Challenges Facing Business School Leaders—and What’s Next

With the world today facing seemingly constant disruption, including the rapid spread of artificial intelligence, fractured geopolitics and volatile economies, leading a graduate business school can be a tough proposition. As we approached September and the publication of our 2025-26 Best B-School Rankings, Bloomberg Businessweek convened a group of deans from around the globe to talk about some of the hardest issues they now confront and ponder where graduate business education is heading and how to best prepare students to thrive given the upheaval and to recognize opportunities in unlikely places.  We are brining one representative narrative from one of the participants on three important questions.

On B-schools’ role in assimilating the quick pace of change and heightened uncertainty in the world.  Business schools are close to practice, and to the real world. There is so much uncertainty impacting business, and that automatically impacts business schools, on a range of issues. Clearly, there’s a reconfiguration of global governance and the global economy. We’re experiencing rapid technological change with the rise of AI and a much greater focus on data and data analytics. Even though the agenda in the US around sustainability has shifted, the environmental concerns are of course not going away. We have a new generation entering our programs—Gen Z is different, and they’re entering the workforce. So you have a lot of change in the world, you have a lot of change in business. It manifests in different ways for us in terms of how demand from recruiters is evolving, what some of the flows of students are, and of course, very importantly, what the curriculum looks like. For us, then, how do we make sure students are prepared for a labor market that is changing really, really fast, one where the requirements are evolving? That makes what we do interesting and challenging for sure.

On helping students confront, navigate and accept change.  Students also need to develop plasticity, flexibility and resilience, because even if they get a job now, that job may disappear or change completely in one or two years. That plasticity is something they have to bring to the table as they think about what their job trajectory will look like. It’s tough for students at the moment, because they are looking at all these uncertainties. But it is quite important that we feel the confidence in the training we’re providing them, and in the environment and the community we’re offering them, and it is important to sustain this. Last year our top placement destination was the United Arab Emirates. It overtook Singapore and London. All of a sudden it appeared as the No. 1 destination—that’s because there’s a lot of opportunity there, and the students feel the confidence to just go and explore.

On schools’ ability to adapt to a multipolar world and teach an understanding of differences.  It is important that we do become, increasingly, places where people can come together who have different ideas about how you organize an economy and how you run a business, from east to west and north to south. But it doesn’t mean that we as institutions with roots in a particular part of the world don’t have a point of view and that we shy away from articulating that point of view. That will be more important—that business schools themselves can be a source of moral clarity in a way that isn’t culturally imperialist, but in a way that isn’t void of values either. And I think that would be a mistake if that’s how we interpreted the implication of this new multipolar environment.