Joel M. Podolny

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 <h4 class="ideainbrief-title">The Idea in Brief</h4>
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   <li>Many people believe that management education has contributed to the systemic failure of leadership that led to the current financial crisis.</li>
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   <li>That may be so because, one, a focus on values-based leadership and ethics has not been central to management education. And, two, even when B schools teach leadership, they foster the belief that CEOs should focus on the big picture—not the practical details.</li>
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   <li>Business schools can regain society’s trust by emphasizing values as much as they do analytics and by encouraging students to adopt a holistic approach to business problems. As professional schools, they must stop competing for students only by advertising rankings—a practice that reinforces the idea that their only goal is to teach students how to make a lot of money.</li>
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   <li>The time has also come for business schools to develop codes of conduct for MBAs and to withdraw the degrees of those who break the manager’s code.</li>
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</article-ideainbrief><p>“I know you’re angry. I’m angry!” declared <a href="http://www.milkmovie.co.uk/" target="_new">Harvey Milk,</a> the American politician and gay rights activist, during a 1977 protest against the repeal of an antidiscrimination law. Today, we find ourselves in an economic quagmire where people around the world feel that same kind of intense rage—this time, against big business. Society has lost confidence in many economic institutions—investment banks, credit-rating agencies, and central banks, for instance—and prominent among them is one to which I devoted most of my professional life: business schools.</p>

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<p><span class="reprint">Reprint: R0906G</span></p>
<p>People in America have come to believe that business schools are harmful to society, fostering in their graduates behavior that is self-interested, unethical, and sometimes even illegal. Many are convinced that managers are simply incapable of self-regulation and have called for laws to govern executive compensation and corporate financial reporting. Sure, legislation is cumbersome, but the consequences of self-governance are apparently even worse. How did business schools become part of the problem rather than the solution?</p>
<p>It&#8217;s their own fault, maintains Apple University dean Podolny, who is in a good position to know (he has been a professor at Harvard and Stanford business schools and a dean of Yale&#8217;s School of Management). Fifty years of efforts to increase rigor have left even the best business schools with a bias against teaching qualitative disciplines like ethics and leadership. What&#8217;s more, the schools have allowed rankings organizations to drive their admissions policies and curricula, skewing them toward an overweening emphasis on making money.</p>
<p>Podolny suggests a multipronged approach to tackling the problem: curriculum changes that emphasize the integration of several disciplines and link analytics with ethics; team teaching that ropes in professors from different fields to give students a holistic approach to business issues; a broader definition of scholarship that can embrace the research practices of less-quantitative academic fields; an end to using rankings to market the effectiveness of schools&#8217; MBA programs; and a willingness to rescind the degrees of individuals who act unethically in the workplace.</p>
<p>If that sounds like a tall order, it is. Business schools will never become part of the solution, Podolny insists, until they reinvent themselves.</p>

The Buck Stops (and Starts) at Business School

Reprint: R0906G People in America have come to believe that business schools are harmful to society, fostering in their graduates behavior that is self-interested, unethical, and sometimes even illegal. Many are convinced that managers are simply incapable of self-regulation and have called for laws to govern executive compensation and corporate financial reporting. Sure, legislation is cumbersome, but the consequences of self-governance are apparently even worse. How did business schools become part of the problem rather than the solution? It’s their own fault, maintains Apple University dean Podolny, who is in a good position to know (he has been a professor at Harvard and Stanford business schools and a dean of Yale’s School of Management). Fifty years of efforts to increase rigor have left even the best business schools with a bias against teaching qualitative disciplines like ethics and leadership. What’s more, the schools have allowed rankings organizations to drive their admissions policies and curricula, skewing them toward an overweening emphasis on making money. Podolny suggests a multipronged approach to tackling the problem: curriculum changes that emphasize the integration of several disciplines and link analytics with ethics; team teaching that ropes in professors from different fields to give students a holistic approach to business issues; a broader definition of scholarship that can embrace the research practices of less-quantitative academic fields; an end to using rankings to market the effectiveness of schools’ MBA programs; and a willingness to rescind the degrees of individuals who act unethically in the workplace. If that sounds like a tall order, it is. Business schools will never become part of the solution, Podolny insists, until they reinvent themselves.

The Buck Stops (and Starts) at Business School

Summary.

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