PREFACE
This is a book that some will find intriguing, but others will find it utterly offensive. This work is penned with guts, withstanding the fact that it infringes on the tranquilly of many business schools, perturbs the quantitative dexterities of many researchers, challenges the amorality of those management theories we so vociferously propagate, and a lingering fear of incensing those who feed me. But I join a swelling echo of dedicated scholars who have unitedly alarmed the impending demise of business schools, whose ideals, values, and propositions are becoming increasingly detangled from reality.
Business education has reached a full cycle, from the zenith of raging capitalism, searing economism, and tipping globalization to the steaming stakeholder capitalism, the rising demands for corporate morality, and the scorching disgust at corporate scandals. Scholars echoed their concerns that business schools, in their splendors of accomplishment, are compositely embroiled in educating a class of highly knowledgeable executives with polished managerial skills, of which many are now vindicated in corporate scandals, breaches of trust, stiffening of corporate funds, and devoid of social consideration.
For decades, business schools have been proliferating their brands, image, and polished their pedagogical pristine. Duped as capitalism’s last stand, business schools are howled at as being the "running dogs" of corporatization, disseminating amoral management education that sidelines altruism and humanity. Behind the veil of brilliance, business schools are running low on empathy, spawning generations of super CEOs and managers that prioritize profit over humanness, and dispatches research outcomes remotely associated with humanity.
This book instills an intellectual syllogistic deduction on how business schools have lost their soul as they incessantly disseminate amoral management education. The souls of business schools are adrift, with many operating in reverie and the faculty superficially oiling the wheels with the slightest idea of an impending derailment. There are smoldering indications that business schools and their amoral postures are adrift from the surging social demands of morality. The emerging regulatory requirements of corporate conformance to Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) and the crystallization of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are commanding indicators that society is demanding altruistic business education. Traditional business and capitalistic management concepts of “Red Ocean”, cutthroat competition and survival, outsmarting rivalry, and those very commercial ideas of succeeding at all costs are losing their pedestal. Far too long, business schools have unquestioned the appropriateness of these amoral management theories and accepted without resisting those management concepts that caused tremendous carnage to business and society. Business schools are dangerously cliff hanging onto the “valley of death”, which will entrench as they continue to discount the rising demands for a moral business education.
Many prominent scholars have written on the notion of amoral management education, but this work mines deeper into characterizing the forms and types of amoral knowledge and how they belligerently and tacitly infiltrate management education. This book opens the eyes of readers, reveals the perils of amoral management theories, and intuitively addresses the question of whether business schools could survive the crisis in the next decade. Towards the end, this book blueprints how business schools can reclaim their lost souls. Business schools must reclaim their soul, and we must draw strength to question, resist, and refute those expiring amoral theories. It is time business schools regain their glory and begin to tread the consecrated path of producing socially moral leaders instead of super managers.
