A reflection from John North, Executive Director, GRLI
When CLADEA’s Flourishing and Humanistic Leadership Network invited GRLI into a podcast conversation on the future of business education, I said yes immediately.
The session brought together Michael Pirson (IHMA), Konstantin Mudrack (Capitalismo Consciente España), and Dr Carlos Barber (Universidad La Salle México), with César Espinoza — Dean of the Business School at Universidad Espíritu Santo in Ecuador — moderating. Gisela Veritier, President of CLADEA, opened the conversation with an invitation that set the tone: “Leadership is not something we discuss. It is something we practise moment by moment, through who we choose to be.”
The full recording is above. These are the threads still with me.
It is both
The session opened with the question of whether management education is failing or evolving.
Michael Pirson did not hedge. “It is both,” he said. “Scientific management as the most pronounced form of the industrial-age type of extraction is not sufficient, and for a long time this has been recognised and evolved. But the core and the foundation of it hasn’t really been rethought. The blueprint of much of organising is still happening with a faulty, flawed assumption of who we are as human beings — and therefore we still produce the same kind of results that nobody wants.”
I wanted to build on that before moving to the mission question, because I think there is a specific structural reason why the current model is becoming so hard to defend:
“Very often in the industrial-age model, the environment is still treated as a kind of background or a stakeholder in the economy or in business. But from a globally responsible perspective, the natural system is not a stakeholder — it’s the ultimate foundation of the rules.”
If nature is a stakeholder, we can negotiate with it. If it is the foundation — the precondition for any economic activity at all — the entire logic of optimisation changes. Once you really see that, quite a lot of conventional business education starts to look unstable.
The mission is being enlarged
When César asked what is happening with the mission of business schools, I tried to be direct. The mission is not being replaced. It is being widened — in ways that many institutions are still processing.
“The mission is now moving from educating for success in an economy as it currently is towards educating for responsibility in the world as it is becoming — or needs to become.”
That is a larger and more honest brief. It asks something of institutions, not only of individuals. And it shifts the question business schools need to answer — from “how do we produce competitive graduates?” to “what kind of leaders are we helping form, and for what kind of world?”
GRLI has been working inside this tension for more than two decades, in partnership with AACSB, EFMD, and oikos, and with regional associations across the globe. This is not a critique from outside the field. It is a recognition from within it that incremental adjustment — adding ethics courses, updating sustainability content — is no longer sufficient.
Earlier this very week I had the opportunity to host a global cohort of Deans and Directors who are working beyond the logos of their institutions to actually transform business education. The questions they are carrying are worth pausing on: What does it mean in today’s context to be truly human? How can we drive innovation that is wise — not only process- or technology-focused, but reliant on relationships? These are not marginal questions. They are being held at the heart of serious institutional leadership.
Forming leaders, not just managers
Konstantin Mudrack named three structural challenges facing the schools that have heard the call to change. First, genuinely redefining purpose — understanding what a new mission actually requires. Second, the body-of-knowledge problem: the old paradigm has decades of textbooks, established tools, and millions of professors who know and have taught it. Replacing it is serious work. Third — and this one is underestimated — the demand-side trap: most employers are still hiring for traditional management skills, which creates persistent pressure on schools to keep teaching what the market currently rewards.
Those are honest observations. And none of them is a reason to wait.
My own contribution was to push back on what gets called “leadership development.” A person can be deeply values-led, reflective, even courageous, and still be formed inside an institution whose deeper incentives push in another direction. That is why responsible leadership cannot be reduced to personal ethics alone.
“Effective change has to work at multiple levels — individual, organisational, and systemic. Business schools can educate leaders for the common good. But only if they move from a narrow model of leadership development towards something more integrated — that involves and develops the whole person, that engages with real societal and ecological issues, and that addresses institutional redesign alongside personal development.”
In order to develop the leader in the human, we need to develop the human in the leader. That sequencing matters.
Success and flourishing
The conversation got genuinely alive when Michael described what he sees on Wall Street. “There’s a certain deathness, zombiness, lack of aliveness present,” he said. “I think we perpetuate that through our systems.” He was making a point about our prevailing model of success: that we have confused accumulation with flourishing, that eudaimonia — what Aristotle called being more fully alive — has been crowded out by a narrower set of metrics.
I pushed back — not on the diagnosis, but on the framing.
If we position flourishing as the alternative to success, we lose the audience we most need to reach. The point is not to soften success but to insist on its most honest definition. If your measure of success is producing people who feel like zombies, that is not success. It is a category error.
Konstantin put a related tension clearly. He still encounters the assumption — especially from business leaders with doubts — that ethical and purposeful leadership requires a trade-off against financial performance. His view, drawing on Ed Freeman’s stakeholder thinking and on the conscious capitalism field: it is not either/or, it is and. Companies that integrate elevated purpose, conscious culture, and genuine stakeholder responsibility tend to outperform over time. “It’s just a proof of point,” he said. “I believe we need much more empirics around it. But it’s not a contradiction.”
The inner journey — and its limits
One of the moments that stayed with me came from Konstantin’s response to the question of what executives can do tomorrow morning to lead differently. His answer was counterintuitive: nothing to the external world. Not yet.
“The level of consciousness of a company is actually limited by the level of consciousness of its leader. Unless you are able to be very explicit on how to elevate your own level of consciousness — which includes the ethical, the humanistic, the systems thinking, the interdependence — unless you are able to do that, you will not be able to truly, sustainably transmit this in your executive work.”
I want to add a counterweight, because I think both things are true:
“We’re not going to think our way into a new way of acting. We have to act our way into a new way of being in the world.”
The inner development Konstantin describes is not passive contemplation — it happens in practice, in relationship, in doing things differently. Both moves are required: deepen the inner work and act outward differently, beginning with small things.
Best for the world — and the risk we run
Near the close of the conversation I returned to the phrase that has anchored GRLI’s work since we launched the 50+20 agenda in Rio de Janeiro in 2012:
“Instead of competing to be the best in the world, let’s collaborate to be the best for the world.”
That shift — from in to for — is not rhetorical. It changes what gets measured, what gets rewarded, who counts as a co-steward, and what an institution believes it owes the broader field.
But I also named the risk we run — and I think it is important to be honest about it:
“There is a risk that business schools, because we are really good at doing this, become highly articulate and produce wonderful glossy reports that talk about transformation, yet remain structurally loyal to and embedded in the assumptions that created the crisis we are currently sitting with.”
The positive note: the awareness is there now. The opening is to turn that awareness into shared experimentation — to create prototypes, partnerships, and spaces of inquiry that produce hands-on results, and then contribute that learning back to the commons. One small thing GRLI is experimenting with at the moment: forming circles of six to nine business schools that share what they are learning about pedagogical and curricular innovation, with the explicit expectation that their learning does not stay only with them. It gets paid forward for the benefit of the wider landscape. We welcome any school in the CLADEA network and beyond that wants to join.
Think big, act small, start now.
What this conversation ultimately asked
Carlos Barber offered the foundational note near the close: “Ontologically speaking, human beings are made of values. The most important thing is to put human beings at the centre — to recognise their dignity, to instil values, and to cultivate leaders of positive action instead of leaders of negative action.”
And Michael Pirson, asked what value he would ask a young student never to lose, declined the premise — and gave a better answer: “I don’t think I should be asking that of any student. I want to affirm the full humanity of people. Accepting gracefully full humanity, being curious, exploring that more — without fear, without judgment.”
That is probably the most important thing said in the entire conversation. The transformation of management education does not begin with a new curriculum. It begins with the willingness to see students — and leaders — as full human beings first.
That is where this particular conversation landed. I am grateful to CLADEA and to César Espinoza for convening it, and to Gisela Veritier for framing it as a space of practice, not just discussion.
This conversation was convened by the Flourishing and Humanistic Leadership Network of CLADEA, moderated by César Espinoza, Dean of the Business School at Universidad Espíritu Santo (Ecuador), and opened by Gisela Veritier, President of CLADEA. Watch the full recording above — and subscribe to CLADEA on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
