The article, authored by Jean Garner Stead, calls for an urgent re-evaluation of business education to foster leaders capable of creating sustainable value in a rapidly changing world
While six planetary boundaries collapse and inequality reaches obscene levels, business schools continue training tomorrow’s leaders with yesterday’s deadly paradigms. Generation Z students arrive desperate to learn how to address the polycrisis – the interconnected crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and social inequality. They graduate equipped only to optimize the system destroying the planet. We’re educating leaders for a world that no longer exists. Business education itself has become an externality we can no longer afford. This failure requires a complete ecosystem transformation to enable Sustainable Strategic Management (SSM) – the revolutionary approach that positions business within social and ecological systems to create integrated value while regenerating natural and social capital, see ‘Revolutionizing Business with Sustainable Strategic Management’.
The broken ecosystem
Andrew Hoffman’s groundbreaking analysis in Business Schools and the Noble Purpose of the Market reveals why individual reform efforts keep failing: the entire higher business education ecosystem is built on false neoclassical economic assumptions. Accreditation bodies like AACSB reward traditional research productivity over pedagogical transformation. Ranking systems measure starting salaries, not planetary regeneration. Textbook publishers perpetuate neoclassical frameworks because standardization is profitable. Corporate recruiters hire for skills that optimize the old paradigm. Faculty incentive structures reward publications, reinforcing traditional thinking. Funding models depend on donors invested in the status quo.
Most insidious of all, faculty themselves suffer from paradigm paralysis and status quo bias. Even well-intentioned professors trained exclusively in neoclassical frameworks struggle to teach what they’ve never learned. This isn’t malice – it’s cognitive capture. The dreams of transforming business education get perpetually deferred by the very people who must lead the change, trapped in mental models they cannot see past. This paradigm paralysis makes the dean’s orchestration role essential.
Hoffman demonstrates you can’t change just curriculum – you must transform the entire ecosystem. To understand what must die and what must be resurrected, examine the stark contrast between current education and what survival demands.
What we’re teaching vs. what we must teach
The gap between business school curriculum and planetary reality has become a chasm. We still teach Porter’s Five Forces and Value Chain as if industry boundaries matter during an interconnected polycrisis. Finance optimizes shareholder returns without accounting for natural and social capital depletion. Marketing drives consumption growth on a finite planet already requiring 1.7 Earths. Operations ignore regenerative potential. Neoclassical economics treats the environment and society as externalities. Separation thinking pervades every course. This neoclassical death must give way to ecological resurrection.
The required transformation demands new foundations. Ecological economics must replace neoclassical assumptions across all courses. The Open Systems Model, must become the central framework showing business nested within society within an ecosystem. SSM principles must guide strategic thinking from competitive to enterprise level. Finance must embrace multiple capital forms with true cost accounting. Marketing must shape sustainable consumption patterns. Operations must focus on regenerative design and flourishing circularity. Strategy must expand to stakeholder orchestration and ecosystem-level value creation. New competencies emerge: systems thinking as a foundational lens; consciousness and oneness as leadership foundations; multi-stakeholder collaboration; regenerative business model design. Students are ready for this transformation – business education is not.
The student imperative
The students are already here, values transformed, waiting for education to catch up. Sixty-seven percent of consumers demand sustainable products. Ninety-eight percent of CEOs acknowledge sustainability as a core leadership responsibility. Gen Z arrives with climate anxiety and purpose- seeking, asking the right questions. Yet we betray them systematically. Students experience cognitive dissonance: taught neoclassical economics while watching planetary systems collapse. They witness the polycrisis, understand there are no safe havens from Earth’s destabilization (see ‘No safe haven: Why business leaders must act now to address Earth’s polycrisis’), yet learn strategy as if externalities don’t exist. They grasp flourishing circularity’s potential through cases like Eastman Chemical (see ‘Sustainable strategic management: Toward flourishing circularity’), then learn linear growth models. They recognize transformation’s necessity (see ‘Consciousness research: The science that changes everything for CEOs’), then learn incremental optimization. Hoffman’s insight: the generational values shift has already occurred. Students will transform business – but only if we transform their education first.
The practical pathway forward
Transformation requires simultaneous action at three levels, with business school deans playing the pivotal role. Individual faculty must integrate SSM concepts into existing courses now. Replace Porter with ecological economics foundations. Use cases like Eastman’s flourishing circularity. Teach the Open Systems Model as a fundamental framework. Assess students on integrated value creation across all capital forms.
Business school deans must embrace their role as orchestrators of transformation, not managers of the status quo. Like Eastman orchestrating diverse stakeholders, deans must coordinate faculty, students, corporate partners, and accreditors toward a transformative shared vision. Faculty respond to incentives – deans control those incentives. Challenge accreditation standards directly by leading coalitions demanding criteria that reward SSM integration. Restructure faculty incentive systems to reward pedagogical innovation and student impact on regeneration. Curate corporate partnerships strategically, prioritizing companies practicing SSM. Build interdisciplinary programs bridging business, ecology, and social systems. Redefine success metrics to measure graduate impact on planetary regeneration. Form alliances with other deans to collectively pressure rankings systems and publishers. The dean’s courage to catalyze this shared vision and orchestrate ecosystem transformation determines whether change happens or remains aspirational.
The broader ecosystem must shift simultaneously. Rankings must include sustainability impact metrics. Publishers must develop SSM-based textbooks and ecological economics frameworks. Corporate recruiters must value systems thinking and regenerative leadership. Collective commitment is required – no single actor can transform the system alone.
The ultimate choice
Across this series, we’ve established the reality of the polycrisis, introduced the SSM framework, demonstrated flourishing circularity, and explored the necessity of transformation (see our previous articles in this series for details). Education is where transformation must begin – or it won’t begin at all. Every semester, we graduate another cohort of leaders unprepared for planetary reality. Business schools can become agents of transformation or monuments to irrelevance. The students are ready. The survival of humanity demands it. The frameworks exist.
Hoffman’s final challenge cuts through all resistance: Will we have the courage to let the neoclassical paradigm die so ecological economics can resurrect business education as something worthy of the crisis we face? Deans must orchestrate the ecosystem transformation. Faculty must begin the resurrection in their classrooms. Students must demand the education they need. Start now. Start today. Our species depends on it. The choice is clear: transform business education and enable business to lead humanity’s regeneration, or educate another generation of leaders who will optimize our path to extinction.
