Prof. Elspeth Murray, Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, took part in a CoBS professional development workshop with her peers during the AOM conference in Copenhagen, where she delivered a presentation on the sense of business school teaching and education.

On Business School Teaching and Education by Elspeth Murray.

When everything is available for free, so far, ChatGPT, other AIs, and whatever, I was really interested in this discussion about bringing research into the classroom as a way of saying that we are not looking backwards to what an LLM has said historically, but to actually the creation of new knowledge.

So I think there’s a huge existential crisis that we must, not trying to be Debbie Downer here, that we must really think about with respect to the big ¨why-are-we-here´ question. We’ve had a great ride since business schools were created, and now I think a lot of people are wondering, well, what is it that you do, and why should we care? I found it interesting over the years, too, to reflect on business schools versus the core other faculties and universities.

And my friends and colleagues in engineering and law, we sort of commiserate together because we are all actually the application of things that are typically done elsewhere. I even had one of my colleagues tell me that really in business schools, it should only be about finance and accounting because those are the things that are truly different from other faculties. Needless to say, I don’t usually respond to that, but it does beg the question about really, if not being applied, then what else?

And we have many mechanisms that reinforce, I think, the drift that we have seen and also a continuing set of behaviors. So let me talk a little bit about culture. And again, one of the areas that I do research in is strategy with my colleague Peter Richardson. We talk a lot about organizational change and we talk a lot about culture. And culture is really an outcome of beliefs, systems, processes, etc. And as we sort of think about perhaps the culture problem, the elitism, the perpetuation, the publish or perish, the RTP (renewal, tenure, and promotion) process, all of these things continue to reinforce a certain set of behaviors, which I would say are working against application – and application is really creating positive impact in the world in which we live. But all is not lost.

The other point that I would add, and again, this is about professional development as opposed to our world is on the cusp of something totally different. I have chaired our RTP process at the business school for the last two years. And I have spent a lot of time thinking about that process. I’ve got three points to leave you with. My number one point is that we have all executed those processes in a way over the years which have been very traditional. There’s an opportunity to re-examine how we use those processes to incentivize a different set of behaviors. So can it not just be publish or perish? And I think my question is really, what about if positive social impact was the most important thing instead of everything else?

Let me tell you a personal anecdote. I have a son-in-law who’s an engineering professor and he was telling me he just got tenure and he said, you know what? I got tenure because I changed the building code in Canada. He’s a civil engineer. So that’s how they measure impact versus “he has published”. So I think we have a narrow interpretation of business schools.

I think number two is our leverage and our impact is through teaching. I think in the classroom, that is where we get to shape the hearts and minds of our students. And I love a line that we use at Smith School of Business. We should be in the business of creating ¨care holders¨, not shareholders. And if we can do that, then I think we have actually made social impact.

Third, we need to have the courage to actually start to make change now before we wake up one day and say, geez, we should have, could have, might have – and we must start to act now and think differently.

Useful links:

• Link up with Prof. Murray on LinkedIn
• Read a related article: The Next Frontier of Responsible Leadership: Insights from business school Deans
• Discover Smith School of Business, Queen’s University
• Apply for the Certificate in Professional Impact Analysis at Smith.

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