The future of business education

Johan has spent two decades helping business schools reform themselves from the inside, in four institutions with almost nothing in common.

At Copenhagen Business School, arriving in 2009 to change a fragmented institution perceived by industry as detached from practice, he ran 160 interviews before taking office, and initiated a strategy process involving 1,300 people. The outcome was five simple guiding principles and the focused Business in Society strategy that outlived his presidency. A DKK 50 million deficit turned into a DKK 120 million surplus, a merger with a small private executive education institution, and 38 op-eds in local business magazines in under two years to build the business in society brand. Then the internal academic politics won, and both he and the chairman of the board chose to resign. He later wrote the episode up as a peer-reviewed article, with limitations named in the title.

At Jönköping he inherited a business plan carrying 72 priorities and a school in debt to its owner. Consulting faculty throughout, the leadership team cut those priorities to three and dissolved all five academic departments, which served neither the strategy nor the students. Every new leader was recruited from inside. After four intensive years, in 2015 Jönköping became the first business school in Sweden accredited by both EQUIS and AACSB, and by then it was debt-free and running a healthy surplus.

Following the four-year tenure at Jönköping, Johan joined the global Hult International Business School first Chief Startegy Officer then as Chief Academic Officer for eight years. With campuses in London, Boston, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Dubai, Hult face the different challenges. A private school across four continents that put teaching first, it had not systematically encouraged or measured research output, only teaching excellence. Following the strategic alliance with Ashridge Business School, this made it hard to explain the combined school to accreditors. Rather than retrofit a conventional research model, the team he led built one that fitted the mission and culture to be close to, and relevant for business practice. Hult (with Ashridge) was accredited in 2017 on that model and later secured triple accreditation across all campuses. Johan also initiated and drove one of the first implementations of Generative AI in higher education in Hult, from two months after Chat GPT was introduced to the world end 2022. After eight intensive years and several cycles of strategic changes he chose to step down as CAO, and for two years served as independent, part-time Advisor to the President.

A Danish public university, a Swedish foundation-owned school, a global private one. Different countries, different governance, different money. Reform worked in all of them, which is the point and also the problem.

He has been making the case in public the whole time, and arguing with the accreditors as well as inside the schools. Since 2014, in Harvard Business Review, Global Focus, AACSB Insights, the EFMD blog and at the Drucker Forum: that business education had become anachronistic and needed renaissance leaders; that students must be conversant in STEM without losing the humanities, because it is not either/or but both; that research written by academics for academics is a failure of purpose; that banning ChatGPT would fail, published in January 2023 while much of the sector was buying detection software. In 2017 he told AACSB's own magazine that its faculty-qualification standard should be less fixed and more mission-driven.

Two decades of doing it, alongside a great many other people. Twelve years of publishing it. The field has not moved.

The remaining explanation is coordination. What has never existed is a mechanism that makes one school's improvement worth another school's while. No single party has an interest in departing from the current way of working, and a school that raises its standards generates benefits that accrue equally to schools that invested nothing. What broke that trap in 1959 was not the Ford and Carnegie diagnosis but what arrived with it: money tied to compliance, faculty retraining at scale, and accreditation standards that made the new model the minimum bar.

Rebuilding that architecture for a field with no centre is the work Johan is now doing with and key stakeholders in the field.