Chapter One Excerpt for Business School and the Noble Purpose of the Market
ONE
Business Schools Are Broken
It’s Time to Fix Them
“The time has come . . . to rejuvenate intellectually and morally the training of our future business leaders.”
—RAKESH KHURANA, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Today’s business schools were designed for a world that no longer exists, one that elevated the primacy of shareholder profits above the interests of employees, the environment or broader society; viewed government more as an intrusion on the free market than an arbiter of its proper functioning; and promoted unlimited economic growth despite the obvious physical, environmental, and economic limitations on such a goal. Given this, (largely Western) business schools are not preparing future leaders with the skills, knowledge, and wisdom they will need to deal with planetary challenges such as climate change and social challenges at home such as widening income inequality. It is time to rejuvenate the business school curriculum to turn the power of business and the market towards a role that is more consistent with its place within society.
The market, comprising business, government, civil society, and others, is the most powerful set of organizing institutions on Earth, and business is the most powerful entity within it. In fact, the past 150 years of capitalism have been tremendously successful in addressing the problems of society. It can be credited with raising the standard of living for billions of people by increasing the world economy by a factor of 14, tripling the global per capita income, extending average life expectancy by almost two-thirds, and decreasing the number of people living in extreme poverty from 56 percent in 1920 to 10 percent today.1 This advance in prosperity is due in large part to advances in medicine, shelter, food production, and other amenities brought about by the market.
Businesses will continue to play a role in addressing humanity’s challenges—but it’s not clear whether it will be a positive one. To be sure, businesses hold enormous powers of ideation, production, and distribution to provide solutions to society’s problems at the scale we need them. They also hold the potential to multiply the effects of the darkest of human impulses and result in exploitation, materialism, and greed.2 To tip the scale in the right direction, there is an urgent need to nurture a new breed of business leaders who view business not only as a means to profitability but also as a vehicle to serve society. As Hubert Joly, former CEO of Best Buy, writes in his book The Heart of Business, it is time to reconnect with the noble purpose of business and bring about the “next era of capitalism.”3 Crucially, leaders that take this path should be acutely aware of the current shortcomings and ethical dilemmas inherent in today’s capitalism. And they should see it as their duty to guide this system towards a more equitable model that better responds to the complexities and challenges of the twenty-first century. As I will argue later, business schools are currently not producing enough of these leaders.
The Market’s Failures in Our Natural and Social Environments
Today’s version of capitalism is encountering critical issues that it isn’t equipped to tackle. Humanity stands at a pivotal juncture, facing numerous profound challenges requiring immediate action. Key concerns include the perils (and opportunities) of advanced artificial intelligence, the continued use of forced labor, gender and racial inequality, persistent global poverty, conflict and hunger, the lingering threat of nuclear weapons, and increasing worries about future global pandemics, to name just a few. However, this book narrows its focus to climate change and wealth inequality. That is because these challenges feel particularly grave, and because there is no greater indictment of our current economic system than the looming specter of systemic failures in both our natural and social environments.
The Market’s Failure in Our Natural Environment
At this point, the arithmetic of climate change is both well-known and terrifying. Scientists have established 350 ppm as the safe limit for atmospheric CO2 to preserve our stable environment. However, human activities since the Industrial Revolution have raised this level to 421 ppm in 2022, leading to a 1°C (1.8°F) rise in global temperatures.4 This temperature rise is already causing more frequent and intense natural disasters such as wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes, along with sea-level rise, disease spread, species extinction, and more.
Some scientists warn that if we don’t reverse current rises in CO2 levels by 2030, damage to the global climate will be irreversible.5 If we reach a rise of 3°C (5.4°F), risks of crossing irreversible “tipping points” increase dramatically.6 On our current trajectory, temperature rise could exceed 4°C (7.2°F) by the of the century.7 If we allow the trends to go that far, we will not be able to simply adapt or innovate our way out of the problem. For example, human life cannot survive at so-called “wet bulb” temperatures above 35°C (95°F) which, taking into account both temperature and humidity, corresponds to a temperature of 35°C (95°F) at 100 percent humidity, 46°C (115°F) at 50 percent humidity, or 50°C (122°F) at 35 percent humidity. Beyond these thresholds the human body can no longer cool itself by evaporating sweat to maintain a stable body core temperature. These thresholds have already been crossed in some regions around the world. In 2017, India recorded its highest temperature of 51°C (124°F), and in 2023, China recorded its highest temperature of 52.2°C (126°F). These temperatures were experienced in populated regions that, according to experts, tested “the limits of human survivability.”8
Some estimates of the potential global economic damage from climate change reach a present-discounted value of $22.5 trillion by 2100 in lost labor productivity, declining crop yields, food shortages, early deaths, property damage, breakdown of infrastructure networks, water shortages, air pollution, flooding, fires, and more.9 The Bank for International Settlements, an umbrella organization for the world’s central banks, warned in 2020 that climate change could be one of the largest economic dislocations in history.10 Beyond the direct economic costs to the economy, climate change will displace millions of people around the world, stressing the supply of humanitarian aid and causing massive climate migrations that will have an impact on national borders. In 2023, UNICEF reported that at least forty-three million children alone were displaced by extreme weather events, most notably floods and storms, over the prior six years.11 Unfettered capitalism is causing these problems to happen; unfettered capitalism can’t fix them.
The Market’s Failure in Our Social Environment
Our society is becoming dangerously unequal as disparities in economic wealth and opportunity grow to levels not seen in the United States since the Gilded Age in the 1870s–1890s. Figure 1.1 shows that the share of national income earned by the top 1 percent doubled between 1980 and 2016 while the share for the bottom 50 percent was cut nearly in half. That has led to a vast concentration of wealth over time. By 2014 in the United States, “the top 1% of households possessed 38.6% of the nation’s wealth, compared with − 0.1% (that’s right) for the bottom 50%.”12 By 2017, the country’s three richest individuals—Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos—collectively held more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the domestic population, a total of 160 million people, and roughly one fifth of Americans had “zero or negative net worth.”13 According to the Rand Corporation, between 1975 and 2020, $50 trillion was transferred from the bottom 90 percent of US wage earners to the top 1 percent.14 By 2023, the twenty-six richest billionaires had more money than the US Treasury,15 and 76 percent of the total wealth in the United States was owned by the top 10 percent of earners while the lowest 50 percent of earners only owned 1 percent.16 A result of this inequality has been a hollowing out of the middle class (see Figure 1.2), whose share of aggregate income fell from 62 percent in 1970 to 43 percent in 2018, compared to an increase for upper-income households from 29 percent to 48 percent and a decrease for lower-income households from 10 percent to 9 percent. Overall, the share of American adults who live in middle-income households decreased steadily from 61 percent in 1971 to 51 percent in 2019.17
With statistics like that, it should be no surprise that the United States’s Gini coefficient (a measure of an economy’s equality wherein a score of 0 correlates with perfect equality and everyone has an equal share in everything and a score of 1 correlates with complete inequality and one person owns everything) rose from 0.35 in 1980 to 0.49 in 2021, which ranks it as more unequal than many countries, including India, Kenya, and Russia.
And this has been happening around the world (see Figure 1.3) as, according to one astute economic observer, “most economies are failing to provide the conditions in which their citizens can thrive, often by a large margin.”18 By 2019, the twenty-six richest billionaires mentioned above owned as many assets as the 4.6 billion people who make up the poorest 60 percent of the planet’s population.19 And that wealth kept growing. Between 2020 and 2023, the wealth of the world’s five richest men more than doubled, growing three times faster than the rate of inflation, while the world’s poorest 60 percent—almost 5 billion people—had actually lost money.20 According to Oxfam, the richest 1 percent acquired nearly two-thirds of all new wealth (worth $42 trillion) created between 2020 and 2023, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population.21

FIGURE 1.1
Income Share of the Top 1% and Bottom 50% in the US, 1980–2016
Source: F. Alvaredo, L. Chancel, T. Piketty, E. Saez, and G. Zucman, World Inequality Report, 2018, https://wir2018.wid.world/ (accessed December 10, 2023). CC BY 4.0.

FIGURE 1.2
The Decline of the Middle Class in the US, 1970–2018
Note: Households are assigned to income tiers based on their size-adjusted income. Incomes are scaled to reflect a three-person household.
Source: Pew Research Center analysis of the Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplements (IPUMS). J. Horowitz, R. Igielnik, and R. Kochhar, “Most Americans say there is too much economic inequality in the U.S., but fewer than half call it a top priority,” January 9, 2020.
The implications of such inequality are multiple and dangerous. One is that the wealthy become socially disconnected from the broader realities faced by the struggling majority. This detachment can lead them to exert their disproportionate influence on politics in ways that do not address or improve the living and working conditions for most people, exacerbating societal disparities. Another danger is that large portions of the population become cynically disconnected from a political and economic system that seems unresponsive to their needs.22 As a result, they may have no compunctions about breaking those systems, whether in the voting booth through the support of populist demagogues or in the street through increased conflict and “revolution of one sort or another.”23

FIGURE 1.3
Income Share of the Wealthiest 10% Around the World, 1980–2016
Note: In 2016, 47% of national income was received by the top 10% in US-Canada, compared to 34% in 1980.
Source: F. Alvaredo, L. Chancel, T. Piketty, E. Saez, and G. Zucman, World Inequality Report, 2018, https://wir2018.wid.world/ (accessed December 10, 2023). CC BY 4.0.
Unfortunately, warns Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz, these dangers of inequality are interconnected, forming a destructive cycle: increasing economic inequality leads to more political inequality in a system heavily influenced by money, which in turn leads to deregulation and weaker rules, further deepening economic disparities, and raising the risk of social unrest.24 One need look no further than the tax code to see this cycle playing out. In 1960, the country’s richest families paid 56 percent of their income in taxes, helping to fund the creation of social safety nets like Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps; by 2018, while their share of the national income grew, their tax rate fell to only 23 percent.25 According to a report from Oxfam, US billionaires became 46 percent richer between 2020 and 2024, yet they paid an effective average federal income tax rate of 8.2 percent compared to the average American income tax rate of 13 percent.26 We can’t count on the market to fix this as it is presently structured.
The Market Can Be Corrected to Fix These Failures
The problems described in the previous section have been caused by today’s version of unfettered capitalism. Inequality and climate change are systemic failures that are the result of choices in how the market is presently structured by those in power who benefit.27 But collectively, we can amend today’s rules of capitalism so that it can be unleashed to tackle these and other mega challenges. It’s easy to forget that capitalism is not an immutable law of nature. It is a system of human rules and institutions, designed in the service of humans and able to evolve when those interests are no longer served. Its nature is neither static nor uniform, and it has shown flexibility in responding to various challenges. Historical examples such as the emergence and regulation of monopoly power, the successful tackling of ozone layer depletion, the reduction of water pollution, and the mitigation of acid rain demonstrate this adaptability. The pressing question now is how capitalism will be reformed to meet the challenges of climate change and inequality in this century, particularly by those who will hold positions of power.
The reform will need to be significant. Specifically, the present system of shareholder capitalism—what is alternatively referred to as market fundamentalism or the neoliberal doctrine—must be amended into a new form of capitalism, one in which the corporation seeks to provide value to society and not just to enrich the few. New guardrails in the market will be needed to cease the endless pursuit of economic growth, the view of nature as a limitless source for materials and sink for wastes, and the mindless consumption that drives it all.28
For that to happen, we need a new kind of business leader, one focused on mastering the domains of commerce while also recognizing that they have an interest and responsibility in maintaining the integrity, stability, and equity of the system in which they practice that craft. Rather than exploit a broken market or political system for personal gain, future business leaders must take ownership for fixing the market.29 As Stiglitz argues, their emphasis will need to move away from “wealth extraction . . . trying to steal a larger fraction of the economic pie” and towards “wealth creation . . . a recognition of the true sources of wealth of a country and . . . the ability to get wealthy by creating wealth and contributing to society.”30
This is where business education enters the picture—or doesn’t.
Business Education Is not Rising to the Challenge
In recent years, many business schools in the United States,31 Europe,32 and elsewhere have added climate change to their curriculum. But the guiding motivation behind this new focus is the business opportunity that climate change presents in the form of new products, services, and practices that address the climate challenge.33 Selling climate solutions is an important first step, but it will not be enough. It will only slow the velocity at which we are heading towards inevitable system collapse; it will not reverse course.34 Simply adding electives while the curriculum remains focused primarily on profits for the shareholder will fail to address the scope and scale of the challenge.
Indeed, business schools have largely focused on simplistic notions of “expanding the pie” or “win-win” solutions to address climate change—for example, teaching students how more efficient agricultural practices can also increase crop yields and thus profits. However, such solutions rely heavily on depleting groundwater and topsoil, employing excessive amounts of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, putting small-scale farmers out of business, making larger-scale farmers into serfs for multinational corporations, destroying rural economies, and often providing unhealthy foods that contribute to epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and cancer.35 They ignore the more difficult (and more interesting) “win-lose” scenarios that will be necessary in a future for which deeper systemic solutions are required.36
How, for example, can we bring about an orderly and just transition to a carbon- and fossil-fuel-free economy?37 It is not sufficient to hope that new energy sources and new forms of carbon capture technology will emerge to make the transition frictionless. The most likely scenario is a transition that will be painful for businesses and consumers. For instance, switching to renewables will require up-front investments. While the costs will likely be borne by utilities, they will be passed on to consumers. If the average consumer wants to take matters into their own hands, installing a new HVAC system like heat pumps will require an up-front refit of their home. Buying an electric car will require not only the up-front cost of the vehicle, but the installation of a charging station or the availability of one nearby.38 Politicians are hesitant to call out these costs; business schools are missing an opportunity to force their students to tackle these challenging truths head on.
The reason for this failure is that business education has ossified into outdated ideas and models about the world, society, the market, business, and the people within them. The MBA in particular has become a “product” that has been packaged for students in its present and unvaried form for decades. It is fixated on fifty-year-old notions of shareholder primacy39 and a variant of the “greed is good” mentality.40 Business education teaches students ways to make “the business case” and gain market advantage when addressing climate change, while giving very limited attention to the pragmatic reality that we are talking about an existential threat to life on Earth or the moral reality that it is the people of the rich countries that are primarily responsible for climate change and the people of the poor countries who will feel its effects first and hardest.41 Making only a business case around climate change is not just absurd, it’s sociopathic (as Figure 1.4 humorously points out).
Indeed, corporate attorney James Gamble warns that the business case emphasis compels business leaders “to act like sociopaths,” running their companies as “textbook case[s] of antisocial personality disorder” in which the company “is obligated to care only about itself and to define what is good as what makes it more money.”42 He may be on to something. In an era of record fossil-fuel extraction and record climate change impacts, what else can explain oil industry executives using the resources of their companies to spread misinformation about climate change to confuse the public and stall regulatory action to boost share price,43 or a fossil-fuel industry trade group launching an eight-figure media campaign to increase the use of oil and, in the words of an industry leader, “dismantle policy threats” to the sector?44 What can explain a multinational pharmaceutical company increasing profits by aggressively promoting a product that has killed over 450,000 people and addicted countless more?45 What can explain a leading management consulting firm earning massive profits by not only helping that pharmaceutical company in its misinformation campaign46 but also helping authoritarian regimes repress people in their own countries?47 Why might a social media company adopt a slogan of “company over country” and pursue massive profits by promoting misinformation and disinformation?48 And what can explain a former hedge fund manager acquiring the rights to a sixty-two-year-old drug and then raising the price from $13 to $750 per tablet because people need it to treat a life-threatening parasitic infection and have no choice but to pay or risk death?49 The answer lies in a thirst for profits and money over any kind of responsibility to society.

FIGURE 1.4.
Source: Cartoon by Jonesy. Originally published in Prospect magazine (September 2021). https://www.jonesycartoons.com/.
Business journalist and writer Duff McDonald excoriates business schools for fostering such thinking, writing that the business curriculum is devoid of normative viewpoints, “has always cared less about moral leadership than career advancement and financial performance,” and as a result, creates “a generation of corporate monsters” who lack “a functioning moral compass.”50 This is harsh, but I think even the most committed B-school faculty would wince in a moment of self-recognition at McDonald’s description. The reality is that business schools are stuck, unable to change, even though many within them know there is a problem. What stands in the way?
How Did Business Schools Lose Their Way?
The first collegiate business school in the United States was the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1881. The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College was founded as the first graduate school of management in 1900, and the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration offered the first MBA in 1908. Harvard professor Rakesh Khurana writes that these early business schools were “originally founded to train a professional class of managers in the mold of doctors and lawyers to seek the higher aims of commerce in service to society.” In 1927, for example, the second dean of the Harvard Business School, Wallace B. Donham, stated in an address to the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business that “I have reached the conclusion that the greatest need of a civilization such as ours, if it is to progress in an orderly evolution, is for socially minded business men. I am convinced that this social need is the sole basis which justifies our ancient university . . . in entering upon business training.”51 In the 1940s, the third dean of the Harvard Business School, Donald David, repeated that ambition, declaring that there are “three important qualities of a business leader. The first of these is competence in the management of his business activity. The second is the development and application of social skill so as to make his business enterprise a ‘good society.’ The third is the willingness to participate constructively in the broader affairs of the community and nation.”52
But, Khurana writes, business schools have “effectively retreated” from these higher goals, “leaving a gaping moral hole at the center of business education and perhaps in management itself.”53 Many point to the late 1950s and early 1960s as the beginning of that retreat, when seminal reports funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation54 appraised the state of business education in the United States and described it “as a collection of trade schools lacking a strong scientific background.”55 The influential political scientist Herbert Simon called business education a “wasteland of vocationalism.”56 These kinds of assessments galvanized a transformation of the American business school from a practice orientation to the more “academically and discipline-based orientation” we have today.57
What Have Business Schools Become?
While the transformation of business schools may have been an important corrective for its time, the pendulum has swung too far, with the teaching mission being overtaken by the research agenda and, more important, research focused primarily on questions of theoretical, not empirical, relevance. Management professors Warren Bennis and James O’Toole wrote twenty years ago that business schools have adopted an “inappropriate—and ultimately self-defeating—model of academic excellence. Instead of measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculties understand important drivers of business performance, they measure themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research.”58 Not much has changed since. And as this research has become disconnected from real-world issues for both business and society, the teaching mission has followed close behind. Business schools have become professional schools that have lost interest and connection to the profession they profess to serve. One can observe this in the faculty, many of whom have never worked in business or even engaged with business in any real sense. It is a strange irony that many business schools will not admit a student into their MBA program without four to five years of working experience, while many of those same schools will admit students into their PhD program without any business experience at all, and they will become teachers of those MBAs. Further to the point, much of the doctoral education for business professors lacks any real attention to the art and craft of teaching. As academic scholars, many risk retaining views of the business enterprise that are largely theoretical. That is because, at the end of the day, most business school professors see themselves as academic researchers first and teachers of business practice second.
There have been some attempts at change, such as alternative delivery formats for MBAs, compressed degree programs, specialized masters, and undergraduate business degrees. But according to a 2016 book by a group of academics, these changes have amounted largely to “tinkering at the margins.”59 Business schools, to a large extent, have become critical sources of billions of dollars in revenue,60 where the market demand is based more on perceived status than deep rigorous education and training.61 Even efforts at reform reinforce this reality, where the threat to future enrollment and therefore revenues is the chief motivation for change and the search for solutions maintains an insular view by looking only at the top business schools,62 ignoring plentiful business research that powerful incumbents are not usually the source of new ideas.
Stanford Business School professor Jeff Pfeffer argues that the primary value of business education is access to networks for salary enhancement and points out that the rigor of the degree ranks far below other disciplines while the party atmosphere exceeds them.63 He adds that there are questions about the effectiveness of this product when “neither possessing an MBA degree nor grades earned in courses correlate with career success.”64 Some have noted that classroom learning has become less important to MBA students than attending recruiting events, planning club activities, and finding a job. One dean noted, “The focus has shifted from learning to earning.”65 If we know there is a problem, why can’t we respond?
What Keeps Business Schools Stuck?
My focus in this book will be on ideas—specifically, how to change the structure, focus, and overall orientation of the business school curriculum and pedagogy. Before such an examination, it is important to understand the organizational reasons why business schools have all drifted towards homogeneity in recent decades, and why they have been so resistant to innovation. Three constraints are mostly to blame.
Academic Reward Systems. Today, the prevalent criteria for faculty advancement, including promotion and tenure, heavily emphasize publishing in prestigious academic journals. These publications often cater to specialized theoretical communities, prioritizing their interests over matters directly relevant to students, businesses, and the broader society.66 Historian Russell Jacoby writes that the goal of academic research “registers not the needs of truth but academic-empire building.”67 To build that empire, faculty use their research to talk to narrow academic audiences, using a language that even well-educated readers struggle to understand, publishing in journals that non-academics don’t read, and asking questions for which the public has little concern. How many businesspeople have heard of, much less read, the top academic journals in management, such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, The Journal of Marketing, Academy of Management Review, and Strategic Management Journal? I am willing to bet very few. How many have read a synthesis of the results of such research in easily accessible formats? Again, I am willing to bet very few. That is because the intended audience for this work is not businesspeople; it is other scholars. The goal is to garner citations, thereby enhancing the author’s academic reputation and contributing to the metrics used in the tenure and promotion process.68
Whether this work could create real-world change is a question rarely, if ever, asked.69 Taken to the extreme, some view any engagement with the general public as a distraction from the scholarly “real” work or as an anti-intellectual waste of time, what is commonly referred to as the “Carl Sagan effect” in reference to celebrity scientist Carl Sagan’s denial of admission to the National Academy of Sciences for being seen as a “popularizer” of science.70 American journalist and political commentator Nicholas Kristof argues that academia is in thrall to a “culture of exclusivity” that “glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience,” concluding that “to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.”71
In this reality, teaching is a distant second in the list of priorities. Many devalue teaching, seeing it as a burden and calling it a “teaching load.” As a result, the curriculum remains ossified in large part because the incentives to develop new and innovative courses are low, if not negative, as such time spent on developing new courses is time taken away from producing more research. Capturing the absurdity of students learning from instructors who place a low value on teaching, Sydney Finkelstein of the Tuck School of Business delivered a sharply worded rebuke at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business 2022 Deans Conference, asking “Are business schools a scam?”72 In a speech that critiqued a culture-and-reward system that produces narrowly focused studies that rarely challenge the status quo, he said, “If we’re not publishing work that managers care about, what are we doing? If we’re not publishing work that’s addressing the big issues in society, then who are we talking to?”73
Academic Rankings. Business school rankings, primarily from prominent publications such as US News & World Report, Bloomberg, Financial Times, and Fortune, often have the perverse effect of inhibiting innovation and reform, forcing a homogenization of programs as institutions vie for higher positions based on a common set of criteria.74 In this environment, business schools converge towards a monoculture, aligning their models and metrics with what is deemed as ideal by these influential rankings.
The consequence is an education system resistant to innovative reforms; put simply, if a business school dean were to pursue radical reforms that resulted in a drop in the rankings, they would find themselves out of a job. A notable example of the extreme influence and pressure of the rankings system was the case of Moshe Porat, former dean of Temple University’s Richard J. Fox School of Business and Management, who was sentenced to fourteen months in prison, three years of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine after being convicted of fraud for artificially inflating the school’s program rankings.75
While there are signs of change, with some institutions, like Columbia University, opting out of the general rankings, this movement is still in its infancy, particularly within the business school sector. Currently, opting out is predominantly an option for elite schools with established reputations and resources, leaving most institutions bound to the status quo dictated by these influential rankings.
Institutional Challenge. Finally, a profound transformation of business education is an institutional challenge, one that requires a coordinated shift in the entire ecosystem—school accreditation, corporate recruiting, faculty hiring, journal review, faculty reward criteria, school rankings, student admissions, curriculum design, and more. That means that it would be very hard, if not impossible, for one school to do all this alone. In academia, which operates as a competitive marketplace, faculty members often function as autonomous agents, adhering to universally recognized norms of research and teaching. If one school were to establish idiosyncratic measures for academic advancement or teaching pedagogy that were at variance with those at other schools, faculty members would be reluctant to conform. Junior faculty may be ill-advised to follow them unless guaranteed tenure. For if their tenure packet were to be denied, they would need to have a marketable publication record on the open job market. And if the pursuit of a different set of metrics diminished that record, they will have done serious damage to their career and future within academia. Senior faculty may be unwilling to follow if changes in research expectations diminish their stature in the field or if the considerable effort required to change the curriculum is not sure to result in adoption.
Despite all these forces for stasis, business schools must still try to change the curriculum. And if they don’t, students must still find ways to get the education they need in a flawed system.
Notes
1. M. Roser, “Extreme poverty: How far have we come, and how far do we still have to go?” Our World in Data, 2021, https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief (accessed October 8, 2023).
2. W. R. Scott and G. Davis, Organizations and Organizing: Rational, Natural and Open Systems Perspectives (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2000).
3. H. Joly, The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2021).
4. IPCC, in “Climate change 2014: Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability: Summary for policymakers,” 2014, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ar5_wgII_spm_en.pdf (accessed February 26, 2022).
5. J. Watts, “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN,” The Guardian, October 8, 2018.
6. IPCC, “Climate change 2014.”
7. The World Bank, “New report examines risks of 4 degree hotter world by end of century,” November 18, 2012, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2012/11/18/new-report-e… (accessed October 6, 2023).
8. R. Mogul, E. Mitra, M. Suri, and S. Saifi, “India and Pakistan heatwave is ‘testing the limits of human survivability,’ expert says,” CNN, May 2, 2022.
9. S. Fidler, “Environmental risks loom large among World Economic Forum members,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2020.
10. J. Ewing, “Climate change could cause the next financial meltdown,” New York Times, January 23, 2020.
11. UNICEF, “Children displaced in a changing climate,” 2023, (accessed October 6, 2023).
12. P. Dizikes, “The productive career of Robert Solow,” MIT News, January/February, 2020: 12.
13. N. Kirsch, “The 3 richest Americans hold more wealth than bottom 50% of the country, study finds,” Forbes, November 9, 2017.
14. N. Hanauer, “The top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90%—and that’s made the U.S. less secure,” Time, September 14, 2020.
15. J. Gans, “These billionaires have more money than the US Treasury right now,” The Hill, May 26, 2023.
16. C. McGreal, “Angus Deaton on inequality: ‘The war on poverty has become a war on the poor’,” The Guardian, October 7, 2023.
17. J. Horowitz, R. Igielnik, and R. Kochhar, “Trends in income and wealth inequality,” Pew Research Center, January 9, 2020.
18. H. Zaidy, “The American Dream is much easier to achieve in Canada,” CNN Business, January 20, 2020.
19. Oxfam, “World’s billionaires have more wealth than 4.6 billion people,” 2020, https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/worlds-billionaires-have-more-w… (accessed September 21, 2023).
20. R. Riddell, N. Ahmed, A. Maitland, M. Lawson, and A. Taneja, “Inequality Inc. How corporate power divides our world and the need for a new era of public action,” Oxfam International Briefing Paper, January 15, 2024.
21. A. Thériault, “Richest 1% bag nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together over the past two years,” Oxfam International, January 16, 2023.
22. R. Kleinfeld, Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2023).
23. P. Farrell, “Myth of perpetual growth is killing America,” Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2012.
24. J. Stiglitz, “Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron,” New York Times, April 19, 2019.
25. G. Zucman, “It’s time to tax the billionaires,” New York Times, May 3, 2024.
26. “Do the rich pay their fair share?” Oxfam, January 14, 2024.
27. G. White, “Stiglitz: Here’s how to fix inequality,” The Atlantic, November 2, 2015.
28. A. Hoffman, “Why management research needs a radical rethink,” Financial Times, July 5, 2023.
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