Business Schools Beware: Gen Y is at the Door

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Outside the business school community proper, other educational providers have begun to work with Gen Y through the media that fill not just people's working lives but also their leisure time. The leadership institute Mannaz has recently launched a mini-program with the provocative title "Are you an Orc?" The course examines the leadership tools and techniques used in the world's most successful online game, World of Warcraft, which currently has more than 11 million players, and applies them to the real-world workplace.

Collaboration and Consensus

The presumption is that managing and directing international teams means the traditional "face-to-face" model of leadership is no longer possible and, for younger employees in particular, not even relevant. In this context, leaders need to be collaborative, consensual, and inclusive. Ironically, that's exactly what a role-playing game like World of Warcraft teaches. It also seems to teach interesting ways of disposing of competitors using an eclectic mix of medieval weaponry, but nothing is ever perfect.

Perhaps the most forward-thinking ideas in this area have come out of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center, a sister institute of Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business (Tepper Full-Time MBA Profile). The Center's director, Ken Koedinger, argues that to truly engage and excite the next generation of MBAs, technology should not just amend the current business school model, it should shake it up. He points out that we are only a step away from throwing out the idea of a business school as a set of buildings providing formal education and bringing in the concept of school as a knowledge "hub," perhaps a largely or even entirely virtual one. Traditional history-based case studies, the bedrock of so many MBA programs, would disappear, replaced by real-time, real-life case studies in which organizations work with students and academics to solve problems and meet challenges on a day-to-day basis.

It's an exciting prospect and, theoretically, one that could eradicate much of the herd mentality and stifled thinking that have led us into so many economic crises, from the South Sea Bubble to subprime mortgages. The question is: Who is going to have the vision and the courage to implement it?

Matt Symonds is co-founder and former director of the QS World MBA Tour and is co-author of ABC of Getting the MBA Admissions Edge.

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