The Summer 2005 Wilson Quarterly discusses the article “How Business Schools Lost Their Way” by Warren G. Bennis and James O’Toole, in Harvard Business Review (May 2005):
No medical school would employ a professor of surgery who’d never seen a patient, yet today’s business schools are packed with professors who have little or no managerial experience. That suits the schools fine, but their students and society are being shortchanged, argue Bennis, a professor of business administration at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, and O’Toole, a research professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations. Narrowly focused on academic research that purports to be scientific, B-school professors are failing to teach their students to grapple with the complex, unquantifiable issues that business executives face in making decisions.
The result, say employers, students, and even some deans of prestigious business schools, is that the future leaders these schools turn out year after year are ill prepared for the real world of business. Instead of looking on business as a profession, most of the nation’s two dozen leading business schools have come to regard it as an academic discipline, like physics or chemistry.
It must be acknowledged that at least some aspects of a business education don’t necessarily require that a teacher have spent time in a real business in order to teach effectively. Some aspects of statistics and accounting, for example, should be teachable by a person who has spent all their time in academia and none trying to run a business.
Many other aspects of a business education, though, would benefit from being taught by people who have real-world experience. Business ethics come to mind immediately, especially given how many problems there have been in the real world of business ethics. This might be partially attributable to the fact that people are being taught theory (if they are being taught at all) and not real-world examples.
Business isn’t a science and can’t be taught like an abstract theory. Business is, if anything, more like an art and people will learn more from others who have experience with both success and failure. It will take time for schools to change, though, but it would be better for them to start sooner rather than later.
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