“I have never seen so much change in all my years as a business school professor,” confided one dean to me at the end of last year. I was about to agree. But then the occasion had a haunting sense of déjà vu about it.
Because it is hard to think of any year in the past 15 when one professor or another has not said the same thing to me. Be it 1999, 2003, 2011 … this was the year that had seen unprecedented change in business schools, they said. But what exactly has changed?
Certainly for those students on the world’s top 100 MBA programmes, very little at all seems to have changed in the past 15 years – or arguably the past 50. They still take a year or more to apply to business school, they study intensely, usually for two years, and they are taught by professors who have a job for life. They build up an address book to die for, and then they use financial donations to ensure nothing changes, preserving their business school experience for future generations.