Giving Compass' Take:

• The author discusses the importance of a high-quality MBA education in creating a manager that will be effective at facing today's challenges.

• One of the author's suggestions is adding social and political science to an MBA curriculum. How will the addition of these courses help create a holistic manager? 

• Read about the effects of being an impact manager. 

We face great challenges as a society today, from environmental problems like climate change, ocean acidification, and habitat destruction, to social problems like income inequality, unemployment, lack of a living wage, and poor access to affordable health care and education. Solutions to these challenges can only come from the market, the most powerful institution on earth, and from business, which is the most powerful entity within it.

Though government is an important arbiter of the market, it is business that transcends national boundaries, possessing resources that exceed those of many nations. Business is responsible for producing the buildings that we live and work in, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the automobiles we drive, and the energy that propels them.

This does not mean that only business can generate solutions, but with its unmatched powers of ideation, production, and distribution, business is best positioned to bring the change we need at the scale we need it.

The core thrust of my proposal to amend the MBA curriculum is not an appeal to corporate social responsibility or corporate sustainability. For many, these labels have become stale and merely relegate the challenge to the sidelines of a niche discipline. MBA education should therefore focus on developing the whole manager, one who both exerts a powerful influence on society and also is a member of the society that is shaped by his or her decisions.

Below I offer seven such blocks as a foundation upon which others may be built.

  • Pre-program guided discernment 
  • Offer critical education in the nature, evolution, and future of capitalism 
  • Teach responsible government lobbying
  • Offer more critical examination of the “purpose” of the corporation
  • Add natural science to the MBA curriculum 
  • Add social and political science to the MBA curriculum
  • Post-program guided aspirations

Read the full article about becoming a good manager by Andrew J. Hoffman at Stanford Social Innovation Review