Why Business Schools Need to Teach More Than Business

Business schools are under growing pressure to change.

Students want purpose, not just paychecks. Employers want leaders who can navigate uncertainty, values conflicts, and social responsibility. Society increasingly expects business leaders to address problems like climate change, inequality, and technological disruption.

Yet despite these demands, much of business education still looks the same. Courses emphasize technical skills, analytical tools, and individual performance, often treating social impact as an add-on rather than a core concern.

In a paper published in Business & Society, co-authored with Meg Small and Linda Bixby, we argue that this approach is no longer sufficient. Preparing leaders for today’s world requires a more fundamental shift in how business education is designed, one rooted in human flourishing rather than narrow notions of performance .

The limits of technical excellence

For decades, business schools have been remarkably successful at teaching students how to analyze markets, optimize processes, and maximize efficiency. These skills helped fuel economic growth during the twentieth century and remain valuable today.

But many of the most pressing challenges facing leaders are not technical in nature. They are moral, relational, and systemic. They involve trade-offs among competing values, coordination across institutions, and consequences that unfold over time.

When education focuses too heavily on tools and metrics, it can unintentionally reinforce short-term thinking, individualism, and a narrow view of success. Graduates may be highly capable but poorly prepared to grapple with the broader societal implications of their decisions.

From individual success to collective impact

The central idea of the paper is simple: business education should be designed to help people flourish as human beings, not just perform as managers.

Human flourishing draws on a long tradition in philosophy and psychology that emphasizes purpose, growth, autonomy, relationships, and the ability to navigate complex environments. Importantly, flourishing is not just about individual well-being. When individuals develop these capacities, they are better equipped to contribute to collective outcomes that strengthen organizations and society.

In this view, personal purpose and societal impact are not competing goals. They are deeply connected.

What a flourishing-centered education looks like

Reorienting business education around human flourishing would require changes in how students learn, not just what they learn.

Rather than organizing curricula strictly around functional disciplines like finance or marketing, education would be structured around real-world challenges such as climate resilience, public health, or economic inclusion. These challenges become the context through which students develop technical skills, ethical judgment, and collaborative capacity.

Classrooms would also look different. Instead of emphasizing passive absorption of frameworks, they would function more like laboratories for experimentation, where students test ideas, learn from failure, and reflect on the human consequences of decisions.

Finally, students would spend more time outside the classroom, engaging directly with communities, organizations, and public institutions. These experiences help students confront perspectives different from their own and build the relational skills required to lead in diverse, high-stakes environments.

Why this matters now

At a moment when trust in business and institutions is fragile, the way leaders are educated matters more than ever. Business schools play a quiet but powerful role in shaping how future leaders define responsibility, success, and impact.

A focus on human flourishing offers a way forward. It aligns professional excellence with moral awareness, individual ambition with collective well-being, and business education with the needs of a changing world.

Rethinking business education is not just about improving curricula. It is about redefining the kind of leaders society asks business schools to produce.

Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503251340762