The Future Challenges of Business: Rethinking Management Education

The traditional paradigm of business schools is not well suited to handle the ambiguity and high rate of change facing many industries today. The typical MBA program is focused on analytic and cognitive skills, stylized treatment of real business problems, and self-centered careerism with a limited recognition that management is as much art as science. These new challenges that managers now face call for a shift in emphasis toward topics not well covered in academia, from the role of intuition to how to navigate uncertainty (in contrast to risk) or balance focal and peripheral vision. This article examines the teaching, research, and governance issues these new learning imperatives pose for business schools and offers some constructive suggestions for fixing them, based in part on the experience of Wharton's Mack Center for Technological Innovation.