Is there a better way to teach business?

"I was asked to be the keynote speaker recently for an important conference at Rutgers Business School on the future of business education. I thought it would be helpful for business school leadership and students and for recruiters of business school graduates to recap my message in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece. It is called The Future[s] of Business Education: Two Strategy Paths. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here."

"I started with a bit of audience participation by asking all tenure stream academics from business schools to stand up. I then asked them to sit down if their school has in its MBA program a required statistics course that provides instruction on how to make an inference from a sample to the universe from which the sample is drawn. As I expected, 100% of the audience sat down. That is now completely standard fare."

"I asked them to stand back up and then to sit down if their school seeks to convince MBA students that they should make their decisions based on rigorous data analysis. Again, as I expected, 100% sat down. So, I got confirmation that business education universally teaches students both how to make inferences from data and that they should make data-based decisions."

Conference attendees included deans and senior faculty from leading U.S. business schools such as Cornell, Goizueta, Haas, Kellogg, Stern, Ross, Tepper, Tuck, and Wharton. A standing/sitting exercise confirmed that tenure-stream academic programs universally require MBA students to learn how to infer from samples to populations and to base decisions on rigorous data analysis. Statistics instruction emphasizes that valid inference requires representative samples drawn from the universe of interest. Business education therefore instills both the mechanics of statistical inference and the normative claim that decisions should be data-driven.

Read at Fast Company