I really liked the comment about “leadership and humility.” For a good read on this subject, see A. Havard, Virtuous Leadership.

I agree with Dean Sheppard’s view that, under their present structures, most business schools cannot deliver the new breed of students the changed world expects. Cross-disciplinary learning is necessary but insufficient for dealing with the most pressing global problems that cut across cultures, borders, and sectors. Less than a year ago, we merged the policy and business schools at the Monterey Institute. It has been an exhilarating experience for our students, faculties, and alumni so far. It is also gratifying to see our strategic move validated in Dean Sheppard’s words.

This is a good conversation topic. I wish it was not just an interview but a panel discussion involving management educators from across the world. Nevertheless, the comments from across the world have filled this lack of global perspective. From an Indian perspective, much of what the dean has said—supplemented by others in the comments section—fits the management and higher professional education scene here. Case studies, tough deadlines, internships, and projects, notwithstanding the knowledge and skills, remain inadequate. Our HR dept made a simple calculation and concluded that with 17% knowledge of the prescribed curriculum one can get a degree from many of the universities in India!

The gulf between even this scanty knowledge and its comprehension and application is often a huge chasm. It takes businesses lots of time and money to get these hires work-ready. And how many opportunity buses are missed during this training phase is a matter for conjecture. In our own business, I reckon we could have doubled our revenue had it not been for having to get them ready during the past two years. Better light a candle than curse the darkness. Hence we are seriously contemplating starting something which could fast track a fresh professional’s transition work readiness. Yet that will be only a limited solution. The need for holistic, socially sensitive, eco-friendly education in India remains urgent.

I agree with Mr.Sheppard’s approach of inter-scholastic faculties. We definitely need more “generalists” who have good knowledge of each faculty. There should be a new program in every B-school that teaches parts of every specialized program. These students who are prepared to be generalists should think outside the box, have vision and overall leadership qualities. They will always be able to find specialists who can work on their visions.

The interview left me with the feeling that not much has been said on what should have been said, in particular on the subjects of ethics, transparency, corporate governance, and sustainability (both social and ecological). While the dean does make reference to interscholastic blend that is needed, the above issues are too crucial to be treated as ‘nice to do’ or ‘elective subjects’. For example, the construct that business is an integral part of society and not an independent agent in a free market has to become central to what is taught in B-schools. I wonder how many B-school students are aware of something as fundamental as the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the role that businesses should be playing in meeting these goals.

The second big change that B-schools must incorporate is a paradigm shift away from the notion of teaching ‘immutable truths and laws’—students must learn to appreciate different schools of thought, weigh them objectively, and apply their principles as the contexts change, for example, for too long have we taught at B-schools that markets are self regulating and the free market theory has all the answers. Even if this sounds as anathema to B-schools and corporations, it will benefit the students to learn about the fundamental constructs of other schools of economics like Marxism and ecological economics. Students will value this ethos of openness and exposure to mutiple worldviews.

Let me end by recollecting a recent interview of a final year graduate of a premier B-school in India that I conducted; I asked her what subjects would she drop from her MBA curriculum and what would she add. To the former she said that she will drop advertising and marketing strategy because these subjects emphasize on increasing consumption levels unnecessarily, at the cost of the planet and therefore imply a breach of human integrity in a fundamental sense. If that is indication of the MBA student of the future, B-schools certainly have a lot of rethinking to do ....and fast.

In my opinion, there is currently an unmet need to prepare graduates for the realities of today’s workplace—a place where complex supply chains are managed across company boundaries by people all over the globe. Doing business today requires people who can lead from where they are and feel accountability for the results of the whole enterprise. It’s a lot about knowing how to work effectively with others.

In consideration of the two fundamental shifts noticed by Mr. Sheppard—that is a larger context or understanding and broader range of tools and perspectives—maybe it should be the case that MBA (and even graduate) students are introduced to the basic concepts of complexity science, such as the “butterfly effect,” fractal dimensions, and self-organization. Of course we must be aware to an appropriate use of that in so distinct fields including economy, physics, biology, management and so on, however there is a real chance that people - in particular future leaders - will have a less deterministic and more holistic approach to grasp the uncertainty and dynamics of our ever-changing and increasingly interconnected world.

It would be interesting to know if any business school, university, or college has that subject among their current disciplines, and also if any industry, company, or sector effectively applies those concepts to their businesses.

Blair Sheppard, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, responds to your comments.

Readers, Thanks to all for sharing your ideas. I’d like to offer my thoughts on a few of your comments and your concerns about the future of MBA programs in general.

A reader expressed a concern, as have others, that MBA education may be one cause of the recent economic meltdown—a fair worry. Of course a real response to this assertion would require more space than is allotted, here. For a start, Joseph Stiglitz’s new book Freefall includes, in my estimation, one of the best treatments of what went wrong.

And it’s true that two year’s time seems inadequate to prepare students for the increasingly complex business world. One reader alludes to what is, I think, part of the answer to this problem: lifelong and experiential learning. Though I entirely agree that on-the-job experience is critically important, I do not think that formal education is less valuable than trying to do something on one’s own. It is a classic argument to pit formal versus informal learning, but they are complements to each other. That said, universities must do more to link their curriculua to ongoing learning. In addition to practical experience, more advance training may help students to achieve more depth in their area of expertise than a standard MBA program would allow. More advanced training for MBA students, however, risks producing narrow technocrats who do not understand how their models work in a larger context.

Finally, one reader suggests that MBA programs should “reach out to corporate America and ask them what they need to better support their organizations.” Though these ideas weren’t covered in this interview, I assure you that Fuqua and other MBA programs have a very specific process for seeking input from firms about what they want and expect from our graduates. Our program includes an advisory board with members from six key industries. These board members are quite engaged in both helping to shape our curriculum and engaging with our students.

As a soon to graduate EMBA student at Boise State University, a number of the comments that Blair mentioned have been incorporated into this program. Creative Thinking, along the lines of the IDEO process, played a large role with most every class experience as did several multi-disciplinary techniques. Largely beneficial was the cohort concept where teams do the EMBA together; my team included an M.D., 20 year Micron employee, social media expert, and a banker. We all approached problems with a different cultural perspective and respected each other. We were grounded in the classic fundamentals of finance and management, but really learned a new way of critical thinking. A two-week international trip to Vietnam also exposed many of us to Asia and social issues we take for granted in the United States. I learned as much, if not more, from my team members as I did in the class setting. Coming out of this EMBA program, I have greatly improved my ability to think, not just regurgitate! Isn’t that the point.

A highly interesting approach to the challenges of management integrity and education is one posited by Rakesh Khurana, professor of leadership development at HBS, and his colleagues who propose that management be treated as the profession it has effectively become. Practitioners would need to be certified, adhere to a code of ethics, and stay current concerning the latest management tools and practices. We ask as much of doctors, architects, and airline captains. Why not the captains of finance and industry?

Unfortunately, there is no “burning platform” for fundamental change within the existing academic system. Fundamental change will only occur when academia, business, and government realize that developing future managers and leaders—productive citizens—is a lifelong process that begins in grade school and never ends. It requires a better balance and integration between formal education and experiential, on-the-job learning. We’d learn a great deal from a return to the Master-Apprentice model.

Until more fundamental change occurs, most b-school students would learn a lot more about how to be successful in life if they took their $150,000 in grad school tuition and fees, collaborated with a few friends, pooled their money and invested in themselves in a small business/social venture start-up. (Think Jobs and Wozniak; Gates and Allen; Brin and Page.) While statistics would suggest that most would fail, some would succeed wildly. But even in failure, they would learn more than any professors will ever teach them. This isn’t the answer either, but it’s more aligned with Einstein’s approach: “the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” I wish Blair great success in his endeavor!

As a business school graduate, business owner, and guest lecturer at The Rady School of Business at UCSD, I applaud efforts to train business students in policy. It’s clear to me that business people, including myself, have let the country down by allowing this current bunch of politicians practically free reign in shaping ‘policy’ that has the potential for damaging our country irreparably. Hopefully this next generation of both politicians and business men and women can effectively be trained to reach across the aisle far better than their predecessors.

Blair is right on the money in his comments. Achieving a transition to an inter-scholastic organisation is a mega-transformation for academic institutions, as it cuts to the heart of the traditional silo mentality. At Unitec (New Zealand’s largest Institute of Technology), we have taken the first steps in heading in this direction, and have started at the top of the organisation, structurally and culturally.

Like Blair, I am concerned that we don’t have the luxury of time to achieve this, but in the words of Margaret Thatcher - TINA - There Is No Alternative! I look forward to following Duke’s transition.

There are many ideas and statements Mr. Sheppard makes that have no scientific data to support his position. Example, back in the sixties his generation blew up institutions they disagreed with versus today the student says “How can I fix it?” That is absolute hogwash. I would love to poll the Fuqua business students and ask them what they would like to see. I will bet you that the results of the poll won’t have even a distant resemblance to what Mr. Sheppard claims he is hearing. Perhaps it is what he wants to hear.

Finally, Mr. Sheppard does know the politics that go on within a university. His idea of inter-scholastic discipline is a pipe dream. If you want real change in the MBA programs across America, it should be mandatory that all academia who play a role in what is being taught in the classroom to better prepare the student for real world exposure should have real world business exposure themselves, not just academic. In closing, I would suggest that the Fuqua business school along with Mr. Sheppard reach out to corporate America and ask them what they need to better support their organizations, not academia, and certainly not the student.

It’s great to hear MBAs are looking for broader perspectives, linking business to societal and environmental issues. Better still they don’t think the answer is to junk institutions but to make them work better. But we are not starting in a good place to get the better integration he calls for between schools of Business, Environment, and Policy. Business schools are not really ‘interdisciplinary’—they may have all the required subjects, but they lack the tools to integrate them, even if they want to do so. A return to true ‘business policy’ education needs a foundation of rigorous principles that the topic lacked when it mostly got discredited back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, the academic publishing demon kills the cross-disciplinary integration essential to a system-integrating view of management. It would be good to hear from any Deans who have cracked that challenge.

Additional Important Factors: (1) aggressively competitive, for-profit online schools (2) transition from traditional to e-learning & blended learning formats, by consumer demand (3) emergence of the entrepreneur discipline.

I support Blair Sheppard’s view that new global challenges and changing student expectations will require new types of university education. Businesses will also need to change their recruitment and early development processes. Recruiters currently rely on traditional university degree qualifications to quickly screen candidates. The move towards more inter-scholastic studies will produce a new type of “hybrid” graduate that is more difficult to categorise. To maximise the potential of the new “hybrid” employee, early business experience programs will also require a radical overhaul.

Very interesting article. A couple of things struck me—one was the comment about students thinking they’re ready to be CEOs on graduation. This would support the idea that business schools are training students to run / take over businesses begun by others. I’m wondering if schools are training people to actually start successful businesses. Perhaps this should be a requirement for anybody before they’re allowed to run someone else’s business—it would certainly promote the “humbleness” factor.

A second thought was whether schools should be recruiting students with a broader variety of goals. “Building personal wealth” as a consistent theme is going to produce a batch of leaders who pretty much operate along the same lines—and which are not always beneficial to others.

The issues mentioned in the interview deal with elements that should have been compulsorily addressed long ago. It is not what students want from time to time, but the minimum standards of a professional education that needs to be looked at. In any case, the best 2-year MBA program cannot go into the depths of many of the subjects that are required today.

The complexities that are involved in financial economics today can, at best, receive a superficial glance at an MBA program that seeks to provide breadth at the expense of depth. Thus the degree holder becomes best suited to pushing/delivering products and services, and then playing the organization to reach accelarated CEO-ship. A couple of years ago ‘ethics’ became a buzz word. Today, it is inter-functionality, going by the interview. All of such things should have been taken as ‘given’ in the foundations of an MBA course. They don’t have to re-invent themselves every 3 years prodded by market shocks. An MBA will continue to remain a crash-course for entry into organizations, and will continue to churn out misfits who are good at taking short-term decisions ‘on the run’— and perpetuate the myth that thay are smarter than everyone else with skills to negotiate in or out of any situation.

More than 10 Years ago, when I was a student in Montreal, Canada, I had the same dilemma. I started out studying Business, then switched and graduated in Applied Human Sciences (Sociology/psychology/biology) and then finally did my MBA to bring it all together. Today in Beijing, we prepare students as “Dragonpreneurs”—balanced, socially responsible entrepreneurs who are already the leaders and wealth generators of tomorrow.

I hope more business schools around the world realize that they’re largely churning out “outdated” clones of the 80s, who haven’t a clue as to what’s coming at the business community (like an unstoppable speeding train). We also don’t teach top-down CSR, it’s ineffective. We teach bottom-up ISR, LOHAS, and personal decision-making and leadership skills&38212;it’s the only thing that will pull business back into the fold of society and a sustainable world. Have a Sustainable Day!

Most of the business schools in GCC states like Kuwait and Dubai have developed a curriculum with a traditional bias to the ultimate detriment of new forces shaping business in the GCC region. What shapes the destiny of the oil-based economy is diversification of the economy to trade. And this is well supported by suggested interscholastic approach recommended by the Dean of Duke University. Redefining logistics leadership for the next generation is the way of the future and shift in majors that will drive the business.

I like the direction Dean Sheppard is proposing, and hope that Duke is able to pull it off. Absolutely agree with the need for interscholastic links for MBAs, and the focus on teamwork. Practical experience—a form of Co-op—would help the student and the organization they will be a part of in the future.

Somehow tempering the arrogance of typical MBAs is also something to focus on. Too many newly minted graduates think they have swallowed all the knowledge and miss-out on motivating their organizations. I would add communications skills to Dean Sheppard’s list. Teamwork, communications skills, problem solving and conflict resolution. I wish I had more focus on these ‘soft skills’ in school. This is what 34 years of experience at various levels, various leadership roles—and in various cultures—have tought me. Ethics, leadership and people skills are important—in every culture. These should be a foundation for every MBA.

One of the biggest problems with this interview is the fact that the interview is conducted by 2 white American guys discussing how to make MBA education more relevant. I was further surprised at how the importance of Global Management or International business was not mentioned.

Sheppard doesn’t go far enough and would be wise to become familiar with what Roger Martin is doing in the business school at Rotman in Toronto, at Duke, and what David Garvin Chair of the MBA elective curriculum of Harvard has to say. MBA programs are “falling short: leadership, globalization, communication/presentation skills and problem identification in ambiguous environments.” Reducing the barriers between silos will not automatically result in the improvements suggested above.

Read Ahead of the Curve, Two Years at the Harvard Business School, by Philip Delves Broughton about his description of the 895 members of his class: “men and woman of modest talents but outsize ambition...” MBA education for years has been a magnet for people who don’t really have to learn how to think. “Has society allotted too much authority to a single, narcissistic class of spreadsheet makers and PowerPoint presenters?” asks Broughton. The mess this country is in has been caused by greedy people who think they have great judgment and never once thought to question that judgment. A dangerous class of people who have brought the US to the brink of disaster, and it’s not over yet. And the same is true of the US MBA grads who were born elsewhere and took their “expertise” with them.

This was a valuable interview. Thank you. I am especially grateful for the comments alluding to the need for an interdisciplinary approach to education. — My business conducts organizational diagnostics and professional development programs in product management and marketing organizations. From my vantage point, the problem I see is that people with a functional specialty (e.g., engineering) or an industry specialty (e.g., health insurance), do not have an appreciation for the business glue that holds it all together. We need to ensure that all disciplines have a set of “business anchors” (courses or experience) so they all understand how their efforts fit into the corporate or organizational puzzle. We also need good general manager types who know how the highly interconnected business puzzle fits together (systemically, like the human body). Functional silos should be banned. Professionals should have multi-disciplinary exposure and experience (remember job rotations??), and we need a durable substrate of organizational development and talent management so that someone leads the ongoing development of people. Educating is one aspect. Industry needs to do its part, too.

Regarding the call for a more inter-scholastic curriculum, I find University of St Andrews has made an interesting step. The Sustainable Development School and the Management school are in the same building, and students have the option of taking elective courses in either, regardless of what school they recieve their degrees from. For example, having studied management for 4 years, I decided to take Corporate Social Responsibility, Accountability, and Reporting, a course that was open to both Managment and S.D. students. For the first time, I was exposed to the environmental and social consequences of the management and functioning of modern western corporations, and what implications this may have for corporate law, and the future of management in business. This holistic view has prepared me for the future in business in a way that no degree which focuses solely on management, finance, and accounting could have. For this I am very grateful; it has given me the ‘broader’ ‘inter-scholastic’ view which was described in this interview.

The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington has been doing this since the 1980s. It’s good to see Duke catching up, somewhat. This has also taken place at The New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rutgers, and CUNY at Staten Island in the last couple decades or so.