Why Redesign the MBA?
The MBA is often claimed to be the most popular postgraduate degree in the world.1 And yet it’s also often perceived to be hardly an educational programme at all, but simply an expensive networking opportunity.
But it wasn’t always like that. The original vision for the MBA was to improve the capabilities of administrators in integral industries such as banking, railroads, and new communication technologies.2 In other words, to educate servants of the public good.
Whilst there are now few public industries, the fact remains that businesses are responsible for large parts of the infrastructure of our daily lives. More so than ever, their products are in our homes, our bedrooms, our hands, our minds. Their choices shape our interactions, our attention, our wants and dreams.
And, of course, they shape our planet. Our natural ecosystems are integrated into human-made ecosystems of production and are challenged by the constant creation of waste and pollution.
From this perspective, what could be more important than the education of business leaders?
Showing its age
But it’s clear that current MBA programmes are struggling with their task. Critiques amount. They are out of touch3, overly specialised4, or not specialised enough in contemporary science and tech. 5 In a particularly damning indictment, in a recent study designed to capture the causal impact of having an MBA or business graduate take over a company, the authors (economists Darren Acemoglu, Alex He and Daniel Le Maire) found no evidence that such CEOs ‘increase sales, productivity, investment or exports’ relative to prior levels. Instead, what they found was that increased profit for shareholders were generated through wage declines for employees.6 Evaluating educational impact is hard, but it should be troubling that the most discernible impact of the MBA degree is to make conditions for people worse.
Overhauling the MBA is long overdue. It is twenty years since business school professor Henry Mintzberg wrote Managers Not MBAs and sixteen years since Roger Martin, one of the founders of design thinking and at the time Dean of the Rotman School of Management co-wrote The Future of the MBA. These are just two of the most high-profile efforts to lay out alternative MBA curricula, from people with significant opportunities to influence business schools. Yet since, very little has changed in the core MBA curriculum.
The problem lies in the structure of universities. The original MBA curriculum was taught largely by Humanities faculty, but as its teaching moved into its own discrete departments, ‘Business Schools’ became not just places to teach business and management but as homes for business faculty: teachers and researchers with specialisations in the different business and management disciplines (accounting, finance, marketing, organisational behaviour etc). The core curriculum of MBAs ossified.
Meanwhile, the challenges facing organisations are constantly evolving. The coming decade will demand leaders who can engage with the energy transition, with ecosystems regeneration, with AI bubbles and AI breakthroughs. It needs leaders who can create healthier organisations, less myopic financial markets, and operate over longer time horizons.
These questions are now posed around the edges of top MBAs: optional ‘electives’ offer the opportunity to question technology, sustainability and the role of business in society. But as business school critics have pointed out, there is a severe limit to how much one can achieve in a single module when the MBA ‘core’ is teaching business as usual.7
A weak core
What is the quality of this core? The business disciplines have suffered from the malaise of the wider human and social sciences.8 People are hard to study. We do annoying things like change our behaviour when it’s being observed. It is not too much of a stretch to say that any kind of social science is at least as hard as Quantum Physics, and often carried out in conditions that are less funded, specialised or suited to the practice of science.
So, despite the hard work of many brilliant researchers, the ‘science’ taught in business schools (economics, management, organisations) has progressed alarmingly little since Taylor’s time. And in absence of a strong scientific core, what is taught tends to be rules of thumb: the passing on of tacit knowledge codified into basic frameworks or principles.
But there is more out there.
New fundamentals
The current shifts in the business landscape – in intelligence, energy, ecosystems, trust and complexity – are knowledge rich: they are the subject of valuable, specialist work. But the shifts themselves are not specialist issues to be tackled by niche agencies: they are societal dilemmas faced by a wide range of organisations. To work in the context of these shifts organisations require leaders and managers with intellectual range and a proper grounding in what they are up against.
These subjects, then, should form the new core of an MBA. Meanwhile, we can move the old core to the edges, as a supporting rim to be recapped and assessed as purely instrumental, contingent knowledge. Knowledge of the business functions and how they work is useful, for now, but if we treat it as all there is, it will quickly stop being useful and start very much standing in the way of necessary organisational evolution. The principles of accounting, ‘what works’ in marketing, even most tenets of economics rely on a set of assumptions about relationships between producers and consumers that are themselves evolving, or at the least are being forced to evolve by the increased role for ‘non-financial’ (environmental and social) concerns.
Bringing it all together
In 1968 Sheldon Zalaznick wrote of the “the MBA Man” that “he is said to be uniquely equipped to analyse, to integrate ends and means”.9
Organisational decision-making is a constant work of integration. Questions posed are made up of many diverse elements: economics, networks, cultures, norms, values, histories, motivations, languages, scales, technologies. These different aspects of reality come with their own tacit assumptions, their own vocabularies, their own methods. The ability to work with these different inputs and make decisions in responsible ways requires highly complex form of comprehension.10
Proper integration is a key piece missing in traditional MBAs.11 The MBA already claims to be a multi-disciplinary degree. The arts of leadership, marketing and strategy; the sciences of management, economics and organisational behaviour. But in all our interviewing of people about their experience of MBAs, the recurring feature is that what lasts is titbits. An interesting elective here, a memorable workshop there.
This is where LIS comes in. As an interdisciplinary institution, rather than teaching whole subjects, we teach how to comprehend different disciplinary languages and logics, and how to combine them. This means explicit teaching of integration and synthesis: learning to understand these disciplinary differences and their implications, to combine knowledge in responsible ways, and to communicate those combinations accessibly.12
When people talk about their learning at LIS it is as an experience that changed them.13 Our goal is never less than shifting knowledge and capabilities to a fundamentally new level: new worlds of understanding, new ways of seeing, whole new skill-sets.
That’s why we are best placed to create the modern MBA. We have the structure to span the necessary, broader conceptual territory of a contemporary leader and to teach it in a truly integrated way. Not scattered across different electives but as a meaningful whole with a faculty who collaborates, using shared tools and approaches.
So when people ask why we’re creating an MBA sometimes I say that we’re not, really. Because the LIS MBA is not an MBA. It’s what an MBA should be.
End notes:
1 See e.g. this 2024 Indeed editorial or the MBA advocacy site Poets & Quants. It’s more accurate to say that Business and management is the most popular field for postgraduate degrees, as national statistics provide information by field only. See data for the UK (British Academy) and US (NCES).
2 See Carter A. Daniel’s MBA: The First Century
4 https://www.business.com/articles/why-an-mba-degree-isnt-as-prestigious-as-it-once-was/
5 https://www.economist.com/business/2025/01/14/why-elite-mba-graduates-are-struggling-to-find-jobs
6 For an open access version of the paper, see: https://shapingwork.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Acemoglu-He-LeMaire-March-2022.pdf
7 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/27/bulldoze-the-business-school
8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
9 Zalaznick, later editor of Forbes, was writing in Fortune magazine. Quoted in ‘The MBA Degree: What does it mean’, a 1969 dissertation by Robert Carl Krause.
10 The study of how adults can learn to comprehend and integrate increasingly more information, perspectives and demands makes up the field of ‘adult development’, building on Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self (1982) and In Over Our Heads (1994).
11 https://rogermartin.medium.com/the-design-school-advantage-bc9e4b700639
12 https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/teaching-synthesis-london-interdisciplinary-school
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