The future of management education

Business schools came of age in one technological era and now face another. The modern model took shape after the Second World War, when a field of trade schools became a research-based discipline backed by accreditation and a shared sense of what rigor meant. That settlement held for half a century. It is now under a pressure it was not built for.

The pressure is easy to misread. The worry is not that students will cheat with AI, though some will. The deeper problem is that AI makes learning effortless, and effort was never an accident of education. It was the mechanism. Expertise forms through the struggle of working a problem without the answer in hand. Remove the struggle and you remove the formation, while the credential still prints. A school can graduate students who have read everything and decided nothing.

I have initiated and led change in four triple crown accredited business schools (among the 1%), and the lesson that outlasts the rest is this. Institutions defend their formats long after the world has moved past them. The task now is to be clear about what management education is actually for once answers are free: to build practical wisdom, character, and the capacity to act well under uncertainty, the things a model cannot hand a student. That purpose is older than the lecture hall and will outlast it.

This is the work I take into the Global Peter Drucker Forum and into the writing gathered here, from what ingenuity under hard conditions teaches us to why effortless learning is a problem worth naming. The format will change. The reason a business school exists does not have to.