For many years, business school leaders have focussed on producing outputs like revenues for their (often demanding) parent universities, and good salaries for their graduates. But, what if business schools could return to their founding purpose of enhancing the public good by tackling grand challenges? In a recent JMS paper, I report that some business school leaders are attempting to do just this, through a bold transformation change process that I call re-purposing. In this blogpost, I discuss how business school re-purposing involves leaders thinking differently about organizational purpose and acting differently in their roles.  

The Problem: De-Purposed Business Schools and their Technocratic Leadership  

Historically, many business schools were founded with the purpose of enhancing the public good by addressing the (then) contemporary grand challenge of nurturing better-rounded managers who didn’t just know how to count beans, but also how to serve society. Over time, the focus of business school activity was re-directed toward the achievement of outputs such as: higher rankings, bigger financial surpluses, and better salary packages for graduates. This transformation, which I term ‘de-purposing’, has meant that business schools have come nowhere near to realising their potential to enhance the public good by tackling contemporary grand challenges, such as responsible innovation, and environmental degradation.  

During the process of de-purposing, business school leadership lost its sense of vocation (or ‘calling’) to enhance the public good directly. In its place, a technocratic approach to management follows a strand of economic dogma to focus on the production of outputs which are hoped to ‘trickle down’ to benefit society. Within a pattern of incremental change to this model, even some reported reforms appear little more than cosmetic, such as the practice of assigning UN Social Development Goal icons to teaching programme brochures. If not accompanied by purposeful curriculum reform, this activity can be thought of as ‘purpose-washing’. The persistence of this approach to pursuing purpose and the reliance on incremental change can be viewed as a tragic irony because the re-purposing of firms and the management of transformational change are now staples of the teaching and research agendas in many business schools.  

A Remedy? Business School Re-Purposing and a New Approach to Leadership 

Against this backdrop, my study investigated signs of a transformational change among some business schools that I call re-purposing. To explore this phenomenon, I analysed data from a survey of UK business schools, and 8 case studies of early mover schools in the UK and France, that I call Purpose-Driven schools (P-Schools). My analysis of early P-Schools reveals that re-purposing is supported by an approach to leadership that combines the following four features.  

Firstly, leaders of P-Schools think differently about the most ethical and effective way for their organizations to pursue their purpose of enhancing the public good. Instead of hoping that the production of business school outputs may eventually trickle down, P-School leaders view business schools as hubs for nurturing people (students and faculty) and ideas that produce public value more directly, by tackling societal grand challenges.  

Secondly, P-School leaders display a vocational commitment to enhancing the public good of their schools. My case studies illustrate how, instead of ‘way setting’ by specifying road maps, timelines, and output targets, P-School leaders serve more as ‘way finders’. In doing so, they work collaboratively with stakeholders, over long periods of time, to identify a school-specific sense of purpose, and then empower colleagues to innovate purposefully across all of the School’s four main areas of activity: teaching, research, governance, and external engagements.  

Thirdly, P-School leaders operate what can be described as an ‘inside-out’ approach to change because their primary motivation is not to respond to the mounting criticism of business schools. Rather, it is to realize the potential for business schools to enhance the public good in a more direct way.  

Fourthly, P-School leaders eschew incremental approaches to change in favour of transforming their schools. My case studies show that the status quo can be disrupted by leaders infusing a sense of purpose into every facet of their school’s operation, and empowering colleagues to produce aligned innovations such as: redesigning curricula to nurture purposeful graduates for purposeful careers, encouraging multi-disciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries, and fostering partnerships with communities and organizations that are at the forefront of tackling grand challenges. 

How to Realize the Potential of Re-Purposing 

As my case examples show, business school re-purposing is not quick, easy, or well-established. The context remains dominated by conflicting, and deeply ingrained thinking that supports the pursuit of purpose through outputs, technocratic management, and incremental change. As a result, those business school leaders who do seek to re-purpose their organizations face the complex task of balancing the production of outputs with their calling to transform their organizations by deploying their rich and varied resources to tackle grand challenges more directly.  

Against these powerful forces of inertia, early progress towards the re-purposing of business school is promising and inspiring. But it is also fragile. This precarity is likely to be exacerbated by growing financial pressures in the higher education systems of many countries. However, my study shows that the re-purposing of business schools can be possible, if their leaders begin to think and act differently.