When opportunity arrives, we say it "knocks."
When the economy collapsed two years ago, an opportunity for business schools didn't just knock; it came crashing though the front door.
Incongruous as it might sound, the collapse may prove the best thing to happen to business education in a long time. It has shown us the kinds of business methods that are ineffective and, worse, destructive. It glaringly revealed an all-too-prevalent corporate mind-set that measures success mainly in terms of shareholder value—with value for the organization, workers, customers, and society in general far down the list of concerns, if on the list at all.
To change the way we do business, we must also bring change to the way we teach business. Some schools have begun this process, including the one where I serve as dean, the Johns Hopkins University's Carey Business School. Carey's new Global M.B.A. program, which began this fall, was created in the midst of the meltdown with the idea that a socially focused form of business education (and thus business practice) is sorely needed. Even the venerable Wharton School, the oldest business school in the United States, plans changes that will emphasize "driving innovation, making the school more international, and cultivating a culture that is a force for good," according to Poets & Quants, a Web site with news about business education.
At Carey, two major projects within the curriculum of the two-year, full-time Global M.B.A. illustrate our commitment to the idea of business that keeps "humanity in mind." The students spend the intersession of their first year in Peru, Rwanda, Kenya, or India, helping to develop business plans for communities in those emerging nations. Later the students immerse themselves in a classroom project that seeks ways to commercialize inventions and discoveries made by Johns Hopkins scientists and engineers. This social focus underpins the philosophy not just of the full-time Global M.B.A. but also of our longstanding part-time master's programs in business administration, finance, and other disciplines.
So a shift in the thinking of business educators has begun. It won't be an overnight process, given most schools' longtime emphasis on what I call the "science" of business. One key to making the changes stick will be ensuring that our students understand that the international landscape has been transformed. The United States still claims the world's largest economy, but it no longer dominates as it did for decades. China, India, and other nations have begun to elbow their way into the lineup of major economic powers. Moreover, the ease and speed of modern communication and travel have created greater interdependencies among nations, people, businesses, and cultures. Our future customers, and perhaps even our future business partners, will be found on nearly every continent. Business is no longer just a matter for Wall Street or for Main Street U.S.A., but for every byway in every community, large and small, in the world.
Indeed, all of us are joined in what the social critic Jeremy Rifkin has called "a race to global consciousness," progressing toward an "empathic civilization" that recognizes the aspirations of all people and the urgency of caring for our fragile planet. That is the core concept of this great opportunity presented to our business schools and students—to craft business methods that match Rifkin's vision by doing good for society while doing well for the company, by profiting others while turning a profit.
For too long, business schools have largely defined their mission as the teaching of a set of specific abilities. This how-to approach has focused on accounting, marketing, finance, and similar disciplines, defining leadership as expertise based on certain skills. Certainly these "hard" skills, the "science" of business, are important and necessary components of a degree program. But perhaps even more essential for the business leaders of the 21st century are the "soft" skills and qualities representing what I would describe as the "art" of business. Chief among them I would place:
- Intellectual flexibility, the scholarly ability to juggle a variety of ideas and place them in a broad context.
- Cultural literacy, a solid knowledge of the customs and history of societies all over the world, in the places and among the populations that are becoming part of the global marketplace.
- A strong grounding in ethics, and an understanding of the ways that the subtlest ethical conflicts, if not guarded against, can lead to an organization's undoing. In this way, business schools can join their counterparts in medicine and law, where increased emphasis has been placed on ethics training in recent years.
- The ability to communicate ideas well.
- Optimism, creativity, a collaborative outlook, the willingness to lead.
Altering our approaches to business and business education won't be achieved overnight, but we must begin the effort. I believe that it is the role and responsibility of business schools to do so. The result will be the prescription for a response to the failed methods revealed by the economic meltdown: a new kind of business leader who is attuned to the cultures, the hopes, and the demands of people all over our rapidly changing, rapidly globalizing world.
Yash Gupta is dean of the Carey Business School at the Johns Hopkins University.
Comments
1. cshunt312 - November 30, 2010 at 03:05 pm
I enjoyed reading this, Dean Gupta, and really appreciate your leadership efforts in creating a more holistic approcach to business and business education.
As a former full-time academic who returned to the "real world" five years ago, I'd like to add some related qualities that are both critical and missing in too many of today's leaders:
1. A focus on the future rather than the past, balancing today's realities with tomorrow's possibilities.
2. Strategic rather than tactical perspectives and approaches. Maybe a better way to say this is knowing how to take the right approach for your position. Lower-level managers and leaders can be more tactical, but as leaders progress through the ranks they have to become more strategic.
3. Courage and discipline to make tough decisions and stick to them.
4. The ability to listen as well as talk. Eyes on the horizon, ears to the ground - they should be constantly scanning the environment to understand its potential impact on their organization and its stakeholders, in addition to "surveying the troops" to understand their current capabilites and limitations.
My current area of focus is the impact social media will have on organizations - beyond the external applications of marketing, branding, sales. It has the potential to completely transform how work is done, but very few organizational leaders are aware of that, and fewer still are willing/able to educate themselves and provide the kind of strategic guidance their organizations need to enhance their ability to succeed in the Digital Era. Based on my experiences, the items I listed above are among the biggest barriers to their increasing their sophistication and leading the way. I suspect those factors hinder success in other areas as well.
Courtney Hunt
Founder, Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community
2. clamosaurus - December 03, 2010 at 06:04 am
"Even the venerable Wharton School, the oldest business school in the United States, plans changes that will emphasize "driving innovation, making the school more international, and cultivating a culture that is a force for good," according to Poets & Quants, a Web site with news about business education."
Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, if you please.
3. djgilbert - December 03, 2010 at 08:15 am
Only Dean Gupta's points about cultural literacy and ethics represent some departure from the basics of foundation reports from the late 1950s. If those "new" areas are taught as additional "skills" then there really is no departure from the past only the need to hire a few PhDs from different disciplines.
MBA programs of the future must seamlessly inter-weave contextual elements with the core business skills and quantitative disciplines, which have been the main stay of our programs for the past 50 years. Those contextual elements will be different for a student planning to work in China that one planning to work in an SME business in Cleveland.
The flexibility demanded in program design and delivery will be unprecedented in the 100+ year history of the MBA.
4. djgilbert - December 03, 2010 at 08:16 am
Only Dean Gupta's points about cultural literacy and ethics represent some departure from the basics of foundation reports from the late 1950s. If those "new" areas are taught as additional "skills" then there really is no departure from the past only the need to hire a few PhDs from different disciplines.
MBA programs of the future must seamlessly inter-weave contextual elements with the core business skills and quantitative disciplines, which have been the main stay of our programs for the past 50 years. Those contextual elements will be different for a student planning to work in China that one planning to work in an SME business in Cleveland.
The flexibility demanded in program design and delivery will be unprecedented in the 100+ year history of the MBA.
5. djgilbert - December 03, 2010 at 08:18 am
Only Dean Gupta's points about cultural literacy and ethics represent some departure from the basics of foundation reports from the late 1950s. If those "new" areas are taught as additional "skills" then there really is no departure from the past only the need to hire a few PhDs from different disciplines.
MBA programs of the future must seamlessly inter-weave contextual elements with the core business skills and quantitative disciplines, which have been the main stay of our programs for the past 50 years. Those contextual elements will be different for a student planning to work in China that one planning to work in an SME business in Cleveland.
The flexibility demanded in program design and delivery will be unprecedented in the 100+ year history of the MBA
6. quidditas - December 03, 2010 at 08:38 am
I'm going to have to call BS.
The biggest crisis in the credibility of business schools today comes from organized crime spawned in the financial sector, extending to the highest levels of the US government, where the conditions for said organized crime to bloom like a cnacer were set up and where the subsequent "cover up" occurred--albeit not so well that it's not plain enough for anyone to see who is paying any attention, thereby also discrediting the US government itself.
I'm sorry, but to try to pretend the crisis in legitimacy is anything less than that big-- and that destructive-- is simply not going to cut it.
This is a total failure, and failing to address it with the seriousness that is demands is eventually going to seal your fate.
7. grpatnode - December 03, 2010 at 09:10 am
Perhaps the biggest failure of America's business schools and programs is the inbreeding forced by accreditation agencies. Try hiring Faculty from a multitude of disciplines outside the traditional business Ph.D. and you are outside the guidelines. Hire someone that did not come from a AACSP accreditated school and you have similar issues. There is a lot to be said for our strong liberal arts education as the core in undergraduate business programs. We are attempting to continuethat tradition into the graduate ranks. We know that this will bear fruit as to the product and programs produced in that we have a global and ethical perspective
Dr Gerald Patnode
Chair, Department of Business
York College of Pennsylvania
8. quidditas - December 03, 2010 at 09:14 am
Meanwhile, your entire article focuses on how you're going to export this around the world. As it stands, the world must unequivocally shut its doors on you.
9. quidditas - December 03, 2010 at 09:29 am
"We know that this will bear fruit as to the product and programs produced in that we have a global and ethical perspective."
And here again, York College in PA is singing from 2006's globalization hymnal, not recognizing that the world has changed and refusing to acknowledge what that change is. You can't just assert your ethicality, you have to actively re-establish it by working with the law to reinstitute the law.
Where, for example, is your Pecora Commission? Your thousands of 1980s S&L prosecutions? Would you lobby the US government to begin to re-establish your credibility, to take your field back from those who are robbing you of it?
Nothing less than that will even begin to repair your foundation,
although I would argue that you need much more than that. This post, these comments are drivel.
10. 22011344 - December 03, 2010 at 01:39 pm
I will second the BS call, even assuming that Dean Gupta is well-meaning. The AACSB, the Business School Dean's benevolent andprotective association, in the face of the subprime housing scandal, the unregulated derivatives generated financial market meltdown, etc. has devalued the law aspect of business and relegated it and ethics to "teaching areas" - undefined beyond the negative statement that teaching areas do not have to be free-standing courses but may be threads in other courses. Ethics is taught at less than 7% of busines schools; and elsewhere it is covered by everyone. That reminds me of the full professor in finance who declared indignantly to an inquiry about where in his courses he taught ethics: "I teach'em about insider trading that's all they need to know about ethics!!" The lowest level graduate students in the moral reasoning flock to business schools where they receive the indoctrination they need to fit right in as good little doo-bees for corporate America; they represent the first wave of "don't ask, don't tell" just do what you are told moral Zombies. Don't worry the Business Deans who run the AACSB will fix everything; if you believe that I know where you can still buy stock in the Brooklyn Bridge. Ha, ha...
11. cwinton - December 03, 2010 at 02:41 pm
No doubt business education programs have played a role in the ongoing deterioration of business ethics in this country, probably starting as far back as the war profiteers of WWII. I seem to recall even Time magazine some time ago identified the mindset promoted by MBA programs as being a major factor in the short sighted management practices that have characterized American business in recent years. The rampant greed of obscenely compensated corporate executives routinely wrecking otherwise healthy companies at the expense of stockholders, the shenanigans of companies like Enron, the sheer incompetence that characterized S&L institutions, and the absurd business lending practices that promoted the most recent meltdown certainly indicate we are doing a lousy job of developing those who we expect to lead the private sector. It appears to me that those who lead our business programs apparently do not have a clue as to how to right the sinking ship of American business enterprise. I suggest they look elsewhere than among themselves for suggestions and ideas.
12. ishamon - December 08, 2010 at 05:31 pm
This is a healthy dialogue with Nohria of HBS on board and now Johns Hopkins U. Nothing will be accomplished unless conflicting stakeholder interests are given a place in decision making models. It is not ethics per se that is missing but an awareness of which stakeholder bears the costs of the decisions made and the consequences of passing on those costs. Perhaps Agency Theory and its siblings and offshoots will come back to haunt B school courses.
13. bazan - December 09, 2010 at 03:06 am
These orientations are new if we compare them to the main stream of US BS. Not if we compare them with the European BS. Of course not the ones which are the copy of the US standards (Insead, LBS, etc.). But those which are rooted in the European culture (HEC, St Gallen, Bocconi, LSE, ESADE, etc.). And the criterias of EQUIS, the European equivalent of AACSB, give a central place to a multipolar vision of the world, societal responsibility, humanities, culture and soft skills, etc.
It is interesting to observe that, after a long period of deep influence of US BS on the European ones, some US BS begin to follow the European spirit. The problem is AACSB, deeply domestic and narrowly technically oriented