The Promise of Business School to Repair the World

Business education can and should refocus on helping students learn not just technical skills but how to make their work and their lives meaningful. In doing so, business schools can help transform how students understand and engage capitalism and thus educate purposeful and ethical leaders. In this essay, I describe the personal and intellectual journey of creating a course for executive MBAs that, students report, has accomplished those goals. The key principles that led to this success include focusing on students’ own experiences, applying enduring ideas from the humanities to business problems and connecting them to contemporary issues, and structuring assignments that oblige students to reflect and to take a position on their own development. This teaching requires attention to each student’s work, nimbleness in the classroom, and continuous refinement and updating of course material. But it is tremendously gratifying because teaching executive students gives one the opportunity to influence people who will themselves be influential. To help usher in a new kind of capitalism, we should transform business education.