A vision for business schools

Citation

Cornuel, E. (2005), "A vision for business schools", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 24 No. 9. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.2005.02624iaa.001

A vision for business schools

About the Guest EditorEric Cornuel is the Director-General and CEO of the European Foundation for Management Development in Brussels. He has taught for 15 years at various management schools in France as well as in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary and Kazakhstan. Since 1996 he has been an Affiliate Professor at HEC Graduate School of Management, Paris and in 2002 he was named a Chevalier in the Order of the French “Palmes Académiques”. He is also a Board Member of, among others, the GFME (Global Foundation for Management Education), ITP (International Teachers Programme), EIASM (European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management), EBP (European Business Journal), IJBS (International Journal of Business in Society) and EABIS (European Academy of Business in Society).

A vision for business schools

This special issue of the Journal of Management Development is an attempt to gather a number of opinions and visions from leaders in the field of business education. Business schools are an essential component of market economies, and optimizing their competitiveness, relevance and performance is of the utmost importance on at least two crucial dimensions.

First, raising the level of education in management and management-related disciplines allows organisations to function better, and thereby improve the level of economic growth in the sphere of influence – national, international, private, public, or not-for-profit.

Second, and since business schools are training a part of the “elite” in society, we should address the burning issue of the crisis of legitimacy decision makers are currently facing. All the scandals which have affected the private as well as the public spheres need to be taken into consideration, and business schools must take up this challenge, with realism and humility, to create a vision more oriented towards responsibility, ethics and stakeholder value.

The environment is changing quickly, and business schools have not only to keep pace, but also to voice their opinions and positively contribute to the general improvement of our societies.

This issue includes a paper from Gabriel Hawawini, who addresses the future of business schools, and the necessity to differentiate the approach of management education. Following the theorem of the required variety, business schools have to develop more complex responses to be able to cope with a sharp increase in the environment’s complexity.

Peter Lorange gets back to the essence of any organisation, i.e. strategy. He embraces the whole landscape of management education and insists on fundamental reorientations business schools have to make to mirror the context of a more networked and cooperative world-system.

Echoing Peter Lorange, Angel Cabrera and David Bowen see the need for business schools to re-define themselves, change, and adopt a set of core values, a corpus, to contribute to the development of societies at large.

In this context, Paul Verhaegen’s paper highlights the imperious necessity to align faculty with the new challenges business schools are facing. Based on two in-depth surveys, the article identifies crucial factors of faculty recruitment and retention, and is therefore of great interest for deans and directors in their endeavour to ensure that their resources are in line with their strategies.

Finally, Eric Cornuel’s article tries to review the status of business schools in society, and advocates a model which would induce and encourage the emergence of more globally responsible behaviour in organisations and at the same time enhance corporate performance.

Eric CornuelGuest Editor