A Bolder Vision for Business Schools | Economics & society - Harvard Business Review

Future leaders will need a new set of values to confront a new set of challenges, insist Peter Tufano, Harvard Business Review.

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The basic model for modern management education dates back to the late 1950s. It has been an adaptable, resilient model that has generally satisfied the needs of both students and their employers — in terms not only of courses but of the ideas generated through the research of business faculty.  Without business schools, many of the management frameworks and concepts that we take for granted would not exist: from Michael Porter’s Five Forces, to the Nobel prize-winning work in asset pricing and Finance, to Clayton Christensen’s concept of Disruption, to Blue Ocean Strategy, or the now-debated concepts of agency theory.

Against this backdrop, there are growing societal pressures for business to take a lead in finding solutions to the climate crisis and to be an agent of social change. As this pressure mounts, the traditional business school model is looking dated. The pace of change in business schools is far slower than in business, with the result that MBAs are increasingly less well prepared for the complex challenges of leading companies and collective enterprises in general...

Unfortunately, traditional MBA toolkits, whether grounded in economics, data science, or psychology, do not adequately prepare students to think through issues of justice, which means that business schools will need to revisit and broaden their curricula.  At the very least, they will need to expand the range of thinkers and teachers on their campuses to include people with backgrounds in history, philosophy, and the humanities.  Justice is much more nuanced than net present value.
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Source: Harvard Business Review