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Your Turn Business School Is Not the "Real World" "learning by doing" works. Practical experience has been the primary source of management education for centuries, and it will forever be an important complement to academic study. But higher education was not built to emulate the real world. The best business schools in the worldcannot match a true on- the-job experience. Anything we can do lacks the urgency, context, finan- cial peril, and financial rewards of actual employment. Bartlett Giamatti, in the book A Many industry executives, corporate recruiters, consulting firms, andeven business academics have asserted that business schools are "behind the curve" when it comes to man- agement training andpractice. They see business schools as ineffective, at best—and, at worst, irrelevant. In response, business schools have attempted to provide more "real-world" business training to students, to prove their rele- vance to business. But in attempting to recreate real- worldbusiness, business schools are undermining their true core competency. Their purpose is not to offer real-worldbusiness experience; their purpose is to educate. There's no question that by Yash Gupta product line is not a unit or an object but rather a value-laden and lifelong process; where the goal of the enterprise is not growth or mar- ket share but intellectual excellence; not profit or proprietary rights, but the free good of knowledge; not efficiency of operation but equity of treatment; not increased productivity in economic terms, but increased intensity of thinking about who we are andhow we live andabout the worldaroundus." al model far removed in structure, style, motivation, andculture from a for-profit corporation, we should emphasize how business schools dif- fer from the real world. We should focus on our core competencies—on doing what higher education can do much better than industry. First, we offer students and facul- ty the freedom to experiment via case studies, simulations, and other projects. Case-study experimentation exposes students to alternative solu- tions and to a level of feedback and post mortem analysis rarely available in real business situa- tions. Students can see how oth- ers solvedthe same situation, compare their performances, and learn from that knowledge without the impingement of real-worldpressures. In addition, new technologies Free and Ordered Space, eloquently formulated the difference between "for-profit" businesses andinstitu- tions of higher education. "A college or university," he writes, "is an insti- tution where financial incentives to excellence are absent; where the 52 BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2004 get that the atmosphere of higher education is, by design, inherently different from corporate environ- ments. Its purpose is to offer an alternative to experience. It's an alternative that has long been viewed as more effective andefficient than "learning by doing." Rather than attempting to deliver quasi-real worldexperiences or trying to put a "corporate shell" over an institution- As academics, we sometimes for- are still reluctant to integrate simula- tions into their classrooms. In the 1988 article accompanying BusinessWeek's very first ranking of MBA programs, Andy Grove, for- mer president of Intel, described how a business school dean rebuffed his suggestion of teaching leadership dents learn not only how to manage "what is," but how to manage "what might be." Even so, many business schools give us the ability to bring cases into the classroom in ways that greatly enhance the power of these proven learning tools. Via computer simulations, we can create scenarios that test a stu- dent's mental agility and devel- op leadership and crisis manage- ment skills far beyondthe real- world challenges our students are likely to face in the work- place. By facing the challenges of these "hyper-realities," stu-