Reclaiming Managerialism in Business Education

• Business schools face a paradox: They teach management science but often fail to apply those same principles to their own governance and leadership.
• When practiced ethically and strategically, managerialism can align mission, leadership, and performance systems to produce stronger institutional outcomes.
• Schools that treat accreditation, strategy, and performance management as tools for genuine improvement—not symbolic compliance—increase both their credibility and their social value.

 
Business schools confront a striking paradox. They teach the science and art of management, yet they often fail to apply those same principles to their own governance. In doing so, they dismiss the importance of managerialism—the application of those principles.

The contradiction lies not in managerialism itself, but in its distortion. Critics often portray it as an ideology that prioritizes profits over people and society. Properly understood, however, managerialism is the strategic and ethical application of management science to advance institutional mission and deliver impact across profits, people, and planet.

In the context of business schools, managerialism means shaping vision, culture, and outcomes. Business schools need leaders who can translate management theory into values-driven practices, ensuring managerialism becomes a vehicle for mission-driven leadership rather than the narrow pursuit of profits. 

Drawing on 18 years of corporate leadership and experience as an academic and accreditation reviewer, I believe business schools should reclaim managerialism to link their governance to the principles they teach. This requires them to clarify their purpose and intention, align their missions and values, elevate their leadership, and reimagine their performance management systems.

Output Management: Signal of Purpose and Intention

I am not the only one to argue for more attention to effective managerialism: In their May 2025 publication, John Fiset and three co-authors expose the credibility gap between espoused values and actual practices. And in his 2022 book The Triumph of Emptiness, Mats Alvesson critiques the “grandiosity culture” in higher education, showing how rankings and branding hollow out substantive missions.

By contrast, strong corporate management practices reveal pathways for business schools to strengthen their governance and foster environments where faculty can flourish. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman famously argues that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

In other words, there is nothing shameful about pursuing profit, but effective managerialism requires that it occur within the ethical rules of fair competition. Far from a moral luxury, corporate ethics strengthen financial performance—proving that integrity, when embedded in culture, pays.

Stronger outcomes attract stronger applicants. Brand improves. Demand rises. Profits follow. These are the natural consequences of ethically earned purpose.

Across the globe, some business schools invert this logic, placing profitability above ethical governance. Consequently, unethical methods—such as inflated third-party contracting—have become commonplace. As enrollments become the priority, some schools lower entry standards and promote superficial awards secured through registration fees or sponsorships. Curricular innovation takes a back seat, and the societal value of management education erodes. This is “input management” at its weakest—where administrators prioritize superficial metrics over building institutions capable of sustained positive results.

Schools that emphasize “output management”—by focusing on practices that create lasting value for stakeholders—tell a different story. Imagine a school that sets its purpose around graduate success, aiming for graduates to receive 2X return on investment (where X is the student’s total cost including tuition, housing, overhead). This is the case for the Faculty of Management Studies at the University of Delhi and the Department of Management Studies at IIT Delhi, which consistently deliver returns exceeding 2X ROI. Many other well-managed private business schools in India achieve returns of 1.5X to 2X ROI.

This is not a rigid formula but a purposeful goal that signals societal value and positions schools as credible institutions. To get there, schools must design dynamic and fair processes, refine curricula, innovate pedagogy, and develop faculty to improve outcomes. Stronger outcomes attract stronger applicants. Brand improves. Demand rises. Profits follow. These are the natural consequences of ethically earned purpose.

Mission Statements: From Ornaments to Instruments

Business schools often treat vision, mission, and value statements as administrative ornaments—conceptually pleasant but strategically inert. Too many institutions mistake disconnected activities and tactical initiatives for strategy.

I observed firsthand an institution whose stated values emphasized honesty, integrity, and transparency, yet did not communicate COVID-19 infections to faculty, staff, or students. Its commitments to secure the leadership of faculty for important initiatives went unfulfilled. Such administrative manipulations hindered progress, making it increasingly difficult for faculty to achieve ambitious objectives.

Such dissonance underscores a simple truth: Character defines leadership. Genuine leaders embody the values their institutions proclaim. Without this embodiment, values remain slogans; with it, they become the foundation of trust and transformation.

As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras argue in Built to Last, visionary organizations view their vision and mission statements not as lists of goals, but as strategic anchors that align culture, resource allocation, and long-term priorities to create sustainable advantage.

Beyond Rhetoric: The Conceptual Modeling Technique

To help schools move beyond rhetoric to true strategic purpose, I developed the Conceptual Modeling Technique (CMT). First introduced in an October 2024 AACSB Insights article, the technique begins with the assumption that vision and mission are tightly coupled, collaboratively developed with all stakeholders, and professionally crafted using proven managerial techniques.

Consider, for example, a school that wants to integrate its vision and multiple mission elements into a coherent strategic framework. It might have high-level goals such as creating an inspiring culture and developing its infrastructure, as well as more foundational goals such as refining its students’ entrepreneurial skills and innovating its admissions and career placement processes.

Using CMT, stakeholders from across a school’s community collectively examine each element to define pathways to achievement and identify overlapping initiatives. Applying the Pareto Principle (which holds that 80 percent of outputs come from 20 percent of inputs), community members would collaboratively distill and simplify key initiatives, transforming abstract statements into a coherent institutional strategy.

Leadership Quality: From Compliance to Transformation

A 2024 McKinsey study finds that nearly 45 percent of the variation in corporate performance can be traced to the effectiveness of the chief executive. This underscores that responsible, insightful, and courageous leadership is not a peripheral attribute but the most decisive factor in shaping organizational destiny.

When academic administrators lack leadership and academic credibility, their governance can regress into repressive, feudalistic practices that stifle discourse, innovation, and growth. Faculty input is discouraged—or even subtly penalized. This creates a climate where conformity is rewarded and intellectual input is treated as disloyalty. Over time, talented faculty seek better prospects elsewhere, and those who stay foster a culture of “quiet quitting,” marked by minimal effort, emotional detachment, and a dash for the door the instant the day concludes. 

Responsible, insightful, and courageous leadership is not a peripheral attribute but the most decisive factor in shaping organizational destiny.

To confront such a leadership crisis, institutions must abandon cost‑centric practices defined by low faculty salaries, chronic understaffing, and coercive compliance. Instead, they should embrace a values‑driven model anchored in teaching excellence, research impact, and the professional success of graduates.

Two objectives are imperative for schools that want to follow such principles of effective managerialism:

1. They must appoint competent academic leaders. Leadership is not a checklist—it is a force. It begins with vision, competence, and character, but comes alive when vision is translated into fair processes, when competence unlocks people’s hidden potential, and when character creates a culture of joy.
2. They must strengthen their boards. Boards are crucibles of institutional destiny. When stacked with friends and loyalists who echo the leader’s preferences, they morph into rubber-stamp clubs. The result? Programs stagnate, faculty disengage, and credibility steadily erodes. But strong boards are composed of proven professionals who demand accountability, discern genuine academic vision, and select leaders capable of translating outcomes into enduring institutional value.

Institutions that fulfill both imperatives lay the foundation for transformational leadership. Such leadership is grounded not only in competence but in dharma: the duty to envision what ought to be done and to act with integrity, excellence, and societal impact.

Performance Management: From Ritual to Strategic Alignment

Performance management systems (PMS) are meant to turn lofty institutional aspirations into tangible, measurable impact. But as Michael Armstrong and Duncan Brown observe, appraisal of faculty performance can become a hollow annual ritual, carried out in ways that are mechanistic, repressive, and detached from purpose.

For example, at one institution I observed, the PMS became an instrument of control rather than improvement. Faculty were required to obtain prior written approval even to attend online professional development sessions off-hours. A rigid point-based assessment equated major accomplishments such as designing and launching a doctoral program or organizing an international research conference with routine administrative tasks.

I have seen other business schools deploy their performance management systems similarly, resulting in faculty working in isolation. At these schools, performance management was a bureaucratic exercise divorced from the theories their faculty taught.

But what happens when institutions practice management theories in their governance? Let me share a strategic approach that emerged from my consulting work with higher education institutions. Based on the goal-setting theory of motivation and built on CMT, this method encompasses the following steps:

• Creating a collaborative vision. Directors and deans collectively shape the institution’s annual goals.
• Goal-setting with peers. Program chairs, area heads, and faculty then craft their own goals, testing them in workshops and sharpening them through peer input.
• Aligning objectives. Faculty discuss each goal with their deans and department heads in person—clarifying pathways, securing resources, and forging a shared commitment.
• Layering accountability and social pressure. The vice chancellor conducts monthly reviews of the institutional heads’ goals, while faculty goals are reviewed quarterly in the presence of peers. This visibility leverages the social process to foster healthy internal competition, mutual support, and collective ownership.
• Engaging in celebratory governance. Administrators turn quarterly presentations into celebrations where faculty share their achievements with pride, confront bottlenecks openly, and co-create solutions.

Through this process, schools can transform their PMS into strategic compasses that energize faculty, unlock initiative, and foster cultures of shared achievement.

Accreditation: Checklist or Catalyst?

Accreditation standards serve a dual purpose: to guide business schools toward enhanced quality, relevance, and societal impact and to formally recognize schools that meet these expectations through rigorous evidence and demonstrable outcomes. The purpose is noble, but how business schools engage with accreditation reveals a great deal about their leadership cultures.

Some schools reduce accreditation to a branding exercise—a fragmented checklist of compulsory tasks, a quick fix to boost revenues. It becomes a process to be stage-managed to placate peer review teams. This is the “input management” mindset, focused on appearances, not substance. When institutions treat accreditation as theater, they strip accreditation of its spirit, erode their credibility, and betray the public trust.

For schools practicing true managerialism, accreditation is not a checklist to be ticked off, but a catalyst for creating enduring value.

To guard against these tactics, my national peer review meetings emphasize two practices that cut through the façade. First, I advocate for conducting confidential surveys of faculty, staff, and students who can reveal their lived experiences and share whether leadership cultivates excellence or merely enforces compliance.

Second, before the peer review visit, I conduct a social media audit to compare the institution’s social media claims against supporting evidence. Because ethics and values are habitual, a culture of distortion inevitably spills over into public messaging.

Ultimately, academic leaders should use accreditation as a lever for transformation that strengthens teaching, deepens research, elevates institutional reputation, and creates lasting impact. For schools practicing true managerialism, accreditation is not a checklist to be ticked off, but a catalyst for creating enduring value.

Built to Conform, or Built to Last?

Business schools cannot afford to preach management science while practicing its distortion. Rather, they must resolve this paradox by reclaiming managerialism in its ethical, strategic sense. They must practice management that is anchored in purpose, vision, leadership, and performance, and they must view accreditation as a pathway to transformation, not compliance.

Institutions that align governance with the principles they teach will not only elevate faculty and students but also restore credibility and societal impact. The choice is stark: Do we choose hollow rituals that erode trust, or do we demonstrate courageous leadership that builds institutions that last?