How Business Schools Lost Their Way

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H OW

BUSINESSSCHOOLSLOST TH E IR W A Y

by Warren G. Bennis and James O 'Toole

T o o fo c u s e d o n " s c i e n t if ic " r e s e a r c h , b u s i n e s s s c h o o ls a re h i r i n g

p ro fe s s o rs w i t h l i m i te d r e a l - w o r l d e x p e r ie n c e a n d g r a d u a t i n g s tu d e n t sw h o a re i l l e q u i p p e d t o w r a n g l e w i t h c o m p le x , u n q u a n t if ia b le i s s u e s -

in o t h e r w o r d s , th e s t u f f o f m a n a g e m e n t .

BU S I N E S S S C H O O L S A RE ON T H E W R O N G T R A CK .

For many years, MBA programs enjoyed rising

respectability in academia and growing pres-

tige in the business world. Their admissions were ever

more selective, the pay packages of graduates ever more

dazzling. Today, however, MBA program s face intense crit-icism for failing to impart useful skills, failing to prepare

leaders, failing to instill norms of ethical behavior - and

even failing to lead graduates to good corporate jobs.

These criticisms come not just from studen ts, employers,

and the media but also from deans of some of America's

most prestigious business schools, including Dipak jain

at Northwestern University's top-ranked Kellogg School

of Man agem ent. One outspoke n critic, McGill U niversity

professor Henry Mintzberg, says that the main culprit

is a less-th an-re levant MBA curriculum . If the num ber of

reform efforts under way is any indication, many deans

seem to agree with this charge. But genuine reform ofthe MBA curriculum remains elusive. We believe that is

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How Business Schools Lost Their Way

because the curriculum is th e effect, no t the cause , of wha t

ails the modem business school.

The actual cause of today's crisis in management edu-

cation is far broader in scope and can be traced to a dra-

matic sliift in the culture of business schools. During the

past several decades, many leading B schools have quietly

adopted an inappro priate- and ultimately self-defeating-model of academic excellence. Instead of measuring them -

selves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or

by how well their faculties understand important driv-

ers of business performance, they m easure them selves al-

most solely by the rigor of their scientific research. They

have adapt ed a model of science that uses abstract finan-

cial and econ omic analysis, statistical m ultiple regressions,

and laboratory psychology. Some of the research pro-

duced is excellent, but because so little of it is grounded

in actua l business practices, th e focus of gradua te b usiness

education has become increasingly circumscribed-and

less and less relevant to practitioners.This scientific model, as we call it, is predicated on the

faulty assu mption tha t business is an academic discipline

like chem istry or geology. In fact, business is a profession,

akin to medicine and the law, and business schools are

professional schools-or should be. Like other professions,

business calls upon the work of many academic disci-

plines. For medicine, those disciplines include biology,

chem istry, and psychology; for busin ess, they include

mathematics, economics, psychology, philosophy, and

sociology. The distinction betw een a profession and an

academic discipline is cmcial. In our view, no curricular

reforms will work until the scientific model is replaced bya more appropriate model rooted in the special require-

me nts of a profession.

Before asking how business education should change,

we need to exam ine its evolution. Most business schools

claim a dual m ission: to educate practitioners and to cre-

ate knowledge through research. Historically, business

schools have emphasized th e former at the expense of the

latter. In fact, for the first half of the twentieth century,

B schools were more akin to trade schools; most profes-

sors were good ole boys dispensing war stories, cracker-

barrel wisdom, and the occasional practical pointer. We

reme mb er when MIT's Sloan School of Managem ent was

known as MIT School of Industrial Management and its

production class was taught by the manager of a nearby

General Motors assembly plant. That was a useful, but

hardly comprehensive and professional, education.

Warren G . Bennis is the University Professor and Distin-

guished Professor of Business Administration and the ound-

ing chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of

Southern California's Marshall School of Business in Los An-

geles. James O'Toole is a research professor at USC's Center

for Effective Organizations and the author of Creating theGood Life (Rodale, 2005).

Then, in 1959, prompted at least in part by the enor

mous demand for professional managers in a booming

postwar economy, the Ford and Carnegie foundations is

sued devastating reports on the woeful state of busines

school research and theory. Both foundations recom

men ded ways to give B schools respectable academ ic un

derpinnings and offered grant money toward achievintha t end . Driven by conscience and cash, top-tier univer

sities began t o treat their business schools almost as seri

ously as law schools. By the end of the twen tieth century

nearly all the nation's lea ding business schools - th

two dozen or so elite MBA-granting institutions and an

other dozen schools fighting to join the highest echelon

offered a curriculum of academic distinction. B ut, in th

process, their focus switched, and now the objective o

most B schools is to conduct scientific research. Going

back to the trade school paradigm would be a disaster

Still, we believe it is necessary to strike a new balance be

tween scientific rigor and practical relevance.

The Scientific M odelvirtually none of today's top-ranked business school

would hire, let alone prom ote, a tenure-track professo

whose primary qualification is managing an assembly

plant, no matter how distinguished his or her perfor

man ce. Nor would they hire professors w ho write article

only for practitioner reviews, like this one. Instead, th

best B schools aspire to the sam e standards of academ i

excellence that hard disciplines embrace-an approach

sometimes waggishly referred to as "physics envy." Indepartments such as physics and economics, top facult

members have few responsibilities other than to attend

to their disciplines. They are not required to train pract

tioners or to dem onstrate practical uses of their w ork; an

they are free to do whatever research they choose and t

produce subsequent, even more focused, generations o

scholars. In this scientific model, the university exists pri

marily to support the scholar's interests. For the mos

part, universities accept this arrangement and the intel

lectual prem ise on which it rests: namely, that universitie

help society advance by supporting scientists who pus

back the b ound aries of knowledge. They leave the pract

cal implications to othe rs.

It's very different in schools of law and m edicin e, whic

deliberately engage with the outside world. Law school

expect faculty members to be first-rate scholars; in fac

articles published in law reviews are often cited in trials

B ut these in stitutions also value professors'ability to te ach

Similarly, medical schools carry on advanced biologica

research, but most members of the teaching faculty ar

also practicing do ctors.

Why have business schools embraced the scientifi

model of physicists and economists rather than the professional model of doctors and lawyers? Although few

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B school faculty me mb ers w ould ad mit it, professors like

it th at w ay. This mode l gives scientific resp ectability to the

research they enjoy doing and eliminates the vocational

stigma that business school professors once bore. In short,

the model advances the careers and satisfies the egos

of the professorial And, frankly, it makes things easier:

Though scientific research techniques may require con-siderable skill in statistics or experimental design, they

call for little insight into complex social and human fac-

tors and minimal time in the field discovering the actual

problems facing managers.

B usiness school professors using the scientific a pproa ch

often begin with data that they use to test a hypothesis

by applying such tools as regression analysis. Instead of

entering the world of business, professors set up simu-

lations {hypothetical portfolios of R&D projects, for in-

stance) to see how people m ight behave in what amo unts

to a laboratory exp erim ent In some instances those m eth-

ods are useful, necessary, and enlightening. But becausethey are at arm 's length from actual practice, they often

fail to reflect t he way business w orks in real life.

When applied to business-essentially a human activity

in which judgm ents are m ade w ith messy, incomplete, and

Those safeguards, de rigueur for A-list journals, help en-

sure that published research passes scientific muster.

Indeed, the system works fairly well in the hard business

disciplines, such as econom ics and finance, to which m ath-

ematical m odeling can be easily applied. Even in finance,

however, the system cre ates pressure on scholars to pub-

lish articles on narrow subjects chiefiy of interest to otheracademics, not practitioners.

To be fair, some of what is published in A-Iist journals

is excellent, imaginative, and valuable. But much is not.

A renowned CEO doubtless speaks for many when he

labels academic publishing a "vast wasteland" from the

poin t of view of business practitioners. In fact, relevance

is often systematically expunged from th ese jou rnals.

For instance, a leading management journal recently re-

viewed the results of a promising study ofthe behavior of

several thou san d le aders in global corp oratio ns. The initial

research results showed that certain indicators of leader-

ship misbehavior could be monitored to identify ethicalproblem s before a crisis occurs. Unfortunately, th at find-

ing could no t be proved in a strictly scientific sense. As a

result, the version ofthe article tha t was finally published

focused no t on developing practical me thods t o reduce or-

ganizational risk but, instead, on questioning a m inor de-

tail in a previous study on a different subject. The article

was factual, but it was neit her interesting no r useful.

W HE N APPLIE DTO B U SIN E SS-where judgments are made with messy,incomplete data-statistical and methodologicalwizardry can blind rather than illuminate.

incoherent data-statistical and methodological wizardry

can blind rather than illum inate. Consider some ofthe mostdifficult questions facing managers: How does a culture

of celebrity affect leadership? How should a CEO be com-

pensa ted? H ow does one design global operations so they

are at once effective and equitable? W hat is the purpo se

of a corporat ion beyond the creat ion of shareholder

value? Such broad, multifaceted questions do not easily

lend themselves to scientific experiment or validation.

Another consequence of the scientific model is that

professors' evaluations are influenced by the number of

articles they publish in A-Iist business research journals.

Submissions to these discipline-based publications are

refereed by anonym ous panels of scholars wh o assess re-search findings based on objective, scientific standards.

Scholars, in their own defense, argue that the gradual

accum ulation of tiny facts will one day accrete t o a largerand more general scientific understanding of organi-

zational behavior. Practitioners who have to make real

decisions, however, must meanwhile look elsewhere for

guidance, notably to the business press and to the best-

seller list- no w ho me t o fewer and fewer books by faculty

members .

Most issues facing business leaders are , in the final anal-

ysis, questions of judgment. What looks like a straight-

forward financial d ecisio n-say , to cut costs by relocating

a service center - often has implications for marketing,

sales, manufacturing, and morale that can ' t be shoe-

homed into an equation. Strategic decisions, especially,are likely to go awry when based purely on quantitative

magia





factors, as Robert Mc N am ara-tbe developerof many such

techniq ues at Ford and, later, the U .S. De partm ent of

Def ense- ruefu lly admits. In what amou nts to a major

mea c ulpa, he now argue s tha t hard analysis often leads to

overweighting the value of the knowledge you have. Of

course, this bias affects eve ryone, not just scientists, but t he

aura of quantification masks the fact that social scientistsoften assume that t he variables not included in their equa-

tions are insignificant. In business research, however, the

things routinely ignored by academics on the grounds that

they cannot be measured - most human factors and all

matte rs relating to judgm ent, ethics, and m ora lity- are ex-

actly what make the difference between good business

decisions and bad ones.

As McN amara's Vietnam War-e ra experience painfully

dem onstra tes, leaders tend to get into trouble not by foul-

ing up the numbers but by failing to give the correct

weight to all the quantitative and qualitative factors that

should figure in their decisions. The greatest risks they runare the by-products of their trained tendency to define

problems in terms of what they know and then to fall

back on past behavior when faced with a new challenge.

As McN amara concedes,"We see what we want t o believe"

Tliat is not surprising; most of us wear the concrete shoes

of our earlier successes. But in a rapidly changing global

economy, business education should help students leam to

recognize their conditioned reflexes. However reassuring

the halo of science, it can also lull us into a false sense of

confidence th at we are making objective decisions.

By allowing the scientific research model to drive outal! others, business schools are institutionalizing their

own irrelevanc e. We fear tha t this will be a difficult prob-

lem to correct because many business professors lack

enough confidence in the legitimacy of their enterprise

to define their own agenda. For example, business eco-

nomics journals today are practically indistinguishable

from traditional economics journals. And, not to b e "out-

scienced," ma nag em ent researchers now focus on techni-

cal issues that have the look and feel of topics studied by

their peers in the harde r disciplines.

Business scholars could take a lesson from their col-

leagues in the discipline of psychology, which was stiflingunder the scientific model three or four decades ago. Psy-

chological research then was dominated by rigorous, but

ultimately unproductive, studies of reaction time. As long

as psychology professors labored within that small area,

they lea rned little tbat was of value to any one. It was only

after they began to apply their imag inatio ns-an d rig or-

to much broader problems that psychology began to

make enormous strides. N ot until respected psychologists

dared to ask questions th at m attered , whe ther or not they

could be quantified in tradit iona l ways, were gro und-

breaking studies undertaken, such as tbe Nobel Prize-

winning work of Daniel Kahneman and the late AmosTversky on how people make financial decisions. Unfor-

tunate ly, most B school professors still limit their sigh

to what they can measure readily-a kind of "methodo

at ry "- instead of searching for new ways to study wh at

important. In fact, management professors seem to hav

an almost morbid fear of being damned as popularizers

Do they believe that the regard of their peers is more im

portant than studying what really matters to executivewho can put their ideas into practice? Apparently so.

W ho Gets TenureThis new emphasis on scientific research in busines

schools remains, for the most part, unspoken. Indeed

mos t deans publicly deny it exists, claim ing tha t t hei

schools remain focused on practice, albeit with an in

creasing aw areness of the value of rigorous research. Her

we must watch what leaders do, not what they say

At elite business schools, and at the w anna bes em ulatin

their practices, the shift toward the centrality of scientifiresearch is evidenced almost everyw here.

Just look at the hiring an d ten ure processes. Deans ma

say they want practitioner-oriented research, but thei

schools reward scientific research designed to please aca

demics. By recruiting and promoting those who publis

in discipline-based jour nals, business schools are creatin

faculties filled with individuals whose main professiona

aspiration is a career devo ted t o science. Today it is poss

ble to find tenured professors of management who hav

never set foot inside a real business, except as custom er

At many schools, the road to tenure does not ruthrough field work in businesses. Among young academ

ics and their advisers, this understan ding is explicit. Juni

scholars are urged to avoid too much work with pract

tioners and to concentrate their research on narrow, sc

entific subjects, at least until late in their quest for tenure

(While many conscientious researchers take it upon the m

selves to leam about the practice of business after the

are tenured, there are few incentives for them to do so

To be sure, there is merit in suggesting that fledgling fac

ulty m embers try their wings before attem pting arduou

intellectual journeys, but B school research is becom in

too narrow even for academics. One traditional factor itenu re decisions is how often a candidate's work is cite

by other scholars. Paradoxically, deans and tenure com

mittees tell us that the number of citations of article

written by candidates is dramatically lower than it wa

a decade ago-evidence tbat researchers'work doesn't ma

ter even to their peers.

Nevertheless, a management professor who publishe

rigorously executed studies in the highly quantitative Arf

ministrative Science Quarterly is considered a star, wh il

an academic w hose articles appear in the accessible page

of a professional review-which is much more likely t

influence business practices-risks being denied tenurWe know of no scholar at a first-rate business school wit




a good publishing record wh o has been denied tenu re or

promotion for being a poor teacher or for being unable

to teach effectively in executive education programs,

where teac hers must have real-world business experience.

B ut we do know of a professor of finance who w as denied

promotion when his department decided he was not

a serious scholar. The damning evidence against him in-cluded seven articles in this publication and the highest

mathematical and quantitative skills in the revised Grad-

uate M anagement Admission Test, the first filter of futur e

managers .

Business professors too often forget that executive de-

cision m akers are not fact collectors; they are fact users

and integ rators. Thus, wha t they ne ed from e ducators is

help in understanding how to interpret facts and guid-ance from experienced teachers in making decisions in

the absence of clear facts. After all, any low-level admin-

istrator can make sound decisions when all the facts are

in; having the courage to take a shot in the dark is one

of the hallmarks of leadership. If the purpose of gradu-

ate business education is to develop exe cutiv es-le ade rs-

then the faculty must have expertise in more than just

fact collection. The best classroom experiences are tho se

TODAY IT IS POSSIBLE to f indtenured professors of management w hohave never set foot inside a real business,except as customers.

teaching ratings in his dep artm ent. In short, th e stated end

of business education may remain the same: to educate

practitioners and to create knowledge through research.

But the means make that end impossible to achieve be-

cause rewards are directed elsewhere.

What Gets TaughtWhat professors study, and t he w ay they study it, directly

affects the education of MBA candidates. As research-

oriented business professors come to dominate B school

faculties, they a ssum e responsibility for setting the MBA

curriculum. Not surprisingly, they tend to teach whatthey know, which often transla tes into first-class instruc-

tion on m ethodolo gy and scientifically oriente d research.

These professors are brilliant fact collectors; but despite

their high level of competence, they are too often un-

comfortable dealing with multidisciplinary issues in

the classroom. They are ill at ease subjectively analyzing

multifaceted questions of policy and strategy, or exam-

ining cases that require judgment based on wisdom and

experience in addit ion to -a n d sometimes opposed t o -

isolated facts. As a result, these messy issues, no matter

how pressing, receive less attention in MBA courses.

The trend away from using the case me tho d corrobora testhis point and is accelerated by greater emphasis on

in which professors with broad perspectives and diverse

skills analyze cases that have seemingly straightforward

technical challenges and then gradually peel away the

layers to reveal hidden strategic, economic, competitive,

human,and political complexities-all of which must be

plu mb ed t o reach truly effective busine ss decisions^ We

all can name great practitioners of this style of business

education; unfortunately, given the narrowing of the in-

tellectual paradigm over the past two decades, chances

are good that not one of them would be hired - or

tenured-at a top business school today. Columnist David

B rooks laments th at ". . .our universities operate too m uch

like a guild system, throwing plenty of people with dis-sertations at students, not enough with practical knowl-

edge. Why aren't there more scholars.. .who teach stu-

dents to be generalists, to see the great co nnection s?"

In that regard, conditions at business schools have wors-

ened dramatically since the mid-1980s. During the 1970s

and early 1980s, th e best bu siness schools were arguably

the most intellectually exciting places in academia. In

many universities, B schools were the primary loci of multi-

disciplinary research. That intellectual ferment and cross-

pollination helped make business schools the hugely

pop ular institutions they are today. At one point, the fac-

ulty in our depart me nt at the U niversity of So uthern Cali-fornia's Marshall School of Business included individuals




with advanced degrees in mathematics, anthropology,

sociology, engineering, decision sciences, economics, and

psychology. Recruitment committees actively sought out

scholars who were conducting innovative research and,

at the same time, were comm itted to m aking a difference

in orga nizations. Those scholars published regularly, but

few appeared in what today are regarded as the "right"journals. During the past 15 years, however, hiring alm ost

everywhere, including at the Marshall School, has focused

on narrowly trained specialists, particularly those holding

discipline-based doctorates from other business schools.

One unfortunate result of this trend has heen that many

B schools have to hire adjunct professors to teac h re-

quired MBA courses.

Worse, the integration of disciplined-based knowledg e

with the requirements of business practice is left to the

student. A few years back, the curriculum committee of

a highly regarded B school considered a proposal for a

multidisciplinary first-semester MBA course based on thecurrent challenges of a well-known global corporation.

The committee rejected the proposal-but not because it

was poorly designed or pedagogically flawed; in fact, the

committee said it would be an advance over the existing

program . The proble m, in the words of one faculty mem -

ber, was that "we are not qualified to teach it."

The impact of this loss extends far beyond the class-

room . Businesspeople are starting to sense tha t individu-

als in the academy are not engaged in the same profession

they practice. Em ployers are noticing that freshly minted

MBAs, even those from the best sch oo ls- in some cases,especially those from t he best schools - lack skills the ir

academic publishing than about the problems of th

workplace. It's no wonder there's been such a marked in

crease in the number of in-house corporate universitie

and for-profit management education organizations.

Regaining RelevanceIn a 1927 address to the American Association of the Col

legiate Schools of Business, the philosopher and mathe

matician Alfred N orth W hitehead spoke prophetic word

Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts; Iti

a way of illuminating the facts...The tragedy of th

world is tha t those who are imag inativ e have bu

slightexperienc e, and those who are experienced hav

feeble imaginations.

Today, Whitehead's observation is more fitting tha

ever. If business schools are to regain their relevance, the

must come to grips with the reality that business man

agement is not a scientific discipline but a professionand they must deal with what a professional educatio

requires. Harvard Business School associate professo

Rakesh Khurana has pointed out that professions hav

at least four key elements: an accepted body of knowl

edge, a system for certifying that individuals have mas

tered that body of knowledge before they are allowed t

practice, a commitment to the public good, and an en

forceable code of ethics. Professions thus are oriente

toward practice and focused on client needs. Above al

professions integrate knowledg e and practice. We do no

propose making management a gated profession requir

ing credentialing and licensing. Nonetheless, we believ

a useful step toward acknow ledging that business is a pro

fession would be to recognize that both imagination an

experience are vital - and ought, therefore, to be centra

THE PROBLEM IS NOTthat business schools have embraced

scientific rigor bu t that they have forsakeother forms of know ledge.

organizations need. At first, employers were confused

about the source of this problem, but they seem to be re-

alizing that the people who taught their new hires had

spent little time in organizations as managers or consul-

tants and that younger faculty members may not even

know many businesspeople. Today, business practitionersare discovering tha t B school professors know more abo ut

to business education. With an eye toward integratin

knowledge and practice, Polaroid's Edwin Land suggeste

50 years ago that every business school should run it

own business. Why should n't business schools oper ate ven

tures that function like the equivalent of medical-schoo

teaching hospitals? Cornell University 's S.C. JohnsoGraduate S chool of Mana gement has recently responde




to this long-ignored cha llenge by establishing the Cayuga

MBA Fund, nm by students at the Parker Center for In-

vestment Research.

By whatever means they choose - running businesses,

offering internships, encouraging action research, con-

sulting, and so forth - business school faculties simply

must rediscover the practice of business. We cann ot imag-ine a professor of surgery who has never seen a patient,

or a piano teacher who doesn't play the instrument, and

yet today's business schools are packed with intelligent,

highly skilled faculty with little or no managerial experi-

ence. As a result, they can't identify the most important

problems facing executives and don't know how to ana-

lyze the indirect and long-term implications of complex

business decisions. In this way, they shortch ange their stu-

den ts and, ultimately, society. Things won't improve until

professors see that they have as much responsibility for

educating professionals to make practical decisions as

they do for advancing the state of scientific knowledge.

The strongest po tential force for change is the business

comm unity, but, unfortunately, most corporate employers

have been sending m ixed signals. They complain th at

B schools aren't producing potential leaders, but the n

they hire MBAs with narrow specialties. What's more,

business leaders have been unstinting in their support

of business schools, often giving large sums of money, typ-

ically witho ut strings. This supp ort is interpre ted as a vote

of confidence. After all, wh en a dono r gives $30 million t o

put his name on the outside of a school, one can't blame

faculty members for assuming that donor is pleased withwha t they do inside. In our view, business leaders have n ot

demanded enough from the educational institutions pur-

porting to serve them. But until the business community

clearly articulates its needs, deans will continue to re-

spond to calls from the faculty for more oft he same.

If prestigious organizations like the Business Round-

table or the World Economic Forum were to undertake

a study ofth e quality and utility of business education, th e

findings would likely gamer a level of attention among

faculty and administrators similar to that generated by

the 1959 Ford and Carnegie reports. We don't think it is

healthy for corporate philanthropists to micromanagethe policies of educational institutions; but in the case of

professional schools, practitioners must adopt a gover-

nanc e ro le. The first step in this process is for co rpor ate

leaders to educate themselves abo ut the curr ent practices

of the schools producing their future managers. They

migh t sta rt by picking u p a copy of an A-Iist business iou r-

nal and asking them selves if the articles in it say any thing

their managers need to hear.

At th e risk of sounding rep etitive , let us be clear: We are

not advocating a re turn to th e days when business schools

were glorified trade schools. In every business, decision

making re quires ama ssing and analyzing objective facts, soB schools must continue to teach quan titative skills. The

challenge is to restore balance to the curriculum and the

faculty: We need rigor an d relevance. The dirty little secret

at m ost of today's best business schools is that they chiefly

serve th e faculty's research interests and car eer goals, with

too little regard for the needs of oth er stake holders. Serv-

ing the business community by educating practitioners and

generating knowledge they can use may exist as secondaryfunctions at those institu tions, but such objectives are hon-

ored mainly in speeches mad e by deans seeking donation s.

The Professional M ode lTo balance the goals of faculty members with the needs

of other constituencies, business schools might look to

their sister professional schools in medicine, dentistry,

and law for guidance. Dental education is an apt mo de!

to the extent that it prepares students to deliver a sewice

requiring sophisticated skills and to m anage hands-on en -

terprises. Research is critical to dental education, but it

plays a secondary role to the task of educating com peten t

and ethical practitioners, isn't that also the right balance

for business education?

Ultimately, however, we believe business schools would

reap the greatest benefit from emulating the most inno-

vative law schools. The law is a broad-based activity draw-

ing upon m any oft he sam e disciplines relevant to business:

economics, psychology, accounting, politics, philosophy,

history, sociology, language, literature, and so on. Law

schools, however, have not succumbed to physics envy

and th e scientism it spawns. Instead, they tend to rewardexcellence In teaching and in pragmatic writing. Research

is an im por tant co mp one nt of legal practice and educa-

tion, but most of it is applied research, and its validity is

not eq uated with th e presence of a scientific p atina. Law

schools recognize that a well-written book or a well-

doc um ented article published in a serious, practitioner-

oriented review is as valuable as a quantitative article

published in a journal read only by cutting-edge research-

ers. N evertheless, scientific publications are certainly val-

ued in law school performance assessments. A law school

professor who uses the scientific method to demonstrate

tha t a commo nly held belief is wrong, or to quantify aninsight that is counterintuitive, will be rewarded. When

assessing the work of law school faculty me mb ers, evalu-

ators ask ques tions such as. Is the research im port ant? Is

it useful? Is it interesting or original? Is it well thought-

out , well argued, and well designe d? All of thes e querie s

seem more appropriate as standards for appraising the

work of business school faculties than the narrowly de-

fined standard of scientific rigor.

Of course, not all business schools suffer from the at-

tenu ated focus we find so alarming . Deans and faculties at

a few top-tier institutions are conscientiously struggling

to find ways to conduct rigorous research without aban-doning their professional missions. At Harvard Business




School, for instance, continued emphasis on case studies

makes practitioners an integral part of the educa tional pro-

cess. And Harvard iielps ensure th at its curriculum will keep

evolving by making course develop men t a consideration in

tenure and promotion decisions. Similarly, Tom Campbell,

dea n of the H aas School of B usiness at the U niversity of Cal-

ifornia, B erkeley, has m ade a puhlic com mitm ent to teach-ing and research in the b roade r and softer areas of business

that are the focus of his school's influential-but unrefer-

eed-California Management Review.

Many second-tier B schools, especially those n ot h oused

in large research-oriented universities, have also retained

their professional focus. (Unfortunately, the quality of ed-

ucation offered at some of those institutions h arken sbac k

to trade school days). We are impressed with the Univer-

sity of Dallas's recognition th at an overly narro w appro ach

to busin ess educat ion may have bee n a factor in the TVco,

Arthu r Ande rsen, WorldCom, and E nron scandals. As

Thom as Lindsay, the university's former provost, explains:[B]usiness education in this country is devoted over-

whelmingly to technical training. This is ironic, be-

cause even before Enron, studies showed that exec-

utives whofail-financially as well as morally-rarely

do so from a lack of expertise. Rather, they fail because

they lack interpersonal skills and practical wisdom;

what Aristotle called prudence.

Aristotle taught that genuine leadership consisted

in the ability to identify and serve the common good.

To do so requires m uch m ore than technical train ing.

It requires an education in moral reasoning, whichmust include history, philosophy, literature, theology,

and logic . . .

Lindsay estimates that, before the recent scandals, busi-

ness studen ts spent "95% of their time learning how to cal-

culate with a view to maximizing w ealth. Just 5% of their

t ime. . -is spent developing their moral capacities."To right

that balance, the Dallas business school introduced liberal

studies into the curriculum and initiated a series of intel-

lectual and ethical exercises.

Looking A headTraditionally, business schools have lacked offerings in the

hum anitie s. That is a serious shortcom ing. As teacher s of

leadership, we doubt that our topic can be understood

properly without sol id grounding in the humanit ies .

When the hard-nosed behavioral scientist James March

taug ht his famous course at Stanford using War an d Peace

and ot her novels as texts, he empha tically was not teach-

ing a literature course. He was drawing on w orks of imag-

inative literature to exemplify and explain the behavior of

people in business organizations in a way tha t was richer

and more realistic than any journal article or textbook.

Similarly, when executives are given excerpts from theclassics of political economy and philosophy in seminars

at the A spen Institute, the inten t is not to tum the m int

experts on Plato and Locke but to illuminate the prc

found recesses of leadership that scientifically oriented

texts either overlook or oversimplify.

Naturally, reforming business education means mor

than adding courses in the hu man ities. The entire MBA

curriculum must be infused with multidisciplinary, practical, and ethical questions and analyses reflecting th

complex challenges business leaders face. We are encour

aged on this score that the freshly appointed dean of th

Marshall School has courageously gone on record as ad

vocating a major rebalancing of our MBA program in

order to link hard and soft skills. We certainly do not ad

vocate that business schools, in revising MBA curricula

abandon science. Rather, they should encourage and re

ward research that illuminates the mysteries and ambigu

ities of today's business practices. Oddly, despite B schoo

scientific emphasis, they do little in the areas of contem

porary science that probably hold the greatest prom ise fobusiness education: cognitive science and neuroscience

In those fields, pioneering research ers use magn etic reso

nance imaging technology to study how the brain behave

while mak ing economic decisions, taking into account suc

factors as gender differences and the role of trust.

The problem is not th at business schools have embrace

scientific rigor but that they have forsaken other forms o

know ledge. It isn't a case of either-or. N ot every professo

needs to be a switch-hitter, however. In practice, busines

schools need a diverse faculty populated with professor

wh o, collectively, hold a variety of skills and interests thacover territory as broad and as deep as business itsel

As the late S uman tra Ghoshal wrote in a shrewd analysi

of the problems with m anag em ent edu cation today, "Th

task is not one of delegitimizing existing research ap

proaches, but one of relegitimizing pluralism."

Rebalancing runs against the perceived self-interes

of many professors, not to mention the seemingly un

stoppable trend in academia toward specialization. W

believe the most effective levers for overcoming this re

sistance are personnel policies related to recruitmen

prom otion, tenure, and other academic rewards. Instea

of blindly following the paths forged by trade schools otraditional academic departments, business schools mus

create th eir own standard s of excellence. However, man

business school leade rs now say the ir unive rsities are forc

ing them to adopt the same standards for hiring and pro

motion used by graduate departments in the hard sci

ences. In our view, this is often an excuse for maintainin

a dysfunctional (but comfortable) system. Other profes

sional schools have carved out standards that are appro

priate for their various professions; now business school

mu st have the courage to do the same.

Reprint R0505F

To orde r, see page 155-



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How Business Schools Lost Their Way