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Economy D The Next eans lose sleep about many things, but one question keeps me awake at night: Are we preparing students for the right econo- my? I suspect that 90 percent of the graduates we now produce are being educated for either the past economy, which was driv- en primarily by manufacturing, or the present economy, which What are business schools doing to prepare students for the economy to come? Not nearly enough. by Joseph E. McCann is driven by services. At best, we are preparing only 10 percent of graduates for what we might call the Next Economy, which many believe will be driv- en by five central forces: in-depth knowledge and converging science, a resource-constrained environment, interdependence through globalization, cultural and demographic diversity, and survival only through continuous creativity and innovation. Thomas Friedman's best-selling book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, is a reminder that something big—really big—is under way. He writes of "world flatteners" such as the five themes above, which will dictate how the Next Economy evolves. How many of his "world flatteners" are factored into our programs? Not enough. I'm not sure we have the institutional courage to alter our prevailing model of business edu- cation to prepare graduates for what's coming next. Transformative change has never been the forte of U.S. business schools because they are driven by near-term needs. These needs are determined by corporate recruiters, donors, and our own institutional legacies, including impermeable functional silos protected by tenured faculty. Even so, we are getting better at critiquing our programs, as we've seen in articles by Henry Mintzberg in the Academy of Management Executive, by Warren Bennis and James O'Toole in the Harvard Business Review, and by Jeffrey Garten in CEO Magazine. Moreover, we do manage to serve our past- and present-economy customers reasonably well. But with Ford and GM debt now earning "junk" status from credit agencies and with service jobs now following manufacturing jobs off- shore, we should not be content when our graduates simply find jobs. We must make sure they have a future and remain relevant in the economy to come. The Next Economy is a science and knowledge economy. Today, as we straddle the line between the present economy and the Next Economy, entirely new industries are being built. These industries revolve around the convergence of technologies such as computing, communica- tions, and engineering, and the growing importance of life sciences such as 40 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2006