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B usiness schools can be notorious institutions of habit. It's a tendency that may have served them well for the last 120 years, but it won't get them through the next ten, according to Gary Hamel, author and visiting professor of strategic and international management at London Business School. He explored the implications of this idea at a recent roundtable discussion at Monterey Institute's Fisher Graduate School of International Business in Monterey, California. The event, "The World's Reigning Strategy Gurus," brought together leading experts on business strategy, including Hamel; Stefanie Lenway of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis; Yves Doz of INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France; Michael Enright of the University of Hong Kong; William F. Sharpe of the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California; Michael Czinkota of Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business in Washington, D.C.; and Ernest J. Scalberg of the Monterey Institute's Fisher Graduate School. Like all modern organizations, they said, business schools will survive or perish on their ability to evolve with and within a rapid- ly segmenting marketplace. To encourage the evolution, the gurus outlined in their discussion an ambitious b- school "to-do list" for the upcoming decade. Their proposed objectives strike at the core of traditional business education, but business schools may ignore them at their own peril. In a market that continues to move ahead by leaps and bounds, said these strategists, cleaving too much to tradition is akin to merely running in place. separate all that is the "physics" of their organizations—the processes that must be that way because they aid develop- ment—from "the dead hands of convention and history" that only limit development. "This perspective is the start- ing point for innovation or for strategy," he said. "You must systematically deconstruct the orthodoxies, conventions, and dogmas people hold." Hamel's analysis of management education as "physics "what was and is must always be" mentality. To move for- ward, business schools must first cast off this mindset, said Hamel. "Educational institutions as a class are extremely conservative, and educators as a class are some of the most innovation-resistant people on the planet," he said. "In that sense, I don't think that the academic environment is very conducive to radical innovation." All innovation starts, Hamel continued, when individuals DEFY convention. Academia is famous—or perhaps infamous—for cherishing a versus convention" represents business schools' most central struggle, these strategists agreed. It's the fundamental pull- and-tug between traditional in-person learning and the technological promise of new forms of distance learning; the clash between faculty who teach and faculty who research; the conflict between local obligations and global outreach. To what degree should business schools choose the former over the latter? How business schools resolve these conflicts will have major implications on just how much they can achieve, said Michael Czinkota, professor of management at Georgetown University. "From its 'profane' beginnings in Padua and Bologna, university education is now more than 1,000 years old. Amazingly, in many instances, 'industry participants' from 975 A.D. could function well in today's workplace," Czinkota joked. "We still lecture, speak ex cathedra, and have students huddle around the teacher." As a result, he argued, many traditional management education institu- tions have given insufficient attention to experiential knowl- edge exchange, to the development of global rather than local matrices of knowledge, or to the use of technology to communicate that knowledge. As business schools delve into these three areas, they must ask two other important questions. First, as the price BizEd JULY/AUGUST 2004 37