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or for reinventing management education itself? worlds, interests, and priorities of corporate executives and management educators. It appears that this gap is not clos- ing appreciably, even at a time when there has never been a more urgent need for alignment. Third, are the very skills that should matter most to corporate success might be loosely defined as "developing wisdom" are not at the core of many management education programs. It's true that the so-called "soft" skills are difficult to measure and interpret, which might be one reason they are taught rela- tively rarely in business school. Yet those are the skills that appear to be more and more critical to leadership and corpo- rate success, especially in today's chaotic global environment. The questions about "soft" skills may become even more bewildering with the upcoming launch of a certification exam for MBAs. The exam is expected to be a five-hour, 300-question test covering finance, accounting, marketing, and management, to be administered electronically. Intriguing questions are: Will such an exam truly assess an individual's ability to integrate the five critical mindsets of effective leadership mentioned previously? Will it be able to assess "the wisdom of leadership" in a meaningful manner? If not, then what will it really measure? Fourth, is it the content or context of a business school education that the skills that receive the least attention from management educators? As mentioned previously, many of the critical skills that will increasingly offer business schools their competitive advantage? What people learn in management schools is becoming more and more uniform. If the soon-to-be-introduced MBA certification exam becomes widely adopted, the con- tent of management programs is destined to become even more homogenized. Thus, it may well be that the real dif- ference between programs across schools and cultures is the context within which teaching and learning occurs. Does that mean that context has become the competitive advan- tage of any particular school? If so, this contradicts years of management school tradition of curriculum revision, and even adoption of certain kinds of technology, to enhance or supplement classroom learning. worried about the right issues: globalization, the growth of the media, the growth of capital markets, worldwide demo- graphic trends, the impact of technology, and the sociopo- litical and economic uncertainty that crosses all nations? A related question might be: Should management educators be leading or following corporate executives in terms of identifying important issues? This question has been debat- ed for years and deserves new attention now. There has always been a significant gap between the Are management educators, like corporate executives, may be as much about networking, screening, or recruiting services as they are about the actual education they offer. If management educators spent as many hours and resources worrying about the context of their educational experiences as they do about the content of those experiences, true dif- ferentiation of management education products and servic- es might be the result. Will this be the differentiator between mere survivors and those who thrive? If so, what contextual variables are the most important to consider? It has been said that graduate management programs Solutions to the Problems At least two more questions remain. The first is: How can management education be fixed? In their article, Pfeffer and Fong recommend that business schools be modeled more closely on other professional school counterparts, less on colleges of arts and sciences. This means that business schools should focus research on problems of enduring importance. They also should build curricula that are evaluated, in part, by how well they actually prepare students to be effective in practicing the profession. Pfeffer and Fong conclude that this requires a systematic assessment of all business school products as well as much more attention to the competitive environment. It seems clear that all management educators must radi- cally rethink not only the content of their educational offer- ings, but the context of those offerings as well. These tumultuous times may call for a major shift in thinking about the very core values and practices of our industry. Is it a time for merely refining management education—or for reinventing management education itself? That question leads to a final one: If educators had the oppor- tunity to create a totally new business school that would best address the ongoing and anticipated needs of executives worldwide, what would this "ideal" business school look like? There are a few exam- ples of totally new business schools that are currently emerg- ing. It will be interesting to see whether they become real models for the industry's future, or simply new business schools that follow old traditions and models in manage- ment education. Of course there are no easy answers. But at least we must ask the right questions. It surely is time for the debate to begin. ■ z John Seybolt is senior vice president for Institutional Advancement and Alliances and distinguished professor of management at Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management in Glendale, Arizona. BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2004 43