Giving Compass' Take:

• Stanford Social Innovation Review discusses changes that can be made to business schools in order to help students think about long-term impacts on decisions: It's all about asking the right questions.

• We need to take great care in how we train future industry leaders: How can we instill the principles of Corporate Social Responsibility at the outset?

• Here's more about the role of business in building a better world.

From capital budgeting to customer analytics to how to work effectively in teams, skills developed in business school are useful both as tools for graduates (re)entering the workplace and as mechanisms for growth as responsibilities evolve over the course of a career. Beneath these proficiencies lies the critical thinking ability that drives graduates’ decisions and those of the companies they eventually lead. This ability, however, is laden with two outdated assumptions acquired during their graduate education: the notion of shareholder primacy and its attendant short-term profit maximization ...

We propose to change how we teach business cases and evaluation of strategic alternatives in two ways. First, students should evaluate not only short-term impacts of decision alternatives but also the medium-to-longer-term impacts. This implies projecting the impact of decisions beyond a one-to-three-year horizon. While there is greater uncertainty with longer-range projections, this expanded evaluation process simply requires checking in on progress and adjusting course over time.

Second, students should evaluate how different decision alternatives affect all relevant stakeholders. This second recommendation is connected to the first, since decisions made necessarily influence multiple stakeholder groups in the long term, with feedback loops that ultimately affect financial performance.

Read the full article about ways to redesign management education by Rachelle Sampson and Witold Henisz at Stanford Social Innovation Review.