The Purpose Of The Business School

In the mid-20th century, university-based business schools re-oriented themselves to increased alignment with the preferences of the university and decreased alignment with the preferences of business. This re-alignment has caused multiple observers to question the effectiveness of current-day business schools. For example, recent discussions have lamented that business schools are engaged in research that does not influence the practice of business. This book engages these debates, arguing that all judgments about the effectiveness of business schools are rooted in assumptions about what the purposes of the business school appropriately are and that many of those assumptions are unstated and not subjected to debate. The author weaves a unique blend of complexity theory, philosophy of science, and the nature of professions to articulate those goals and assess the effectiveness at meeting them. The book traces parallel discussions regarding the purpose of the university in the writings of Aristotle and Wilhelm von Humboldt and ties those discussions to current debates. This book will inform business faculty and administrators of the degree to which university-based business schools are balancing multiple purposes which include discovery of knowledge, creating knowledge that informs the practice of business, training professionals, and instilling ethical principles in its training of those professionals.

Are business schools on the wrong track? For many years, business schools enjoyed rising enrollments, positive media attention, and growing prestige in the business world. However, due to the disruption of Covid-19, many previously ignored issues relating to MBA programs resurfaced. As a result, MBA programs now face lower enrollments and intense criticism for being deficient in preparing future business leaders and ignoring essential topics like ethics, sustainability, and diversity and inclusion. The Future of Business Schools discusses these issues in the context of three critical areas: complexity, sustainability, and destiny

A clarion call to shut down the business school!

With contributions from some of the leading thinkers in business school education, this book explores the impact and purpose of the business school, and addresses some of the most important questions facing management education today. The diverse perspectives brought together by the EFMD in this volume examine a number of common questions, themes and challenges. These include: whether business schools should be viewed as schools of management, given the complexity of the business environment; what is the positive impact of business school research, and the balance of relevant, practical impact and academic rigour; the strategic evolution of business schools and how they may evolve in a more purposeful direction; and why business school leaders compete strongly but are reluctant to collaborate, and how collaboration may encourage greater positive societal impact. With insightful commentary and illustrative case studies, this book serves as a landmark publication on the value and impact of business schools. The book will be of particular interest to those working in business schools, higher education leaders, policy makers and business leaders seeking insight into the value, impact and future of business and management education.

Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.

101 THINGS I LEARNED® IN BUSINESS SCHOOL will cover a wide range of lessons that are basic enough for the novice business student as well as inspiring to the experienced practitioner. The unique packaging of this book will attract people of all ages who have always wondered whether business school would be a smart career choice for them. Judging by the growing number of people taking the GMATs (the entrance exam for business school) each year, clearly more people than ever are thinking about heading in this direction. Subjects include accounting, finance, marketing, management, leadership, human relations, and much more - in short, everything one would expect to encounter in business school. Illustrated in the same fun, gift book format as 101 THINGS I LEARNED® IN ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL, this will be the perfect gift for a recent college or high school grad, or even for someone already well-versed in the business world.

Is management a profession? Should it be? Can it be? This major work of social and intellectual history reveals how such questions have driven business education and shaped American management and society for more than a century. The book is also a call for reform. Rakesh Khurana shows that university-based business schools were founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers but have effectively retreated from that goal, leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself. Khurana begins in the late nineteenth century, when members of an emerging managerial elite, seeking social status to match the wealth and power they had accrued, began working with major universities to establish graduate business education programs paralleling those for medicine and law. Constituting business as a profession, however, required codifying the knowledge relevant for practitioners and developing enforceable standards of conduct. Khurana, drawing on a rich set of archival material from business schools, foundations, and academic associations, traces how business educators confronted these challenges with varying strategies during the Progressive era and the Depression, the postwar boom years, and recent decades of freewheeling capitalism. Today, Khurana argues, business schools have largely capitulated in the battle for professionalism and have become merely purveyors of a product, the MBA, with students treated as consumers. Professional and moral ideals that once animated and inspired business schools have been conquered by a perspective that managers are merely agents of shareholders, beholden only to the cause of share profits. According to Khurana, we should not thus be surprised at the rise of corporate malfeasance. The time has come, he concludes, to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.