bureaucrats, trapped in frameworks Drucker could never have imagined. Efficiency has replaced ethics, and productivity has replaced meaning. Drucker didn’t write a bad book, he wrote a timeless one that no longer fits its time.

I see no hope for this country anymore.

A few months ago, I believed that maybe the students would win, that the protests could finally remove this leech of an incompetent, corrupt president and bring at least a shred of order to Serbia. But nothing changed. The protests may not be officially over, but they feel dead, and the same man still sits in power, more erratic and disconnected by the day.

Serbia is officially branded as a “flawed democracy” that is undergoing democratic backsliding, according to analyses from organizations like Freedom House, but even that sounds too generous. What we truly have is a dictatorship disguised as choice: one man surrounded by loyal, unqualified lackeys who hold positions they don’t understand, while real experts are pushed aside or leave the country entirely. The result is everywhere, collapsing buildings, broken roads, failed institutions, all built by people who were never meant to build anything.

Crime goes unpunished because the guilty all “know someone,” and that someone always leads back to the same circle of power. The media are captured, the old are brainwashed, and the young are leaving. The few who stay and try to create something, small startups, independent thinkers, are crushed before they can even start. Corruption keeps its monopoly, and in doing so, ensures that innovation, like hope, cannot survive here.

By not having innovation, you are damning your country to failure. The only current sources of income for Serbia are exploiting its natural resources and selling real estate, something that should be a basic human right, not an industry. There is nothing being created here. No new products, no unique services, nothing that carries the mark of Serbian ingenuity or progress.

Unlike developed economies such as the US, the UK, or France, which thrive on innovation, technology, and global exports, Serbia feels hollow, like an imitation of an economy rather than a real one. We survive by draining what we already have instead of building something new. Our resources will run out, and our real estate bubble keeps inflating, pricing ordinary people out of their own cities. Without innovation, creation, or ownership of ideas, a country isn’t growing, it’s just waiting to collapse.

For a Faculty of Organizational Sciences, FON seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word.

What follows isn’t just student frustration, it’s a reflection of how a university that teaches management consistently fails to manage itself.

The academic year after the students’ protests has been absurdly managed, eight months without classes, followed by six back-to-back exam periods and no real breaks. The dean publicly “supported” the protests, but his actions said otherwise, online lectures resumed despite widespread opposition, and students were treated like obstacles, not participants in the system. Some professors even blamed the students for the disruption, as if demanding a better future for our country was a mistake.

Instead of standing with their students, they used fear, claiming FON would lose funding or programs if we continued to protest, without any proof. The real issue isn’t the protest; it’s the refusal to take responsibility and organize effectively.

Even FON’s website, with its confusing navigation and fragmented systems for exam registration, mirrors the disorder within.

Beyond logistics, FON feels like it’s training us not to be leaders or entrepreneurs, but obedient middle managers in someone else’s system, to give up before we even start. Our classes, books, and case studies rarely ask us to imagine building our own Serbian company, only how to “help a German company make more money.” Because how could a company exist and survive in Serbia when corruption is all it currently knows.

We’re taught management theory every day, yet surrounded by an institution that can’t manage itself.