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YourTurn Playing the Rankings Game The most recent rankings of U.S. business schools were published with a little less fanfare than usual, which might lead you to think that few people noticed them. You would be wrong. You can bet that the business schools noticed. You also can bet that prospective MBA students noticed, since the rankings mainly assess MBA programs. It's a pretty good wager that corporate recruit ers also noticed. In addition, you can be sure that the magazine publishers noticed, because the issue that ranks business schools frequently is their best-selling issue of the year. Business school rankings have become very big busi- ness. They're so big, in fact, that business schools now are caught in a brutal competition for the new symbol of academ- ic success—a cherished high ranking by a business maga- zine. The ranking number has become a sound-bite index of program quality and reputa- tion for prospective students, corporate recruiters, funding agen- cies, and other stakeholders. Some see it as ironic that business schools, which teach competition in the economic arena, have found themselves as the players in a highly competitive game. Others find a cer- tain poetic justice in the fact that business schools have been captured by the kind of system that they have long touted. We recently conducted a study, school leaders. Our most compelling finding was that most of the deans or MBA program directors we inter- viewed characterized the ranking process as a "game"—a dynamic competition with changing rules, invented by outsiders in part to fur- ther their own ends. They also per- ceived it as a game with very serious consequences for business education, one with sometimes hidden or capri- cious criteria and no provision for rewriting apparently arbitrary rules. by Dennis Gioia and Kevin Corley ple fact that B-schools must compete in an open arena against rivals offer- ing similar programs has changed and frequently improved those pro- grams. For some schools that were jolted into recognizing that their programs were obsolete, the rankings were a necessary wake-up call. That's the good news. But there's bad news, too. The Gioia Corley THE GROWING PROMINENCE OF MEDIA RANKINGS HAS PUSHED BUSINESS SCHOOLS TOWARD FOCUSING ON IMAGE MANAGEMENT, OFTEN AT THE EXPENSE OF SUBSTANTIVE IMPROVEMENT. Nearly all could recount stories of schools "gaming the system." Not surprisingly, most also felt it was a game that was nearly impossible to win, for all except a few heavily endowed schools. Can a game like this be good for growing prominence of media rank- ings has pushed business schools toward focusing on image manage- ment, often at the expense of sub- stantive improvement. Because image has become the new currency in the academic realm, competition among business schools is creating a kind of beauty contest, with some ugly con- sequences for the contestants. For example, some of them are spending scarce resources on image-related fea- tures, rather than bona fide program enhancements. In fact, the rankings tend to coerce published in Corporate Reputation Review, which examines the rankings from the perspective of 50 top B- 62 BizEd JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 the players or the spectators? Sur - prisingly enough, yes. The reason is right out of Economics 101: Competition improves the breed. Most B-school leaders would grudg- ingly agree that the rankings have almost single-handedly forced faster changes in MBA programs. The sim- changes that conform to the maga- zines' selectively-chosen criteria, and those criteria are not necessarily the ones that produce high-quality busi- ness education. The magazines have a motive that is indifferent to substan- tive educational improvement. Simply put, they would like to sell more mag- azines. It's not newsworthy if rankings are the same year after year, so the magazines are motivated to generate variation in the rankings artificially— usually by changing the rankings crite- ria. That means B-schools are perpet- ually playing a catch-up game. Catching up by making substantive changes takes a long time, usually longer than a yearly news cycle. Business schools, therefore, have learned the art of spin. Allocating resources mainly to rankings-driven criteria means that they often present an image of pseudo-change, rather