In this article, Raj proposes reimagining business education through a more holistic understanding of human beings who are capable of cooperation and purpose-driven work, without disregarding the complexities of ethical decision-making.
His approach preserves financial rigor while broadening classroom dialogue to cultivate leaders who foster organizational flourishing and measure success beyond graduate salaries.
The Business School the World Is Waiting For
Christopher Marquis has done business education a favor. His New York Times essay of October 18, “I Teach at a Business School, It’s Time to Shut Them Down,” has set off a great deal of soul-searching among business faculty and deans. He concludes that business schools can’t be repaired and should be abolished. He’s right to sound the alarm. He’s wrong about the cure.
I’ve been a business professor for 42 years. Since earning my doctorate at Columbia University, I’ve taught at Boston University, George Mason University, Bentley University, Babson College, and now Tecnológico de Monterrey. My frustration with “business as usual” led me to co-found the Conscious Capitalism movement, so I read his essay with more than passing interest.
Here is where I come out. The world’s business schools form one of the largest educational systems ever built. Every year they shape millions of people who go on to run companies, banks, hospitals, and startups, and, increasingly, the governments that decide whether our societies flourish or falter. Dismantling that system would mean throwing away one of our strongest levers for change just when we need it.
The harder and more hopeful task is to reimagine business education from first principles. Business schools can be powerful allies in building the world most of us want, one of peace and shared prosperity in which all life can flourish, sustainably, for centuries to come. We can’t build that world unless business education is grounded in timeless wisdom and humanistic principles.
Where business education went wrong
There’s a systems principle I return to often: every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Business education didn’t drift into its current form by accident. For half a century it has rested on a single model of human nature, Homo economicus, the rational, isolated maximizer of narrow self-interest. Economists adopted that assumption because it made the math tractable. Nobody ever showed it to be true. On top of it we built the Friedman doctrine, agency theory, the efficient market hypothesis, and much of modern strategy. In 2005 the late Sumantra Ghoshal of London Business School warned that bad management theories were destroying good management practices. Theories about people often become self-fulfilling. Teach a generation of managers that employees are shirkers and executives are mercenaries, and you’ll get organizations full of both.
That doesn’t mean we should throw out what works. Case studies are a good example. The best cases are extraordinary teaching tools. A great case puts students inside a real decision, with incomplete information and real people at stake, and it builds judgment in a way no lecture can. Some of the most memorable moments of my teaching life have come in case discussions. The trouble is what too many cases leave out: the failures and the voices of people affected far from the executive suite.
I’ll add a confession of my own. I began teaching marketing management to graduate students at 26, while I was still finishing my dissertation at Columbia. My fifty students averaged 37 years old, and many of them practiced marketing for a living. I had never spent a day as a marketing manager. My doctoral training hadn’t devoted a single minute to teaching. It was entirely about research, most of which never touched practice. We would never let someone who had never examined a patient teach surgery, yet business schools do the equivalent without a second thought.
Why business schools matter more than ever
Change from within has already begun, in small but real ways. Marquis himself points to the University of Vermont, whose Sustainable Innovation MBA runs sustainability through the entire curriculum and places students inside mission-driven companies for the summer. Other schools are running their own experiments. At the Conscious Enterprise Center at Tecnológico de Monterrey, we’re working to reform business education at our own institution, and we take part in broader efforts with the same aim, including the Global Alliance for Conscious Business Education, the Humanistic Leadership Academy, and Reimagining Business Education. What the field still lacks is a shared, ambitious vision everyone can rally around.
Medical schools justify themselves by health, and law schools by justice. Critics say business schools can point only to the private pursuit of profit. I see it differently. Business is how human beings cooperate at scale to create value for one another. It feeds us, houses us, heals us, and connects us. Colin Mayer of Oxford’s Saïd Business School defines the purpose of business as producing “profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet.” Profit is essential, and it comes from serving people well. Seen this way, a business school exists for human and planetary flourishing, a public good every bit as important as health or justice.
Needed: A fuller understanding of human beings
If the root problem is a partial theory of human nature, that’s where the fix has to start. My colleague David Sloan Wilson (an evolutionary biologist) and I have proposed Homo florens, the flourishing human being, as a foundation for business education. The institutions we design bring out the best or the worst in us. People are meaning-seeking, cooperative creatures with a deep capacity to flourish, and organizations built to help them do so tend to outperform those built on the assumption of narrow self-interest.
None of this denies that we’re self-interested. We are. We’re also self-aware and increasingly conscious. Self-interest, fear and opportunism are real, and anyone who has run a business has run into all of them. The mistake of the last fifty years was to take one part of human nature, treat it as the whole, and build institutions that reward only that part. Swapping one dominant paradigm for another would repeat the mistake. We see Homo florens in an ongoing dialogue with Homo economicus rather than simply displacing it.
Evolution gave us both, and the evidence for this is strong. Within any group, selfish individuals tend to beat cooperative ones. Between groups, cooperative groups beat selfish ones. That’s why both tendencies live in each of us, and why our surroundings have so much to do with which one shows up. For a manager the question becomes practical: what brings out the cooperator in people, and what brings out the opportunist?
I think about this often in Mexico, where I now teach. Many business leaders here learned caution the hard way, through broken contracts, theft, extortion, and institutions that failed to protect them. When they hesitate to adopt a more trusting, human-centered approach, they’re responding sensibly to what they’ve lived through. Something similar happens inside any organization that has been run for years on surveillance, forced ranking, and narrow incentives. People adapt to the system they’re in, and a system that rewards Homo economicus behavior gets plenty of it. Simply telling them to trust more would be naïve and unfair to their experience.
A better answer is to build trust deliberately. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics for showing how communities around the world manage shared resources without either a central authority or a free-for-all. Wilson worked with her to generalize the design principles behind those successes so they could apply to any group. They include a clear shared purpose, fair sharing of costs and benefits, decisions that involve the people affected, transparent monitoring of agreed behavior, graduated responses to misconduct, and quick, fair ways to resolve conflict. None of these principles assume people are saints. They make cooperation safe and opportunism costly, so trust can grow step by step and be checked along the way. In low-trust settings, that’s how Homo florens gets room to emerge: through small promises kept, open books, fair processes, and leaders who are willing to extend trust first and keep extending it.
I’ve seen what happens when students encounter this fuller picture. At Babson, during a class discussion of Triodos Bank, the Dutch values-based bank that lends only to enterprises creating social, cultural, or environmental value, two of my students were literally in tears as they said, “We didn’t know banking could be this beautiful!” I told them that any business can be beautiful when it operates with love, purpose, and values. No one had ever shown them that finance could be an act of care. A reimagined business school should produce moments like that every day.
The real cost of doing the right thing
Marquis doubts the win-win story. He is correct that it doesn’t always work out. But the fact is that over the long run, the interests of a company’s stakeholders are deeply intertwined. A business can’t thrive for long while its employees are miserable, its customers feel exploited, its suppliers are squeezed, and its community resents it. That’s the core insight of Conscious Capitalism. But “over the long run” hides a lot. In the short run, doing the right thing often costs real money, and sometimes it costs a leader their job.
When CVS stopped selling cigarettes in 2014, it gave up roughly $2 billion a year in sales. When Costco’s leaders refused to cut wages and benefits to please Wall Street, one analyst complained that at Costco “it’s better to be an employee or a customer than a shareholder.” He turned out to be badly wrong: Costco has been an outstanding stock to own for over five, ten, and twenty years. In 2020, Emmanuel Faber made Danone the first listed company in France to become an entreprise à mission. Within a year, activist investors had forced him out. Paying a dignified wage before productivity catches up, keeping people on through a downturn or turning away a lucrative customer whose practices you can’t defend all carry a price. Sometimes the payoff comes years later. Sometimes it never fully comes.
Pretending otherwise does students no favors. If we teach them that virtue always pays, the first time it doesn’t they’ll decide the whole idea was a sales pitch. Values get tested precisely when they cost something. Many apparent trade-offs dissolve with enough creativity and patience, but some don’t. Students need practice making the case to a skeptical board, sequencing investments so the enterprise survives long enough to reap the rewards, and deciding in advance which lines they won’t cross at any price. Leaders reach win-win through tension, imagination and, at times, sacrifice. That makes the conscious approach more demanding than the conventional approach, and more honest about what it asks of us.
The MBA reimagined
Imagine a business school that assumes neither that we’re inherently selfish nor that we’re naturally saints. Here is the core of an MBA built on Homo florens: fourteen required courses for leaders who refuse to choose between profit and purpose, or between intelligence and wisdom. It keeps all the analytical tools a manager needs. Students still build discounted cash flow models, run regressions and learn to read a balance sheet. What changes is the view of people and of business that frames those tools, and the questions students learn to ask before using them.
Beyond the curriculum
New courses alone won’t be enough. Reimagining business education means rethinking who we are as professors, why we do what we do, how we teach, what we research and how we define success.
We should prepare doctoral students to teach as rigorously as we prepare them to publish, and we should value faculty who have practiced what they teach. Business schools ought to welcome experienced executives, entrepreneurs and civic leaders into the classroom as full colleagues, the way medical schools do with practicing physicians.
Finally, success. As long as rankings reward schools mainly for their graduates’ starting salaries, schools will steer students toward the highest-paying jobs, and the same few industries will absorb the best of each class year after year. We should measure what we claim to care about: whether our graduates build organizations where people thrive, whether their companies leave communities and ecosystems better off, and whether the graduates themselves lead meaningful lives. Our purpose should be the long-term flourishing of our students, the organizations that employ them, society and all life on the planet. What we teach and measure must serve all of these at once, never one at the expense of the others.
Business education is never value-neutral. It shapes who our students become and what kind of world they go on to build. That makes our schools dangerous when they’re built on bad ideas. It also makes them one of the most powerful forces for good we have, if we find the courage to rebuild them on better ones.
So here is my invitation to deans, faculty, accreditors and alumni around the world. Let’s keep the house and rebuild its foundation, starting with an honest account of who we are as human beings and what business is ultimately for. The question for every business school is whether we’re willing to rise to the occasion. Do we have a choice?