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B Bestusiness Education Ever The T Today's business schools are under fire, but what critics do not seem to realize is just how good 21st- century management education has become. by R. Glenn Hubbard oday's business schools are better than they have ever been. So when I became dean of the Columbia Business School, I was surprised to learn that many people were questioning the value of the university-based business school and even of business education itself. I had thought—naïvely—that it was fairly obvious. The fact that it is not obvious to everyone is made clear in an interview by The Financial Times with Anita Roddick, entrepreneur par excellence and founder of The Body Shop. In the article, Roddick is quoted as saying that she often gets asked to talk about entrepreneurship, but she is not convinced it is a subject that can be taught: "How do you teach obsession—because often it is obsession that drives an entrepre- neur's vision?" She goes on to say, "The problem with business schools is that they are controlled by, and obsessed with, the status quo. They encourage you deeper into the world as it is. They transform you into a better example of the corporate man." There is a ring of truth to her criticisms. The post-war MBA degree was designed to mint managers for large organizations. Business schools prepared mostly men to snap into well-defined positions with well-defined sets of expectations in Fortune 500 corporations. Since that time, our goal has been to balance theory and practice while we reduced the science of management to a set of identifiable principles. But as sweeping changes in the corporate world have ripped away the comfort and security of management jobs, so too have they demolished any sense of complacency that once might have existed in the business school. Business education has evolved dramatically to meet the needs of the rapidly changing business climate, and today's business schools are better than they have ever been. We are preparing students for the modern business world—by teaching them how to understand the global market, how to bring an entrepreneurial spirit to every enterprise, and even how to think. We should be celebrating our success, not fending off critics. Roddick's comments expose what might be the real shortcoming of business schools today: our failure to communicate how well our programs have adapted and advanced over the past 20 years, and particularly over the past five years. I believe management educators should drown out the critics by raising their voices to share all the ways in which management education has become so vital and energized in the past two decades. The New Face of Business Business today is widely decentralized, fiercely entrepreneurial, and relentlessly global. So is today's business education. It is decentralized: Today's business school trains graduates to work in a decentral- ized organization where responsibilities come with the need to solve a problem, not with the need to protect turf and title. Business leaders cannot just set an unchang- ing goal and then labor to achieve it. Rather, leaders will have to be agile seekers looking for many different ways to identify and capture opportunity. Great business schools focus these seekers of opportunity by teaching them to think strategically and 46 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007