“It’s not clear what the purpose of business education is. It’s got to be more than high-paying jobs and more than a place to build elite social networks.”
Rakesh Khurana, Harvard Management Professor
“The public lost trust in business, and some of our graduates seem to be responsible for that.”
Nitin Nohria, HBS Dean since July 2010.
This is welcome news. The WSJ reports that Harvard Business School has begun to redirect the focus of its MBA curriculum from financial calculus and case studies to … ‘judgment’, ‘ethics’, ‘teamwork’ and building ‘leaders of competence and character’.
It is encouraging to see HBS begin to move in a new direction. But there is much ground left to cover. It is disappointing that the terms ‘accountability’ or ‘accountable leadership’ are not mentioned by any of the school’s officials featured in the article. Without a strictly defined level of accountability, behavioral conditions such as those quoted above will remain ungrounded and vaporous. B-schools might as well be swinging at hot air.
America needs business schools that will develop accountable leaders of innovation and creativity – to serve society and commerce. Short of backstopping their programs with Marine DI’s, b-schools need to discover the term ‘accountability’ – and infuse it in their students as a core measure, from sunup to sundown.
