TWENTY

On the Verge of Extinction
Some Final Reptilian Thoughts

JAMES O’TOOLE

MY FRIEND, the leadership expert Jay Conger, recently pointed out to me that I am “officially a dinosaur” in the eyes of most of the academic community. Well, what are friends for if not to warn you when you are in denial? Of course, Jay went on to say that, actually, I am “among a set of dinosaurs” that includes all of my closest professional colleagues, and Jay himself! Indeed, in the eyes of the lab psychologists and A-journal scientists now in ascendancy in America’s leading business schools, the entire subspecies of scholars (like me) whose writings are intended primarily for managers and leaders is headed toward extinction. A great many younger scholars believe that our remnants are doomed to die out because we lack the “rigor” to survive in a new age of social science in which people (like themselves) write for an audience that is exclusively academic. Based on the general trend in business schools (b-schools) over the last two decades, the prediction of our imminent extinction offered by the two Jays (Conger and Lorsch) appears accurate. But just as we were preparing to “fade away,” something has started to happen recently that may indicate the reports of our inevitable demise are premature. I start this chapter with a review of the alarming trends that portend our extinction and end with a few thoughts about what might be done to “save the species.”

Disturbing Trends

For many years now, my colleague Warren Bennis and I have been fretting over the rigor versus relevance issue in graduate business education (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005; O’Toole, 2009). Our main concern has been the potential, long-term consequences for business organizations when b-school professors’ primary focus is on their own careers as scientists, and not on preparing students to lead the nation’s economic institutions. Over the last decade or so, we have grown increasingly concerned by the fact that too many MBA programs—often those at prestigious research universities—are failing to (a) impart useful skills, (b) develop leaders, (c) instill high ethical norms, and (d) prepare mangers to deal with complex, cross-disciplinary, nonquantifiable issues. The intent of this chapter is to address the root causes of those failings and to suggest a course of action to correct them. But before getting to that proposal, it may be useful to briefly describe the origins of my own academic orientation. By making clear “where I am coming from,” readers may be better able to judge the validity of the way forward that I offer later in this chapter.

Sources of My Biases

In the 1960s, like most undergraduate students in the social sciences at the time, I was raised on a heady diet of books by such once-luminary figures as William F. Whyte, Erving Goffman, Daniel Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Robert Nesbitt, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Seymour Martin Lipset, William H. White, Gunnar Myrdal, and J. Kenneth Galbraith. Later, I read books by the then-contemporary masters in the field of management and leadership studies, including pioneering works by Douglas McGregor, Abraham Maslow, Jay Lorsch, Warren Bennis, Paul Lawrence, Herbert Simon, James March, and James McGregor Burns. That is to say, I read works by generalists, scholars who wrote not just for academic audiences; in addition, their books and articles were meant to be accessible to all educated professionals. While my terminal degree is in social anthropology, I was greatly influenced by the work of these scholars, none of whom was an anthropologist. Hence, I never have thought of myself as either defined by, or limited to, the discipline in which I received my degree (or to any other single discipline, for that matter). In fact, I probably have been influenced more by the writings of John Stuart Mill than by those of any single social scientist. Throughout his career, Mill’s intended audiences were the political, business, and legal professionals of his day, the practical people who were the leaders of society. He was, at once and the same time, an economist, philosopher, historian, journalist, and practicing politician. In short, he might be called a “dilettante.” Since I have worked, briefly, in government, journalism, and management consulting (at McKinsey and Company and, later, at Booz, Allen & Hamilton), I suppose the same epithet might be applied to me.

At any rate, it is from that perspective that I offer these sketchy thoughts about why those of us who engage in research meant to be useful to practitioners are a dying species, and how people like us might yet avoid extinction. To start, I don’t think the reason usually offered for the wide dismissal of applied research such as ours—specifically, that it lacks quantitative rigor—is the actual cause. At least, it is not the complete story. I believe the issue is more complex and more attributable to the growing power of academic disciplines in business schools than to any other single factor. I illustrate what I mean by reference to the best-known exemplar of perceived relevance over rigor, the most famous management professor in the eyes of the business community, but one who, tellingly, is among the least cited scholars in academic journals: the late Peter F. Drucker.

Drucker As Exemplar

The catholicity of Drucker’s interests defies the pigeonholing of his work: He wrote imaginatively and knowledgeably about a wide array of subjects including economics, technology, history, politics, demography (and Asian art). Most notably and profoundly, he wrote about all aspects of the corporation, explicating the complexly interrelated functions and roles of planning, strategy, marketing, organization structure, labor relations, performance measurement, and leadership. “My main point,” Drucker (1985) wrote, “is that the organization is a human, a social, indeed, a moral phenomenon.” In terms of the latter, he stressed not the power of executives but, instead, their responsibilities (significantly, the subtitle of his 1974 magnum opus, Management, is “Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices”). With the 1957 publication of America’s Next Twenty Years, he arguably became the nation’s first “futurist,” a role he returned to time and again, notably in his 1976 The Unseen Revolution where he anticipated many of the problems corporations would encounter in subsequent years as the result of the way pensions were traditionally funded. His classic 1946 study of General Motors, Concept of the Corporation, was based on the rigorous, but nonscientific, research method known as “participant observation.” Reissued in 1972, just as GM was starting to lose ground to Japanese competitors, the book presciently and cogently identified the cultural and organizational problems that eventually would lead to the humbling (and eventual nationalization) of that once great company. Prophetically he concluded that “GM is an organization of managers and management . . . not an innovative company.” The end result was that GM was too impersonal, too addicted to technique, and too concerned with scientific measurement and controllable facts “when what is needed is not facts but the ability to see facts as others see them.”

Once, when Warren Bennis praised him publicly for such foresight, Drucker (1985) offered this surprising response: “It was meant as a compliment, but I winced because, bluntly, I was ten years premature with every one of my forecasts. And that’s not a compliment. That is saying that one has had no impact.” Well, he certainly didn’t have much impact on what is taught in business schools.

In 1985, I asked six prominent thinkers to review Drucker’s entire oeuvres (some twenty books at the time), and to offer their critical evaluations for publication in New Management magazine (where I was editor). I then sent the six draft essays to Drucker who commented on them in his usual style: promptly, coldly, analytically . . . and condescendingly! (He wasn’t the easiest person to deal with: On more than one occasion in the ’70s and ’80s, when something I had written found its way into print, I received phone calls from Peter who, in his patented, guttural growl, would tell me how “interesting” my latest effort was—and then go on for a good half hour explaining in painful detail how I had gotten my analysis all wrong! He wasn’t loveable, but he was usually right.)

In the New Management’s “Peter Drucker Retrospective” issue published in 1985, Tom Peters noted, to his “amazement and . . . dismay” that, on just having read Drucker’s 1954 The Practice of Management for the first time, he discovered therein all the key points that he and Bob Waterman had thought original when they presented them over two decades later in their bestselling In Search of Excellence. Given that Drucker was the first to have said almost everything there was to say about management, Peters (1985) thus wondered why Drucker’s name never once was mentioned by his professors while he was a Stanford MBA student. Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1985) similarly expressed great admiration for Drucker’s work, but she also wondered why “there are no Druckerians . . . teaching in the tradition of the master?” In fact, the writings of the man who is often called “the father of management studies” not only have not been assigned in major American business schools for many years now, his work almost never has been cited by scholars. Bennis (1985) wrote that Drucker himself wondered if he really “belonged” in a university or business school, but defended Drucker by likening him to Alexis de Tocqueville, who also was not easily pegged, and who similarly belonged to the grand “world of ideas. . . . Unless that is understood, we risk placing Drucker in too narrow an intellectual context and will fail to do full justice to his unique contribution.”

Limits to Social Science

I think Warren was on to the real reason for the academics’ disdain for Drucker’s work. It was not the absence of scientific, quantitative rigor in his books that led scholars to dismiss them; instead, the root cause has been the ever-increasing dominance of traditional, ever-narrower, academic disciplines in business schools. Unlike Drucker, no scholars today think of themselves as “professors of management,” let alone as “professors of business.” Today, b-school faculties are composed of self-fashioned “professors of organizational behavior” or “professors of finance,” or, in most cases, as members of some narrow subset within such broader disciplinary rubrics. (The Academy of Management lists some two dozen such specialties. While such disciplinary specialization may be necessary to advance the state of scientific knowledge, it is far from clear that it benefits MBA students. Indeed, the professoriate’s commonly held assumption that what is good for them is also good for b-schools, students, and the business community at large is a debatable notion, at best, as we see later in this chapter).

There are at least two fundamental drawbacks to the trend toward ever-narrower disciplinary specialization—at least from the perspective of educating MBAs to be effective leaders. First, the most-vexing issues and problems business executives face—the kinds of questions that business leaders found so relevant when Drucker addressed them—do not respect the boundaries of academic disciplines. Business leaders are seldom if ever faced with a “psychology problem” or “an economics problem”; instead, they must deal with such multifaceted, systemic problems as, What is the most effective organizational design for my company? How can I create a business model and strategy that will effectively deliver on the “triple bottom line.” How do I organize and motivate my associates to generate a steady and sustainable stream of innovation? (Michael Tushman identifies a passel of such cross-disciplinary issues in Chapter 9, On Knowing and Doing).

The second, and perhaps more fundamental, drawback to a discipline-driven approach is that it assumes there is “a solution” to the problem being studied. Researchers would deny this, but in fact that assumption (most often unstated) is a by-product of thinking about business research in terms of “science.” One thing all scientific research has in common is the quest for a theory. Behind all those complex models found in social science journals is the unstated assumption that there is something “out there” in the world of organizations equivalent to the law of gravity, theory of relativity, or laws of thermodynamics. Social science researchers are not at all deterred by the fact that they have failed to find the managerial equivalent of E = mc²; indeed, it is not too great a stretch to say they have discovered very little about organizational behavior, or leadership, that can stand the true test of a scientific law (that is, the findings are replicable at all times and at all places). Instead, the findings offered in business-oriented scientific journals are far more circumscribed: They concern only what has been found true for a particular time and/or place. In effect, what organizational scientists have been doing is to keep reducing the dimensions of what they study until they are small enough to fit the available research methods. And, yes, they then end up with statistically valid findings, but those results are typically too narrow or specific to be generalizable. For example, it stretches the notion of science to the breaking point to extrapolate the findings of a lab experiment (in which a couple of dozen undergraduates serve as guinea pigs) to a generalization about all human behavior. Scientific researchers do not deny this; instead, they argue that “our discipline is still young and, surely, we will find the laws of organizations if we just keep looking. Clearly, any single study, by and of itself, tells us little. But one day, when all the results of all the studies are aggregated. . . .”

Alas, as Peter Drucker understood, nothing as complex and multidimensional as human behavior lends itself to such reductionism. And that’s probably why he was dismissed by academics: He didn’t even pretend to have a grand theory of management, of organizations, of leadership or, for that matter, of anything else. His academic critics are, at least, technically correct when they say that “he was not a systematic thinker.” In fact, he never propounded a single theory, or even a systematic set of beliefs (in Isaiah Berlin’s famous construct, Drucker was more a “fox” with many ideas than a “hedgehog” with one big idea). But, to most academics, a person with no theory is no academic at all! Thus, from their perspective, Drucker’s fatal shortcoming was the modesty and humility of his work. There is great irony in this: as implied earlier, Peter was extremely far from being a modest and humble man; but he was not delusional about the nature of the enterprise in which he was involved. His modest goal was to better understand organizational behavior through the analysis of relevant facts, the application of reason, and the willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. He was intent on teaching executives how to think about complex problems so as to increase the likelihood of their making effective decisions. But Drucker didn’t fool himself into thinking that his rigorous study of management was the same thing as “science.”

Now it must be understood that Peter collected data, analyzed it, and used it whenever it was available and appropriate to do so. The facts—the numbers when they were available and valid—were almost always his starting point. As much as any business professor, he understood that one can and should use statistics to correlate relationships between discrete variables. He drew on academic research in which statistical methods were used in controlled situations to tease out the various interactions of several variables. But Drucker understood the limits to such quantification. As Aristotle explained in his Nicomachean Ethics nearly 2,500 years ago:

Of course, the activities of business typically are more quantifiable than the activity of rhetoric. Yet, not everything about business is quantifiable, as much as we would like it to be. As a professor of ethics, for example, I would like to be able to prove scientifically that ethical leaders prosper and unethical ones do not. I also would like to be able to prove that socially responsible companies make more money than irresponsible ones. Alas, to the extent that such complex and ambiguous human and organizational issues (ones involving the interaction of such multidimensional variable as leadership, culture, and values) are amenable to scientific study, analyses of the available facts prove inconclusive (Vogel, 2005). All one has to do is read the Wall Street Journal to find examples of both successful and unsuccessful leaders who behaved ethically, and examples of both successful and unsuccessful ones who were unethical. Similarly, there appears to be no correlation between the level of a company’s social responsibility, on the one hand, and its profitability, on the other.

This absence of certainty about the causal relationship between doing good and doing well is regrettable, at least from my point of view, because so many executives say that they would do the “right thing” if they knew “for sure” that it would pay to do so, or even if it would be effective. But realistically and regrettably, I have to accept the fact that the search for the “facts” that would give clear guidance with regard to broad leadership, ethical, and cultural issues is, and will remain, fruitless. Executives search in vain for guidance based on hard evidence because there are no scientific laws with regard to such soft and multidimensional subjects, nor can such laws ever be found. The available “facts” tell executives only that they are as likely to succeed taking the high, as opposed to the low, road. And that’s why the most important and difficult questions that confront leaders require making moral choices, and not conforming to some set of scientifically determined rules or principles. Indeed, the very essence of leadership is the necessity to choose in the absence of certainty (the luxury of certainty is reserved for engineers, bureaucrats, and administrators). That’s why Peter Drucker talked about management in terms of its responsibilities.

Inside B-Schools Today

But that is not how most management professors today view the study of leadership. In business schools, the subject now falls in the domain of social science, with an accent on the science. That trend has implications for the classroom. For example, a few years back, I engaged in a long debate about leadership with a group of professors from a leading America business school. When they asked what topics I covered in my leadership class, I mentioned that I stressed the effectiveness of leaders listening to the concerns and needs of their followers. The professors then proceeded to explain to me that there was nothing in the scientific literature to indicate that effective leaders listen to their followers. One of the professors said, “I would never teach my students anything that was not supported by scientific fact.” Ergo, no listening in his class.

I believe this emphasis on applying scientific standards of proof to the study of leadership is misplaced. Not only does it lead to shortchanging business students, it also explains (paradoxically) the manifest absence of valid studies exploring the effects of leadership behavior. In this regard, I have done a little casual, nonscientific research. Working with the help of two graduates students, we undertook a review of two dozen well-documented cases describing successful organizational transformations in large corporations. Our intent was to identify how the top management teams (TMTs) in those companies led their transformations; in other words, what they did that made their change efforts successful. We sorted those actions into generic categories, for example, “listening to subordinates’ ideas,” “delegating authority for implementation,” “keeping the organization focused on task.” We then winnowed the list down to the handful of behaviors that almost all of the successful leaders seemed to engage in (the list included the three examples just cited, including listening, which was a behavior noted in all the cases).

We then went to the scientific literature and entered those behaviors as key words along with the words “leadership,” “organizational change,” and so forth, to see if our “casual empiricism” was supportable by scientific fact. Surely, we thought, some academic must have studied a scientifically valid sample of CEOs, TMTs, or even division heads, to discover what leadership actions, behaviors, and approaches to change are the most effective? Alas, in the dozen or so journals we examined, we found next to no studies referring to our key words (with the exception of a few tangentially related studies relating to the narrow—albeit important—leadership activities that build trust). Instead, we found many small-sample and single-organization studies of narrow “leadership” behaviors of middle managers (and students). But no studies of the behavior of real corporate leaders. I don’t know why I had expected otherwise; in hindsight, I certainly can’t fault my fellow professors for failing to produce scientifically valid research relating to leading large-scale organizational change. It simply can’t be done. And, if I thought it could be done, I would try to do it myself!

The main reason why such studies do not exist is because the statistical methods typically employed by social scientists do not and cannot reveal the causal interactions of the multiplicity of variables involved in changing behavior in a large organization. How would one scientifically control the various factors involved in the leadership activity we call listening? The methodological problems are multifold because there are numerous ambiguous and dynamic aspects of human behavior involved in leadership: For example, there are the interactions of both leaders and followers, and corporate cultures are systems involving complex interrelationships between scores of such hard-to-measure variables as purpose, values, and trust, and such organizational capacities as the effectiveness of communications channels. Thus, it is difficult to imagine how one would ever measure the effectiveness of leadership listening in influencing the behavior of followers. And it is not simply the act of listening in and of itself that is relevant; more precisely it is listening in conjunction with other complementary activities, such as responding positively and following up on suggestions. How would one ever measure the effectiveness of such a set of behaviors?

Although there are excellent scientific studies of many specific aspects of leadership—for example, relating to the personalities of leaders—those are undertaken in isolation from other aspects of what are complexly interrelated human systems (for example, the culture of the firm), and that is like studying the human toe apart from the foot or separate from the body’s circulatory and immune systems. The researcher can get partial truths, at best, but they do not add up to much that is useful or scientifically verifiable.

Certainly it is possible to undertake a scientific study of one aspect of a leader’s behavior on a discrete part of a particular culture, but adding up all those parts in an attempt to understand the whole does not necessarily lead to valid conclusions. The methodological problem involves more than a logical error of faulty aggregation; it ignores the most salient fact of systems: All the parts are complexly interrelated and, thus, changes in one part cause changes in all other parts, and the nature or direction of those changes are not scientifically predictable. Hence, an interesting scientific study of a leader’s efforts to create trust tells us little about the effects of the action on other aspects of the culture of an organization, nor does it predict the effectiveness of those efforts. And what may work to create trust in one organization may not do so in another (with different characteristics).

These caveats are far from being antiscience. They are actually proscience. In this age of creeping theocracy, it is more-than-ever necessary for all scholars to stand firm against those forces of ignorance and superstition who increasingly and stridently deny scientific evidence. That is why I believe scholars should be careful to reserve the hallowed name of science for that which is real science. Of course, most of the studies published in academic journals are not exercises in scientism (in fact, most could be more aptly described as collections of valid data about specific events, organizations, or populations that may be suggestive of broader interpretation). Some of this is extremely useful, and some even approaches the standards of true science (for example, the research findings of Joseph Blasi, Douglas Kruse, and Richard Freeman [2006], drawing on a U.S. Census scientifically valid sample of the entire U.S. workforce).

Moreover, I believe the effective study of organizations needs to be rigorous, evidence-based and, whenever possible, quantified. (Strategy consultants at McKinsey and Booz, Allen, & Hamilton often draw profitably on the rigorous, applied organizational research undertaken by Michael Beer, Richard Walton, Michael Tushman, Nitan Nohria, and Christopher Bartlett, all now, or formerly, at the Harvard Business School). Indeed there is a good amount of such rigorous, applied research readily available, and not only from the Harvard crowd and the authors of this book. But as the Drucker example illustrates, that does not make those studies “scientific.” When dogs snifffire plugs they are collecting and analyzing data, but they are not engaging in science.

In a recent blog, Tom Peters answered criticisms leveled against Bob Waterman, Jim Collins, and himself that attacked the scientific validity of the conclusions of their respective books. Candidly, Peters pled guilty to most of those charges. But he insisted that he and Waterman were innocent of having ever purported to provide “a complete success prescription based on a flawless accumulation of data that managers should follow like the ten commandments.” On that score, he parts company with Collins (who has claimed the mantle of science for his work). As Peters blogs:

What is most unfortunate about Collins’s absurd claim is not simply that he has invited academics to make mincemeat out of both his methods and the claims he makes about what his data “prove”; far worse, his claims distract from the fact that the general conclusions he draws tend to be spot on! Hence, his professorial critics have had a field day ripping Collins’s numbers to pieces and discrediting his work in the eyes of many inside and outside of academe; all the while, what goes unnoticed is that none of them have gainsaid the wisdom of his observations (which is the real value of his work). Collins, like so many of us, feels the necessity of proving his observations scientifically, even when doing so is impossible or inappropriate to the task at hand.

Collins has tried to prove, for example, that certain forms of leadership behavior lead to certain kinds of organizational outcomes. Unfortunately, there is no way to “prove” that one or another style of leadership leads to more (or less) productivity, profitability, innovation, sustainability, or any other complex set of outcomes. Thus, Collins has inadvertently shown that, while it is manifestly possible to identify a few organizational or leadership variables and then to message and control them meaningfully, the end product will not be valid because the sum total of all the aspects of human behavior involved in organizational performance is too multifaceted, soft, and changing to be accurately modeled, let alone studied scientifically.

Let me be clear about the nature of my criticism. In a great many instances, traditional quantitative methods produce interesting and valid results. But there are other sources of valid knowledge that are not scientifically rigorous. In particular, if the findings are to be useful to practitioners, applied studies of leadership and management must be based on a concatenation of (often incommensurable) examples, data, facts, experience, logic, analysis, plus whatever suggestive data exist in the scientific literature. As good lawyers, journalists, consultants, and anthropologists know, the best way to discover the truth in an organization is to diversify the sources of one’s information. Or, as Michael Beer (Chapter 8, Making a Difference and Contributing Useful Knowledge) aptly puts it, the method is triangulation. But even then, when all the data are analyzed, leaders must still choose; ultimately, they must make decisions about complex matters based not on scientific proof but on their personal values, desires, and levels of aversion to risk.

But that is not what is being taught in most b-schools today, and until recently, the situation seemed likely to get worse in terms of the preparation for leadership that MBA students will receive in the future. After all, how can today’s narrowly focused business school professors be expected to train and nurture the next generation of scholars to become broad-gauged, discipline-spanning, pragmatic, systemic thinkers? And why should they do so when universities are perversely hell bent on rewarding the opposite behavior? (Here’s the inside baseball on this: At large research institutions, university-wide personnel committees dominated by social science faculties are the ultimate authorities with respect to business school hire, tenure, and promotion decisions. Thus, representatives of the psychology and economics departments in Letters, Arts, and Sciences are empowered to set the academic standards by which b-school professors are evaluated.)

A Modest Proposal: Professionalize B-Schools

Is there any way to break out of this self-defeating, downward spiral? Warren Bennis and I have concluded that the best chance is to transform the institutions of graduate business education into true professional schools along the lines of those offering law and medical degrees. At medical schools, for example, an MD professor who specializes in developing new surgical methods—publishing her results in practitioner-oriented journals and devoting her time to the hands-on teaching of med students and interns—is viewed by her institution as the equal of a PhD biologist who spends all his time in the lab doing theoretical research and publishing in journals read only by other scientists (while never getting anywhere near an MD candidate, let alone a patient). This model has been widely adopted because medical schools see there is a need for them to provide both scientific research and professional training for docs.

The professional school model has been tested, and it works. Yet, at most of the nation’s leading b-schools the trend is to hire, reward, and promote only the equivalent of the med school’s “pure science” biology professor. In effect, the faculties at prestigious b-schools (and their wannabes) increasingly are composed of discipline-oriented professors and researchers who see themselves as economists or psychologists, both of whom know (or care) little about the practical world of business organizations or about teaching MBAs how to lead them. By way of illustration, the likes of Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, and Tom Peters would not be hired by any major business school today. Or, if hired, they would be labeled “guest lecturers” and thus marginalized as second-class professors.

Hence, Bennis and I have proposed that b-schools halt this trend by adopting a professional school model that embraces faculty pluralism. We conclude that like medical schools, b-schools need both rigor and relevance, and if those two characteristics can be found in a single professor, so much the better. But failing that—as most often is the case—both discipline-oriented and practitioner-oriented faculty need to be hired (and then rewarded equally to prevent the formation of the invidious distinctions that invariably arise in highly stratified, two-class systems).

Stop the Press

There may be some good news on the horizon for us threatened brontosauri. Around the time that Bennis and I first offered our modest proposal (see the previous section), a few enlightened administrators, faculty members, alumni, and students (for example, at Yale and at such “second-tier” institutions as Duquesne’s Donahue, Denver’s Daniels, and York’s [Canada] Schulich b-schools) started connecting the dots among an alarming set of events and trends in the operating business environment (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005). Taking note of the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the deindustrialization of North America, and public calls for “sustainability” (and, later, the nationalization of General Motors and the Wall Street meltdown), they decided the time had come for them to address social, environmental, and ethical issues in their respective MBA curriculums. Subsequently, there has been a snowballing effect of those pioneering efforts: Last fall, representatives from several dozen b-schools around the world gathered in New York as guests of the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education to share what they were learning from their new initiatives to address the cross-disciplinary concerns previously absent from their curriculums.

In a parallel effort, Harvard’s Rakesh Khurana (2007) is leading a movement to make b-schools into professional schools, starting with the Oath Project in which MBA candidates across the country are voluntarily swearing to a professional code of conduct, à la the oaths taken by lawyers and doctors. And, within the last year, influential scholar Jay Lorsch (2009) has called for rethinking the way b-school professors are evaluated and promoted. Based on the med school model, business schools in large research universities would be given the same leeway as other professional schools to set their own standards of performance, for example, counting practical publications oriented toward managers (for example, serious books and Harvard Business Review articles) as heavily for promotion and tenure as purely scientific and theoretical research. Of course, the main accrediting body of business schools is still lagging years behind this nascent reform movement (ditto the discipline-based associations to which professors often show greater loyalty than to the universities that pay their salaries).

But business professors do not need to be passive victims of the bad policies wrought by university committees, discipline-based academic societies, or external accrediting bodies. In the foregoing, I noted that leaders ultimately must make choices about complex matters based on their personal values and desires. I believe the same is true for business school professors. We must, and we can, choose what we study and what we teach. The good news is that a growing number of young scholars appear to be choosing to study the real issues facing business organizations, for example, problems relating to governance, community, innovation, workplace civility, ethics, sustainability, and cross-cultural management—issues that are, by nature, multidisciplinary and concerned with the pursuit of the common good. The more professors choose to focus on such issues, the more relevant b-schools will become without losing rigor.

All told, there now seems to be some progress in that direction. Recently, I ran into a professor who had been one of the most vocal critics of the “controversial” article that Bennis and I wrote in 2005 in which we first offered our proposal concerning b-school professionalization and faculty pluralism. The professor, a past president of the Academy of Management, mentioned to me in passing that “I was outraged by your HBR piece. Then, a month or so ago, I read it. Actually, it’s not all that unreasonable.” Well, I guess that’s what progress amounts to in academia!

Let me summarize my argument by quoting the words of business ethicists Rogene Buchholz and Sandra Rosenthal (2008):

REFERENCES

Aristotle. (1953) The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by J.A.K. Thomson. Penguin Books.

Bennis, W. (1985). A personal reflection. New Management, 2(3), 24–27.

Bennis, W., & O’Toole, J. (2005, May). How business schools lost their way. Harvard Business Review, 96–104.

Blasi, J., Kruse, D., & Freeman, R. (2006). Shared capitalism at work: Impacts and policy options. In E. E. Lawler III & J. O’Toole (Eds.), America at work (pp. 275–295). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Buchholz, R., & Rosenthal, S. (2008). The unholy alliance of business and science. Journal of Business Ethics, 78, 199–206.

Drucker, P. (1985). Memo. New Management, 2(3), 28–32.

Kanter, R. M. (1985). The unsolved puzzle. New Management, 2(3), 10–13.

Khurana, R. (2007). From higher aims to hired hands: The social transformation of American business schools. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lorsch, J. (2009). Regaining lost relevance. Journal of Management Inquiry, 18, 108–117.

O’Toole, J. (2009). The pluralistic future of management education. In S. J. Armstrong and C. V. Fulami (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of management learning, education and development (pp. 547–558). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Peters, T. (1985). The other half of the message. New Management, 2(3), 14–17.

Vogel, D. (2005). The market for virtue. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James O’Toole is the Daniels Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Formerly, he was the University Associates Professor of Management at the University of Southern California and Research Professor in the Center for Effective Organizations. His doctorate is in social anthropology from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is author or editor of some seventeen books, including The Executive’s Compass, Leading Change, Creating the Good Life, and, with Edward Lawler, The New American Workplace.