Warren G. Bennis and James O'Toole agree that business schools are "on the wrong track." Bennis and O'Toole are in a position to know, since Bennis serves as University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles and O'Toole is Research Professor at USC's Center for Effective Organizations. Together, they combine years of expertise and experience and their indictment of business schools is direct and unambiguous.

In "How Business Schools Lost Their Way," published in the April 2005 edition of the Harvard Business Review, these two authors address what they see as the central failing of graduate schools supposedly committed to preparing business leaders--these schools hire faculty who have little or no experience in the actual world of business.

Bennis and O'Toole are well-known in the worlds of management and leadership. Bennis, who also serves as founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at USC, is the author of a series of best-selling works on leadership. O'Toole is an expert in organizational dynamics. In this article, they get right to the heart of the problem they so skillfully diagnose.

In the academic world, the automatic reflex to any call for change is a review of the curriculum. Nevertheless, Bennis and O'Toole are convinced that problems with the curriculum are "the effect, not the cause of what ails the modern business school."

In their view, "The actual cause of today's crisis in management education is far broader in scope and can be traced to a dramatic shift in the culture of business schools. During the past several decades many leading B schools have quietly adopted an inappropriate-and ultimately self-defeating-model of academic excellence. Instead of measuring themselves in terms of the competence of their graduates, or by how well their faculties understand important drivers of business performance, they measure themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research."

This approach, identified by the authors as the "scientific model," is based in the belief that business is primarily an academic discipline. "In fact, business is a profession, akin to medicine and the law," the authors correct, "and business schools are professional schools-or should be." This statement is not intended to diminish the importance nor to lower the status of business as a professional discipline. "Like other professions, business calls upon the work of many academic disciplines. For medicine, these disciplines include biology, chemistry, and psychology; for business, they include mathematics, economics, psychology, philosophy, and sociology. The distinction between a profession and an academic discipline is crucial. In our view, no curricular reforms will work until the scientific model is replaced by a more appropriate model rooted in the special requirements of a profession."

Bennis and O'Toole are clearly on to something of importance here. Attention to the curriculum without understanding the faculty factor amounts to little more than rearranging the furniture. After all, the faculty teach the curriculum, and faculty expectations drive everything from evaluations of student performance to evaluation of faculty peers.

Bennis and O'Toole get right to the heart of the problem. "Virtually none of today's top-ranked business schools would hire, let alone promote, a tenure-track professor whose primary qualification is managing an assembly plant, no matter how distinguished his or her performance. Nor would they hire professors who write articles only for practitioner reviews, like this one. Instead, the best B schools aspire to the same standards of academic excellence that hard disciplines embrace-an approach sometimes waggishly referred to 'physics envy.'"