What ails XXX ?

The day I walked into my business school , all those years ago, I heard this term - "What ails XXX ?- substitute name of business school for XXX. Many years on, I still hear this rhetorical question. From many business schools. Its nice that they do ask this question, but often they stop at that and simply gaze at their own navel.

Imagine an organisation, where you have virtually irrelevant performance targets, no serious performance evaluation, you are unlikely to be sacked, where you bristle against authority and do your own thing, where compensation levels are low, but have little relationship to performance and where demand often exceeds supply, so you don't have to worry about capacity utilisation. That closely approximates a business school - I am being deliberately harsh to make a point. Business schools rarely practice what they preach. That's probably why they hate to take anybody from the industry inside.

Business schools must be run like a corporate - with all its faults, a corporate is still the best form of an organisation we have invented. Hire the best talent. Pay market rates but linked to performance. Sack professors if they are inefficient (what a revolutionary thought). Set sensible performance targets (not number of unreadable papers that are published). Tailor the product to what industry needs; not what you would like to give . Have some form of an organisation structure and accountability - not anarchy in the name of academic freedom.

The CEO of a business school must be from industry, not academia. As I posted before, professors have to go back to industry once in 10 years - not doing consulting, but doing an actual job, where if you fail, you get sacked. At least 10% of professors must NOT have a Phd - ie they must not be career academic types.

If I were to say any of these things in the hallowed portals of a business school, I would get pelted with rotten eggs. But that's the beauty of a blog - I can only be figuratively pelted; not literally.

So in answer to What ails XXX ?, I say Nothing. Just practice what you preach.