Professional Development Workshop Entitled “Impactful Approaches for Ensuring the Relevance of Business Schools and Tackling Grand Challenges” at AOM, Aug 2024 in Chicago, USA.
Business schools seem to have lost their way and need to reinvent themselves to be relevant and contribute to tackling the grand challenges of our times. The “triumph of emptiness”—a phrase used by Mats Alvesson—is evinced by the near-obsession displayed by business schools for institutional rankings carried out by journalists and stage-managing accreditations by neglecting the core processes of business schools. No longer can efforts to address symptoms work; the root causes require tackling by carrying out impactful shifts in our beliefs to create humane, socially sensitive, and ecologically evolved leaders. In the proposed PDW, I share two innovative approaches—practiced and proven—of a) drawing from Vedic literature, exercising dharmic leadership by visualizing ideally what the position should do and acting based on this realization, and b) instead of viewing people as rational economic, conceptualizing them as systemic economic with multiple faculties in dynamic interaction and influencing each other. These two approaches fuel three paradigm shifts in the practices of managing business schools: a) making the vision, mission, and values functional from being ornamental; b) focusing on the core business school processes rather than going for journalists-led rankings and stage-managing accreditations; and c) practicing the management principles we teach students, enabling them to learn by experiencing them. The PDW is designed to trigger the imagination of participants while the activities will enable participants to have a few impactful takeaways that they can implement when they get back to work and improve the functioning of their business schools.