A clear sense of purpose? The evolving role of the business school

The Authors

Ken Starkey, Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Sue Tempest, Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to question the purpose of the business school and its role in management education.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper develops an historical analysis of the origins, development and identity of the business school, reflecting the views of the business school's multiple stakeholders. The paper reviews traditional business school design and how this is driven by particular concepts of purpose and identity. It questions whether these concepts are sustainable in the light of current forces for change.

Findings – The paper identifies the current major design challenges facing business schools as knowledge, narratives and practices and argues for a new narrative of sustainable strategic management as a guiding force for future development.

Originality/value – The paper identifies the current knowledge challenges facing business schools and argues that business schools need to rethink their focus on “school” as well as “business”.

Article Type:

Viewpoint

Keyword(s):

Business schools; Purpose; Identity.

Journal:

Journal of Management Development

Volume:

Number:

Year:

2008

pp:

379-390

Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

0262-1711

“Among the faculties, none has a clearer sense of purpose than schools of business and medicine”, according to Derek Bok (2003, p. 6), past President of Harvard University. To some in the business school community this statement might come as something of a surprise, as it did to the authors of this paper. Business schools, in our experience, are places with multiple communities, for example, discipline groups, with contrasting purposes. Stakeholders in business schools have differing views of what business schools should be doing. Business tends to see business schools as a provider of services – research, consultancy or teaching – to business, defining the effectiveness of business schools according to the degree that the services a school provides are consonant with business's purposes. Academics tend to a differing view, seeing themselves in relatively traditional terms as disinterested students of business, producing knowledge of business rather than for business. They are research-led and motivated by the concerns of the scientist. Of course, different groups have differing views of what constitutes science, research and, ultimately knowledge.

In this paper we address the question: “What is the purpose and identity of the business school?”. We frame this question in terms of choices, in part because the tendency of business schools seems to us to have inexorably moved along a vector which tends to emphasise business – and one model of business – at the expense of school (Starkey and Tiratsoo, 2007). If we have a normative aim in the paper it is to challenge this trend and to present alternative narratives of what a business school might and even should be. We examine the various “ontological narratives” (Somers, 1994) that have characterised the growth and the current success of the business school, and that, in our opinion, will determine its future. We consider these narratives in the light of relationships of historical actors, narratives of the university, and other narratives, social, political and cultural, in the light of a variety of socio-economic forces within whose unfolding the business school is and will be constituted. Our argument is grounded in a belief that there is a need in the business school, in business schools, for new narratives that capture an evolving sense of purpose and a sense of identity consistent with the complexity, and the turmoil, of those forces.

We can understand why President Bok made the comment he did in the light of the activities and the purposes of élite US business schools. These are very clear on their primary purpose, which is, simply, to prepare people to become business leaders and to equip them with the tools to fulfil this role. A quick survey of the web sites of these schools makes this very clear. The Graduate School of Business at Stanford is representative. Its mission is “to create ideas that deepen and advance our understanding of management and with those ideas to develop innovative, principled, and insightful leaders who change the world”. Students are to be inculcated in the general management principles (strategy, resource allocation, organization behaviour, accounting and finance, human resource and operations management) “that create an enduring foundation for leadership”.

The business school fulfils this mission primarily through the postgraduate Masters of Business Administration degree, the major educational innovation of the business school and perhaps the most “successful” degree in history, at least in terms of its exponential growth and the numbers queuing to pursue and reap the rewards of its magic letters (“MBA”) in the corporate job market. The global reach of the degree was graphically illustrated to us recently in a BBC television interview with the head of the famous Shaolin Buddhist Temple in China. He has an MBA and has turned the temple into a thriving business!

Harvard Business School's mission is to prepare business leaders through:

training able men and women to become competent and responsible general managers;
preparing doctoral students for careers in teaching and research or in academic administration; and
contributing to the body of knowledge about management and business through leading-edge research.

Similarly to Stanford and Harvard, Columbia Business School in New York describes itself as “looking for the best and brightest of future business leaders of the world” ( Business Week, 2007). The Dean of Columbia is clear on this and on what it comprises. In a lively defence of university-based business school, the MBA, and the role of business in society Hubbard (2006) argues that the purpose of the business school is to champion entrepreneurial capitalism and new business models to raise productivity.

Hubbard's defence of the business school is explicitly economic. Universities and business schools should offer a neutral environment for discussing how to manage change in the economy and financial markets. How are they to do this? By creating masters and mistresses of the universe who promote venture capital practices, grounded in courses in private equity and venture capital. Private equity firms are seen as the real masters of business prospects; the drivers of contemporary capitalism, and the ability to assess valuations are the key skills an MBA offers! The barbarians, one might observe, are no longer beating on the gates, they are controlling the gates and what lies inside! We wonder what a former president of Harvard would make of this. In the early days of business schools when very few existed, the argument for setting up a business school at Harvard was made by Charles W. Eliot, the then president of the university, that if a business school were established at Harvard it would offer great capacity for “public usefulness”. What, today, constitutes “public”?

The condition of the business school – rigorous irrelevance, icy hearts, shrunken souls, market shakeout?

In recent years, after the euphoria of the golden years and contrary to the enthusiasms of the “Hubbards”, there has been much soul-searching about the purpose of the business school, epitomised in Mintzberg's (2004) trenchant criticism of the MBA and Pfeffer and Fong's radical critique of business school research and teaching which led them to suggest that, if things did not change, the end may well be nigh. These auto-critiques by prominent members of the business school community picked up on a growing sense of unease.

Hambrick (1994) had lamented our absence of “mattering”, that our research, in pursuing scientific rigor, had become increasingly irrelevant and incestuous, mattering only to ourselves and, even among ourselves, valued not mainly for its intrinsic qualities but more for the career advancement publication in an A-list journal leads to. MBA curriculum design has been widely crticised as too focused on analytics, insufficiently integrative, failing to develop wisdom, leadership, interpersonal skills, a criticism neatly encapsulated in Leavitt's (1989) argument that the MBA “distorts” those subjected to it into “critters with lopsided brains, icy hearts and shrunken souls”.

Outsiders to the business school world have been equally unimpressed. From the liberal arts, cultural critic Allan Bloom (1988) argues that the business school is implicated in the “closing of the American mind”, not least because of its instrumental attitudes and the fact that the purpose of science is concerned primarily and uniquely in the business school context, according to Bloom, with the avaricious pursuit of profit. Here one could long debate causality and correlation. Did the business school cause the closing or is it only symbolic of broader socio-economic forces that led inexorably in this direction? The case of Enron did not help as one of Enron's much lauded HR practices, before its fall from grace, was that it had built up an unparalleled corps of managers by recruiting the USA's best MBA graduates.

Enron was the culmination of what might be described as the “gravy training” narrative (Crainer and Dearlove, 2001) that the business school's critics employ. According to this the business school displays a passion for all the wrong things. It is too customer-focused, i.e. too business-focused. It operates according to narrowly defined league tables – controlled by the world's financial and business press – in which world-class is measured mainly by measures of economic utility. This is summed up in the infamous “Greed is good” ethos, a phrase made in real life by Ivan Boesky to Stanford MBA graduates and immortalised in Stone's film Wall Street, a morality tale based on the excesses of the leveraged buy-out “community”. Business schools are charged with paying little consideration to either the fundamentals of education or to a broader social mission, and championing the new management culture of flexible capitalism (Sennett, 1998), with its values of rampant competition in which only the strong survive, individualism, short-termism, and market fundamentalism – shareholder capitalism or financialized capitalism (if private equity continues its rise), with little if any room for stakeholder capitalism.

The business school then stands implicated in the excessive commercialization in every part of the university (Kirp, 2003). Political and market forces rule rather than educational ones. Knowledge is valued in terms of its translatability into cash or merchandise while other kinds of value are marginalised (e.g. intrinsic, intellectual quality – knowledge for its own sake). Universities, once places of public purpose have become merely agencies of personal advantage. While the power of market to mobilize is recognised, the fear is that something is lost in its excessive encroachment into the groves of academe. In the words of Howard Davies, director of the London School of Economics, universities now inhabit a “dog eat dog” world and a business, and business school, philosophy based on the survival of the fittest can only exacerbate the situation.

What does the future hold for the business school itself in such a dog eat dog world? The business school has enjoyed a meteoric rise but, in our view, this is unlikely to continue. The élite schools will no doubt continue to prosper, leveraging their special relationships with business, and drawing in as students high-paying would-be masters of the universe. How many will enjoy this exalted status? Perhaps 20 or 30 – the top US schools and the “national champions”, the top one or twp schools elsewhere, London Business School in the UK, Inséad in France, the top schools in India, China, South America and so on. For the rest, the future is likely to be darker, more challenging, and harsher. There are signs that the MBA market might have plateaued and that a number of us, perhaps the majority, are living on borrowed time. Competition is increasing in all corners of the globe and the proliferation of providers, exacerbated by virtual provision over the internet, means that the West can no longer rely upon lucrative overseas student business.

Internationalisation has been the latest holy grail/cash cow in the business school portfolio. Business school strategy has been market-led. As one market dwindles – for example, demand for the full-time MBA falls – another appears or is created. Where will this lead? In our view demand is not infinite and we see a future in which the majority will be competing in an increasingly price-driven, commodity “industry” with market saturation a real possibility. This is likely to lead to a dissonance between staff aspirations and the demands for new business imposed by management pressures. On the HR side in the business school we see a danger of increasing staff cynicism, exacerbated by unfavourable demographics with the problems we all experience of recruiting enough good graduate students and aging faculties.

In short, we envisage a future in which the élite business schools, dominated by the USA, continue to prosper but there is a shakeout, possibly major, of other players. In this context, apart from the élite, the only other players likely to survive and prosper are those who come up with innovative new products and a new sense of purpose. The silver lining in the gathering clouds is the possibility of the rise of niche players focused on new modes of knowledge production and new knowledge configurations.

“The university in ruins – business school as phoenix” narrative

To counter doom and gloom, we now develop a more hopeful scenario but one that has far-reaching consequences if we consider its drivers seriously. The business school, we suggest, perhaps somewhat quixotically, has the potential to be at the forefront of reshaping the founding ideas of the modern university and to be at the leading edge of a revitalised university of the future. The founding ideas of the modern university comprise, most importantly, beliefs about the universality of knowledge, the quest for truth, the unity of culture and a central role for the university as a champion of culture and a healthy society. Many see these as increasingly challenged and, even, becoming increasingly irrelevant (Delanty, 2001).

The fiscal problems of the state, exacerbated by the use of an economic yardstick as the arbiter of investment in education, driven by “market forces”, have reduced the university, according to one of its most perceptive critics, to the state of “a ruined institution” because out has lost touch with its historical raison d'être, its very reason for existing (Readings, 1996). The extent of the redundancy of its traditional ideals is summed up by the fact that the question for the university has become the appeal to students not on the grounds of knowledge but in terms of value-for-money. The university competes for consumers, rather than for “students”, studious individuals who want to study and think.

The key force for change in recent years has been marketization which challenges the historical sense of identity and purpose of the university (Kirp, 2003). In attempting to paint a more inspiring picture of the business school, we ask if a reinvigorated, “re-purposed” business school, rather than playing the role of cash cow, or deteriorating into a dodo, might not have the capacity to become the phoenix in the ruins? For this to happen we need a new business school narrative, a critical reflection upon the state of our current narratives and a new sense of identity and purpose. Currently there are two dominant business school narratives, each with a particular sense of purpose and of identity. These are a narrative of social science and a professional school narrative.

The social science narrative is expertly represented by Chicago Graduate School of Business which offers a difficult to replicate “USP” of “accomplished peers and a faculty known for its Nobel Prizes”. However, the model and philosophy of social science grounding this narrative is one rooted in economics/finance, and in economics' “physics envy”. Research is aimed at describing the way the world is or should be. Business school students spend 95 per cent of their time learning how to calculate with a view to maximizing wealth (Bennis and O'Toole, 2005).

If science demonstrates its legitimacy and power by generating predictive knowledge, then the attraction of the GSB model is increased by the paucity of knowledge that business school research has delivered and the strange lack of obviously impactful contributions except in finance/economic. The power of the latter's contribution is demonstrated in the award of Nobel prizes. Robert Merton and Myron Scholes are prime examples here and the ubiquity of Black-Scholes and its impact in financial markets. This leads to a commonly held view that finance is and should be the backbone of the business school. Certainly the discipline of finance that MBAs learn today has become a powerful force in shaping markets, public policy and corporate America.

The professional school narrative emphasises practice as much as knowledge. It is clear in its purpose that the task of a professional school, such as a medical school, is to provide training for professional practice. From this perspective, the task of the business school as a professional school is to train for the practice of management as a profession and to develop new knowledge that may be relevant to improving the operations of business, which requires knowledge from world of practice, plus knowledge from social sciences that are relevant to the improvement of practice. But there are a number of unresolved issues here. The application of a professional school model to business schools is difficult to justify both in terms of the knowledge, or lack of knowledge, that business schools have generated – apart from in finance – that have enjoyed direct application to management practice.

The world of management also differs from the world of the profession. Professions have developed an accepted body of knowledge over the years. Professionals, as in the medical profession, span the world of the university and the world of practice, researching and training future doctors, and practicing the science/craft of medicine. Professions also operate with a clear system of certification, far more exacting than an MBA, with professional bodies as custodians of knowledge and licensors of the right to practice. Professions claim and enjoy legitimacy based upon, a commitment to a service ethic of public good. They embrace a code of ethics that governs behaviour and provides a touchstone for evaluating practice, a very different situation than applies in management.

Apart from finance and some aspects of economics (the beta coefficient in portfolio selection, the Black-Scholes model, econometric forecasting), with the best will in the world, it is difficult to claim the generation or diffusion of much knowledge of practicable import in/from the business school. The business school is not, obviously, a repository of much knowledge relevant for business, judged from a professional school angle. The case study is an interesting case in point. One might argue that this is a quintessential example of business school knowledge. A lot more people read our cases than our papers and case studies are ubiquitous in business school education, forming at least a third of most programmes.

But what kind of knowledge do cases represent? The research strategy that underpins the case method might be described as the “dedicated following of fashion”. Cases are often based on little more than war stories, dubious narratives of success, with a cast of all-powerful leaders and, recently, more powerful entrepreneurs. They seem far removed form the complexities of the real world of organisations, presenting one-dimensional pictures of the corporate world, undervaluing context, neglecting other stakeholders apart from the corporate heroes (Starkey and Tiratsoo, 2007). The corpus of case studies constitutes a panegyric to power (almost predominantly male) and fortune rather than fanfares to the common woman and man. The proliferation of admiring case studies of the Enron management miracle and of the dot.com revolution (before it became “dot.con”) speaks volumes.

A way forward?

The potential importance of business schools has long been recognised. President Norton saw this potential in championing the inauguration of Harvard Business School. Half a century later the Ford and Carnegie Foundation reports recognised that it was important to invest in business schools. The purpose of this investment, at the time, was to the business school's scientific legitimacy and to overcome criticism that business schools were little more than trade schools. This led to significant investment in behavioural and economic sciences. The unintended consequence of this was that it set us off on a social science route when the real intention was to develop better professional schools and led to the situation business schools are in today – hugely significant to their parent universities, but valued more for their economic power than their intellectual gravitas.

What is the way forward? One way forward, we suggest, is to construct a new narrative of business and of the business school. This will entail a return to our social science roots, but more broadly embracing in its scope and challenging of the hegemony of the economic, supported by a complementary extension of our engagement with the humanities. Why do we suggest the latter? This is best explained, not by a member of Chicago GSB, but by Chicago Philosophy professor, Martha Nussbaum:

Humanities are essential to good citizenship in business … It would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost their ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 300).

The purpose we espouse here is to broaden the base of our thinking about management and business – to better understand the impact of business and how management can become more effective – by broader exposure to the social sciences, the humanities and liberal arts. We need to engage more deeply with the fundamentals of knowledge, with self-knowledge, wisdom and leadership, self-development, integrative thinking, reflexivity, some of the purposes of a liberal education. The arts offer us models of practice and application, inspiring lessons of creativity, leadership, imagination, inspiration, features emphasised in a recent debate about management as a design science/art in the Academy of Management Learning & Education (Adler, 2006; Martin, 2006) and by one of the most eminent and inspiring of management researchers, Jim March in his use of works of literature such as Don Quixote to teach leadership.

Our intuition is that such a re-engagement of the business school with areas of knowledge that were possibly seen as more important in its formative years but have become submerged more recently will help generate a compelling design and knowledge narrative. At the centre of this narrative will be an expanded notion of the knowledge economy that embraces the social sciences and the arts and humanities as well as science-technology studies, and is focused around critical reflection upon the nature and needs of the economy, of business and of society, developing closer integration with other parts of the university. It will not ignore the power of the economic. But it will offer a more than one-dimensional view of the economy.

Theory and practice are mediated by the historically contingent, therefore we need to cultivate a sense of history. If there are any timeless truths about management then we are not very clear on them as yet. We also need to be more sensitive to the social factors that make economies work (Callon, 1998). Despite the haranguing of market purists/zealots we have only a very one-dimensional understanding of how markets work. These are far more complex than their simplistic advocates claim (Kay, 2003). For example, MacKenzie and Millo's (2003) study of the CBOE (the Chicago futures exchange) demonstrates that markets flourish not as pure market exchange but as networks, cultures, and even moral communities, emphasising the paradox that if markets really functioned in the way in which markets thrive could not be created if the actors involved only operated according to the theory of pure “homo oeconomicus”. The motivations that lead to the genesis of sustainable markets are not those of rational egoists. Only a broader social science perspective, drawing on economics, sociology and other sources of understanding will give us an adequate theoretical understanding of how successful organised markets, and societies, survive and prosper.

The business school in Europe – a distinctive identity?

Part of the debate about business schools in the European context needs to be about whether the business school in Europe needs to develop a distinctive identity. In our opinion it does. We also think that the narrative of business school we are aspiring to involves a new configuration of business and management research with the social sciences and arts and humanities. The European business school would have an advantage in this domain over its US counterpart. The “US model” is relatively set and the evolution of US schools relatively path-dependent. The business school in Europe is a newer phenomenon, more loosely configured, more heterogeneous, and, therefore, more open, in principle, to design innovations.

Business school growth in Europe started in earnest in the 1960s and really took off in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 1960s, business schools were seen as the route to developing management capability and capacity to counter what was perceived as a deficit in management education and competence. In the UK this led to the establishment of London Business School and Manchester Business School and, in France, Inséad which was established slightly earlier in 1959. The need for the business school was driven by what was perceived as a need, even in France, to become more American! Inséad was set up because there was a need that “young Europeans [be] brought up with a good conception of American ideals and the free enterprise system”, in the words of George Doriot, a Frenchman who had become a star professor at Harvard and a key adviser on management education to the French government.

Do we still feel the same as Professor Doriot? In its development the business school needs to be far more questioning about its origins and the narratives it promulgates. We have mentioned the case study in this regard. We need to ask ourselves what business models, and models of society, we espouse, explicitly and implicitly. Are we content with an American business model, the key principles and purposes of which that the eminent UK economist, John Kay (2003), himself a former business school dean, characterises as unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, market fundamentalism and minimal state. Some American economists agree. Nobel prize-winner, Joseph Stiglitz (2003), in critiquing the excesses of the “roaring nineties” when greed really was the major “good” argues that the intellectual foundations of laissez-faire economics and the view that markets by themselves will lead to efficient and fair outcomes is no longer sustainable. The challenge today, Stiglitz argues, is to work out the right balance, theoretical and practical, between the state and the market, between different forms of collective action at the local, national and global levels, and between government and non-governmental agencies.

Embracing a broader set of questions about the relationship between business and society means we will need to broaden our frames of reference and rethink our SWOT analyses. One of Europe's leading social scientists, Ulrich Beck (1995) suggests that the key challenge now facing us is whether the historical symbiosis between capitalism and democracy that has driven the development of the West can or should be generalized on a global scale. If this is done so unquestioningly, Beck argues, we run the risk of exhausting its physical, cultural and social foundations. We live, not just in a risk society, but in a risk world in which business, particularly driven by globalization, is a key, if not the key, driver of change, for better or worse. To deal with the complexities and the risks we face, we require more expansive, more inclusive hybrid narratives of business and management than are currently the norm in the business school.

In the process of constructing these narratives we need, in Europe, and, we would hope, more generally, to confront the fatalism of the “End of History” narrative (Fukuyama's (1992) argument that there is no alternative to the American model) that drives so much, too much, US policy thinking and making. We need to address questions such as: What will the next phase of capitalism look like? What will succeed the American century? What are the different varieties of capitalism and their strengths and weaknesses? What variant of which breed of capitalism (American, Chinese, Indian, European, Russian, Scandinavian, South American, democratic, autocratic …) is likely to serve us best over the longer term?

We propose experimentation with new hybrids in the hope that this will generate what garden designers describe as “hybrid vigour”. Hybrids are often stronger than the parent varieties from which they are grafted and give heterozygote advantage, which in the competition between different social science perspectives might constitute a source of competitive advantage. We need to address issues of normative content (what constitutes the good organisation, the good society, the good life, good management, good business …?). We need new narratives of business and society that address the burning questions of meaning and of justice and inequality that so indelibly mark our age. In our opinion we need to reposition our debates about business within a wider sense of meaning and a broader system of accountability, as much stakeholder as shareholder and private equity, a new hybrid perhaps!

The design challenge facing the business school is one that involves knowledge, narratives and practices. In our opinion, the business school faces huge opportunities to the extent that it can position itself as the key site for rethinking and reshaping the relationship between science, business, technology and society. In doing this it could become a focal point of the academy and the university, integrating the interests of a variety of faculties – social sciences, arts/humanities, sciences, medicine, law … In doing this it can play a key role in developing new networks, zones of interconnectivity between the opposing domains of science, business and culture (Delanty, 2001). The challenge is to create new narratives that suggest, define and justify the potential then actual role of management and business in shaping sustaining economic, social, and cultural conditions – to develop knowledge and practices that support the alignment of economic system, social system, and ecosystem.

The intellectual challenge was well expressed by Sumantra Ghoshal before his untimely death – in his critique of narrow economic theory and its pernicious effects (Ghoshal and Moran, 2003) and in his work on social capital (Ghoshal and Nahapiet, 1998). The essence of the social capital argument is to shift our attention to other forms of “capital” that sustain social and economic systems. (Some do not like the term “capital” in this regard but we use it for the time being until a better term is “coined”.) Social capital develops to the extent that there are active connections of mutuality between actors and is built on the trust, the mutual understanding and a sense of shared values and norms of behaviour that bind together the members of human networks and communities. In essence, it makes collective action possible. In business, social capital provides an important architecture for exchange, market or otherwise, patterns of connections, the relational quality of these connections and the cognitions, the shared meanings, that sustain them.

Differing narratives of sustainability illustrate the way an expanded narrative of business broadens the sense of the issues we need to confront. Strategy, the textbooks tell us, is about creating a unique sustainable position, based on either cost or innovation, as a source of competitive advantage, according to Harvard Business School strategy guru, Michael Porter, who is also a key adviser to governments on the competitive advantage of nations. There are broader definitions of sustainability. Stead and Stead (2004) argue that we need to take a more comprehensive and differently defined global view of the term that refers not only to the survival and renewal of the firm itself but also to the survival and renewal of the various systems upon which the firm depends – the economic system, the social system, and ecosystem in which the firm is embedded. In this broader perspective, the narrative of strategy is redefined to become a narrative of “sustainable strategic management”. An organization must still achieve strategic fit between its external and internal environments to survive and be successful but the assumptions that inform this process are framed in terms of different sustainability-based economic assumptions, accounting for nature, rethinking individuals as moral people living in communities rather than selfish monocultures. The language of business evolves to include a new values terminology – wholeness, posterity, community, appropriate scale, diversity, quality, dialogue, spiritual fulfilment, and a new philosophy of common purpose and common ground.

No doubt, to some this will sound like the dreams (or nightmares) of aging hippies or punks, out of touch with the harsh realities of the twenty-first century world. Such critics would do well to ponder the debates at this year's World Economic Forum at Davos, an event not renowned for its counter-cultural leanings. In the words of Davos's founder, Klaus Schwab:

Today, large parts of the population feel that business has become detached from society – that business interests are no longer aligned with societal interests … What has come under attack now is the credibility not only of our business leaders but of business itself – or, in other words, of capitalism and our market-driven system.

There were a variety of ideas about how to respond. Some of these were very much old school (old MBA?). E. Davis, a Managing Director of McKinsey, argued that the way to change hearts and minds was simply linguistic: “We have to stop using abstract concepts such as GDP growth and explain globalization in terms of job creation, prices and taxes”. People need, he argued, a lesson in economic reality. The forces pulling jobs offshore also drive down prices in stores. C. Ghoshn, of Renault Nissan, argued simply that “globalization demands more work”.

Others were less stark, more reflective and questioning of existing practice. P. Cescau, CEO Unilever argued that: “You can't have a healthy economy without a healthy community” and that managing the impact of globalization on people's lives and their livelihoods falls under the broad umbrella of corporate social responsibility. J. Schiro, CEO of Zurich Financial Services (ZFS) identified an opening up of the business agenda – “we need to remove some of the uncertainty and risk, and by that, anxiety about globalization” – presumably in a way that goes beyond mere marketing. As these corporate leaders recognised, the future facing business and the business school is challenging. It is also exciting. Business schools have a crucial role to play in the shaping of the future of the university, of business, of society, and of the world we live in and would hope to live in future. We need to embrace this responsibility with an extended and clear sense of our purpose and our potential.

References

Adler, N. (2006), "The arts and leadership: now that we can do anything, what will we do?", Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 5 No.4, pp.486-99.