The idea that business schools need fixing has gained a near consensus post-economic crisis, but exactly how to fix them has been a matter of much debate. I recently spoke about the issue with Ben Heineman, Jr., a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a distinguished senior fellow at Harvard Law’s Program on the Legal Profession. He believes that the true problem business schools face is one of scope:
We need to make sure business school students are having courses that give all dimensions of business problems and it’s not just focused on finance. The narrowness of the focus doesn’t prepare people for the breadth of issues that they’re going to face.
One way to address this, according to Heineman, is to integrate MBA education with other professional schools, namely law and public policy, in a “more intense and realistic way” than schools do currently:
That relates to having courses that are team taught by professors from all the schools. For example, international trade would involve an economist or business person and an international foreign affairs person from a public policy school and a law expert in the international trade rules. We not only need to broaden out and improve business school courses, but we need to integrate the professional schools and encourage joint degrees and have better team teaching.
Heineman also believes that a more comprehensive ethics education is important to the continued success of MBA programs. In fact, he recently wrote an article for Harvard Business Publishing about the ethics oath taken this year by many graduating Harvard MBAs and said during our conversation, “The oaths are absolutely a step in the right direction. It’s about being responsible citizens inside a corporation and being responsible citizens inside society; it’s about integrity being as important as making numbers.”
However, he acknowledged that this is merely a first step and a largely symbolic one. He went on to say:
Beyond that, there is the question of how do we have high performance and high integrity, and how do we balance this risk management? We clearly need great innovation and creativity in our businesses, but we also, as the financial meltdown showed, need to have very responsible financial discipline and risk management.
Next week I’ll share some of Heineman’s ideas for melding high performance with high integrity, which also happens to be the topic of the book he published last year.
