Business Schools Need to Overhaul Curricula to Reflect Today’s World

The American economy is battered externally by global competition, and its creditability is being undermined domestically by merger mania and insider trading scandals.

It is interesting to note that this has occurred during the stewardship of “professional managers” and the ascendancy of the MBA as an entree into the executive suite.

It would be simplistic and irresponsible to infer a direct cause and effect relationship here.

However, if one takes a critical look at the curricula of business schools, there is evidence that the content does not address crucial issues of the 1980s and the 1990s.

It has been said that generals always prepare for the last war. Business schools are practicing a similar policy. The last major revision of the various curricula of business schools occurred as a consequence of the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Foundation reports in the early 1960s.

These changes were made when the United States was preeminent in the world as an economic and political power.

Domestically, we were expanding our gross national product with relatively no inflation. The airlines, banks, savings and loans and many other industries were closely regulated.

We were on the gold standard, and the currencies of the world were mostly stable. In addition, the United States was the world’s largest creditor nation.

In 1987, the economy is globalized. The United States is the largest debtor nation. The international currency markets are in disarray, and we have been off the gold standard for 16 years.

The financial services industry and many others are deregulated. If our political power has not eroded, it is, at least, being questioned and challenged around the world. With the exception of isolated courses, you find precious little difference between the business school core curricula of 1987 and those of 10 or even 20 years ago. Furthermore, the slight revisions do not reflect the changes in the world.

Business schools today are set up more to prepare staff specialists than to prepare managers for strategic thinking.

Financial economists at business schools may have been instrumental in developing program trading, but they have failed to recognize that exchanging shares of stock creates no value for the domestic economy as it struggles against global competition.

Business schools also fail to acquaint students with the cultural differences in international markets. In fact, the only “cultures” business school instructors deal with are the value systems of different U.S. corporations.

In short, business school programs should be radically overhauled. The globalization of the economy is a permanent change.

The pre-Copernicus thinking of business executives and business school faculty is unrealistic and threatens our future.

Cultural anthropology and languages, for example, must become as much a part of the curriculum as have finance and marketing. The arrogant assumption that the United States has nothing to learn from other countries about business management must be discarded. Even more important, and more difficult to accomplish, is reducing the “sleaze factor” in our economy. The sleaze factor includes not only insider trading, but also “greenmail,” entrenched management and the continued Wall Street game of money chasing money.

I do not believe that courses in ethics are useful, because morality is not something you can teach or legislate. But increased awareness of these problems is possible under the right curriculum.

Business is the web that holds our global society together. Business schools must recognize that management is not a “job” of society, but a “mission” to society. Profits are an effect rather than a cause of doing business.

Business schools must accept that in today’s world of global competition, they are preparing 21st-Century humanists.

These individuals will need to increase their knowledge bank perpetually and with ever-increasing rapidity, as opposed to the 19th-Century humanist, who was primarily an expert in some area of finite knowledge.

In the decades ahead, “unlearning” will be more important than learning. Business schools are not the only institutions that should be preparing students for the challenging and turbulent decades ahead.

However, if business schools are to make a contribution to society, the curriculum can no longer be a series of courses that give graduates a collection of analytical tools to produce sterile analyses for leveraged buyouts and mergers.