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far, very little of real importance has come out of academia. people like Alfred Sloan or Jack Welch. papers are usually published. Your first question is what percent- age of its students passes the bar exam the first time. In other words, how good is the teaching? You want enough people in your faculty to be intellectually active and to advance knowledge; but you also want them to advance the profession, a goal to which we sometimes pay little attention. I think basing tenure decisions on peer-reviewed publications is nonsense. It has nothing to do with the business school. Business education is not about research. Sure, we want and need research; but consider the modern medical school, which began in the late 18th century. The emphasis in medical school is not on research and publication but on the ability to treat patients and make a difference in their lives. For its first 100 years, the medical school had no research. Its focus was on the practice of medicine instead. Until 1880, the only innovations in medicine came out of the practice of medicine. The same is largely true in management. So far, very little of real importance has come out of academia. It has originated from either practitioners or people like myself who teach but consider themselves primarily to be practitioners. My emphasis has been on my consulting work, because that is where I learn. Only in the last few years, with Philip Kotler at Northwestern and Michael Porter at Harvard, have new things of importance come out of the business schools. Otherwise, in the 50 years since World War II most of the so-called research of the business schools has added nothing to the effective practice of manage- ment. All of the innovation has come from people like Alfred Sloan or Jack Welch. Is this focus on research the greatest weakness of today's management education? It is a part of the larger problem, which is that there is not enough practical experience on the part of the faculty. As the number of management schools mushroomed in the last 50 years, the model on which they formed themselves was that of the college of arts and sciences. The business schools saw them- selves as being looked down upon by arts and sciences and, therefore, tried to become academically respectable. But arts and sciences at the research university are the wrong bring sick patients into the classroom, business education does not allow you to bring an organization into the class- room. You can, however, bring experi- ence in through your faculty. Business educators should be out as practition- ers where the problems and results are. I'm thinking of one of my most effec- tive colleagues, a wonderful teacher. His own field of expertise is quite narrow. But he works with a number of organizations, and he keeps on growing and keeps on learning. You have to work with an organization to be an effective educator. Doing so stimu- lates you and forces you to learn. Fifty-five years ago, I turned down an invitation to join the Unlike medicine, where you can Harvard faculty. There were many reasons for my decision, but a significant one was that the dean at the time had limited the con- sulting work of faculty members to one day a week. And I thought that was the worst thing to do. Yes, he had a problem, in that his faculty members spent too much time outside the school and neglected to teach. But he solved it the wrong way. Should business schools seek accreditation? Accreditation by itself is meaningless, and yet it is valuable. Accreditation does weed out the people who are trying to make a fast buck by selling degrees. It gives a potential student, and, even more important, his advisor in his company or school, some guidelines for choosing a management school. That advisor, whether he is in the company or the school or college, often has absolutely no way of judging. If the school is accredited, then the advisor knows it at least meets minimal standards. And that is very important, given the number of business schools in exis- tence. Accreditation is a guide. It's no guarantee that the results are good, but it is a guarantee that they can't be too bad. Accreditation also provides some protection to a potential models for management education. Management is a practice, like medicine; and the model should have been the medical school, where the bulk of the teaching—especially the most important teaching of the M.D. in his or her residency—is per- formed by practitioners. The head of ophthalmology education, for example, is a practicing eye doctor who has a flourishing prac- tice and spends two days a week supervising the residents. At Harvard, the students start seeing patients the day they enter medical school. employer. Here is a 24- or 26-year-old just out of school with lit- tle or no actual work experience for the employer to judge, but he has graduated from a school that at least has the approval of its peers. There is a price to pay when hiring decisions are based on such criteria—you end up hiring degrees rather than people. But you at least have some protection, some assurance of the type of education the applicant has received, and that is very helpful if you're uninformed. Accreditation is basically a brand, and brands do not tell you z Christy Chapman, based in Winter Garden, Florida, is a free-lance writer. BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 17 that the stuff is the best; they tell you it isn't too bad. That's an important function. s