Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

Abstract

Do business schools actually make good on their promises of “innovative,” “outside-the-box” thinking to train business leaders who will put society ahead of money-making? Do they help society by making better business leaders? This book asserts that they do not and they never have. In throwing down a gauntlet on the business of business schools, the book examines the frictions, conflicts, and contradictions at the heart of these enterprises and details the way business schools have failed to resolve them. Beginning with founding of the Wharton School in 1881, the book measures these schools' aspirations against their actual accomplishments and tells the full and disappointing history of missed opportunities, unmet aspirations, and educational mistakes. It then poses a set of crucial questions about the role and function of American business schools. The results are not pretty. Posing a set of crucial questions about the function of American business schools, the book is pugnacious and controversial. It argues that the impressive façades of business school buildings resemble nothing so much as collegiate versions of Oz. It pulls back the curtain to reveal a story of failure to meet the expectations of the public, their missions, their graduates, and their own lofty aspirations of producing moral and ethical business leaders.