Imagine a hypothetical situation. If the organisations and institutions world over had been managed more effectively, the leaders were more committed to the cause, and the people were more sincere, the world would have been a better place. But this has not happened despite the fact that we came up with the idea of formal Management Education with a structured curriculum to precisely achieve such a state. Today, Management Education is perhaps the most sought after course that claims to make, or rather, manufacture managers. That is, people with that uncanny knack to create surplus and promote prosperity so that the world becomes a better place to live in. However, the transformation that Management Education was supposed to bring in the people attending the courses seems not to come, given the fact that the world still appears to be struggling with the ills that plagued the past when there was no Management Education. Not that Management Education can be panacea for all ills, but mismanagement is certainly the reason for most problems. If we compare the violence, the treachery, the deceit, the poverty, the misery, and the disasters of the past with the present, they seem to be eerily contemporary. We are not talking about a subject like Philosophy that is still groping in the dark to find answers to the problem of evil. Philosophy was just a quest. Management Education was supposed to be the discipline to provide answers to all these. Naturally, the validity of the Management Education paradigm needs to be questioned. Maybe not to reject it but to reinvent it. More so, because it is being increasingly realised that there is a wide gap between what is taught in those four walls of a B-School and what is needed to cope with the challenges of the real world. It was more than three decades ago that a popular book, What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School, in which author Mark McCormack lucidly brought out the point: “What they can’t teach you at a business school”. To prove his point, the author rather caustically suggests that if Thomas Edison had gone to a business school, we would still be using big candles to read books. Corporate behaviour we still are not able to define with certitude, but the instances of corporate misbehaviours are legion that make us rethink on what is to be taught in Management Education. Business frauds, managerial misdemeanors, and corporate felonies are growing in frequency even as B-schools and management gurus are rising in number. Over 500 years ago, British statesman, Sir Thomas More, had raised a basic question on why enterprises fail and had suggested that it was due to poor management. Yet, in spite of more than 11 and a half decades of the start of formal management education, we still seem to be clueless as to what is the antidote to that poor management. Or do we need to reframe the question because it is not the enterprise that fails? It is the human beings that manage the enterprise that fail. The answer then has to be found in causes of this human failure. It all boils down to just one aspect that Management Education imparts the management wisdom but does precious little for managerial character. It is not wisdom versus character. But it certainly is wisdom with character. How to do this is what we need to think about.

Pathak is a professor of management, writer, and an acclaimed public speaker. He can be reached at ppathak.ism@gmail.com