The Transformation of Boardroom Education After Pandemic

The Global Financial Crisis arose an increasing interest toward the role of management education in not anticipating the crisis and, to a certain extent, in having provided some ideological premises of the crisis itself (i.e., ruthless look for profit). The critique on business schools and management education becomes prominent during the current never-ending crisis, since it does not seem that management education is able to provide Boards with instruments to face the current challenges. Therefore, management education institutions should make the effort to stop teaching “management as usual” and take into serious account the current crisis and its present and future implications. A complete U-turn of the management narrative is needed: from success stories highlighting the role of brave top managers winning business wars, to stories of survival and resilience where Boards were able to face strong challenges. To do this, cross-disciplinary teaching about the current crisis, how it affects organizations and society in broad terms as well as its new persisting social nature is in high demand. We propose three areas of reflection: (i) the hybridization of management education, calling for a multidisciplinary and not overly specialized content of management knowledge; (ii) the redesign of the relation between Boards and management, rediscovering the role of business schools as avant-garde of multidisciplinary studies about the “managerial phenomenon”; and (iii) the redefinition of management as esprit de finesse. Along with these three lines of thought, we outline the need to re-focus management education on teaching how Boards’ decision-makers should take risks.