B-School Reform: Better Late Than Never

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In the Wake of Enron

For advancing that heresy we were condemned as "anti-science." Around that time, however, a few enlightened administrators, faculty members, alumni, and students (for example, at Yale and at such "second-tier" institutions as Duquesne's Donahue and Denver's Daniels B-schools, and in Canada, York's Schulich B-school) started connecting the dots among an alarming set of events and trends in the operating business environment. Taking note of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the deindustrialization of North America, public calls for "sustainability," (and later, the nationalization of General Motors and the Wall Street meltdown), they decided the time had come to address social, environmental, and ethical issues in their respective MBA curriculums. Subsequently, those pioneering efforts have had a snowball effect: Last fall, representatives from several dozen B-schools around the world gathered in New York as guests of the Aspen Institute's Center for Business Education to share what they were learning from their new initiatives to address the cross-disciplinary concerns previously absent from their curriculums.

In a parallel effort, Rakesh Khurana at Harvard Business School (Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile) is leading a movement to make B-schools into professional schools, starting with the Oath Project, in which MBA candidates across the country are voluntarily swearing to a professional code of conduct, à la the oaths taken by lawyers and doctors. And within the past year, such influential scholars as Harvard's Jay Lorsch, Michael Beer, and Michael Tushman have argued that practical publications oriented toward mangers (for example, Harvard Business Review articles) should be counted as heavily for promotion and tenure as purely scientific and theoretical research. Of course, the main accrediting body of business schools is still lagging years behind this reform movement (ditto the discipline-based associations to which professors often show greater loyalty than to the universities that pay their salaries).

But all told, it seems to us that there is now progress toward reform. Recently we ran into a professor who had been one of the most vocal critics of our "controversial" article, a former president of the professional association to which most management professors belong, who told us: "For years, I was outraged by your HBR piece. Then, a month or so ago, I read it. Actually, it's not all that unreasonable." Well, that's what progress amounts to in academia.

James O'Toole is the Daniels Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business. Warren Bennis is the Distinguished Professor of Management at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. His 30th book, Still Surprised: A Memoir of a Life in Leadership, will be published this year.

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