Innovation

SPRING 2011

THE

Exchange

The Exchange is a

series of papers on

contemporary topics

relevant to curricular

Haas School of Business:

Building Innovative Leaders

Richard Lyons

Bank of America Dean

Haas School of Business

University of California, Berkeley

The face of business schools is changing and I

believe it has to. Just ask people on the street

whether they think business schools have been

breeding grounds for overconfidence and self-focus;

many would answer with a resounding, “Yes.” Is

this more perception than reality? In some cases,

yes, but many people are still convinced that business school education is an underlying symptom of

what’s wrong with business—and worse, that it

somehow led to the global financial crisis. Business

schools are certainly not entirely to blame, but we

must view this issue as worthy of our attention.

innovation in

MBA education,

based on the work

of the MBA Roundtable.

The MBA Roundtable

is a collaborative,

nonprofit association

that facilitates the

exchange of information

and resources on

MBA curricular

content and delivery.

www.mbaroundtable.org

Perhaps even more importantly, the future is

demanding different business leadership because

management challenges of the 21st century are

and will be different from those of the 20th century.

My own children will be around in 2080 and when

I look at the world they will live in, what comes to

mind is the word, “unsustainabilities”. I define this

term as commercial paths we are on where a

straight-line continuation is not going to work—

where a straight line will hit a wall certainly in my

children’s lifetimes, if not my own. There are

many examples of such unsustainabilities: healthcare expenditure, energy use, public education, the

economics of aging, carbon, global access to safe

water, and so on. These linear paths and others

need bending and the real bending will be the

work of business. We need more people who can

bend them, not just CEOs, but people working

at every level in...