Abstract:

Recently, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review and books about the Wharton
School and Stanford Business School have pointed out that business schools have lost
their way. The professors “know too little about how real businesses work and spend
too much time cranking out highly technical papers of the kind that the academic system
mistakenly rewards,” was how The Wall Street Journal1 described the situation. “They
are locked into a dysfunctional competition for media rankings (“Top 10 Business
Schools,” for ex.), that diverts resources from long-term knowledge creation.” The HBR
Working Knowledge newsletter2 points out that “the professional model of education, as
in medical and law schools, combines the best of practice and the best of theory.
Unfortunately, the scientific [theoretical] model prevails in business schools today. “