Small and medium enterprises management: Practitioner versus academic knowledge

Global economics crisis brings completely new challenges which need to be addressed by the management of the small and medium enterprises (SME) which face a period critical to their businesses. Completely new type of “modern managers” is needed. The biggest difference between the present and past is the speed with which the environment changes and the central role of the information and resulting knowledge management. Modern managers are then those, who can use the knowledge to adjust the speed of their responses according to this pace. The paper assumes that knowledge acquired through practice and the one acquired through the academic education are different. If this is not the case, then it must be necessary referring to the importance of different ways that knowledge is acquired. Different ways of management learning then lead to different “usefulness” of (identical) extensive knowledge acquired.