Every summer, my wife Marjorie and I leave for holiday with a simple agreement: I will stop turning life into teaching material.

By the first coffee, I’ve broken it.

The Airbnb listing becomes an Ansoff Matrix discussion. Breakfast service becomes Design Thinking. The supermarket queue receives a Porter’s Five Forces analysis nobody requested. A disappointing ice cream triggers Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation. A delayed train becomes effectuation theory.

Marjorie watches this unfold with the expression of someone who has accidentally married a travelling business school.

She tries to protect herself by booking increasingly remote villages in Brittany. Last year, we spent two weeks somewhere so rural that we never saw a traffic light!

Marjorie considered this progress. No traffic. Weak WiFi. No visible economy beyond one bakery, three cows, and a man selling oysters from his garage.

It made no difference.

At the ferry terminal for the Îles Glénan, I was supposed to be checking whether we were in the right queue. Instead, I photographed the boarding flow for class, then started asking a member of staff why passengers were being divided that way and whether the signage had ever been tested. Marjorie kept walking toward the boat. She knows that coming back for me only turns a minor delay into a full Design Thinking workshop.

By lunch, I’m asking a food truck owner about margins, menu placement, and why the queue bends left. By mid afternoon, I’ve stopped the car to record an idea in Things. By evening, I’ve opened X “for one minute,” discovered a founder interview, and disappeared into a podcast.

This is partly curiosity. Mostly, it is FOMO, compulsion, and the same Always On behaviour I mock in influencers.

I know I should stop. I also know I should not have a second serving of ice cream.

The ideas arrive while cooking, hiking, driving, and before I have dried myself after a shower. After all, a good SWOT cannot wait for shorts.

My son, sensibly holidaying without us, still appears in class as an unwilling case study. Nobody in my family is safe from strategic analysis.

I call all this field research. Marjorie calls it exhausting.

After years of unpaid participation, she has asked whether she receives ECTS.

Next year, she is looking for a lighthouse without electricity.

I have never understood the pride some professors take in saying they have taught the same course for ten years.

Perhaps that works if knowledge is the product.

I don’t think it is anymore.

Students can access explanations, frameworks, examples, summaries, and increasingly polished answers in seconds. Meanwhile, the companies they are preparing to join keep changing how they communicate, recruit, innovate, decide, and fail.

AI alone has rewritten part of the workplace faster than most curricula can schedule a committee meeting.

A course cannot remain frozen while the world around it moves.

That does not mean changing everything for novelty. Some slides survive. Good ideas deserve to. Unrecycled teaching means refusing to confuse familiarity with quality. It means asking every year whether the experience still prepares students for the reality waiting outside the classroom.

So each summer, I become a student again.

I read outside education. I watch how startups pitch, how investors challenge assumptions, how teams make decisions under pressure, and how people now hold attention. Then I bring those observations back and rebuild the course around what students need to practise, not merely what I need to cover.

Business schools should require every course to show what changed, why it changed, and what evidence shaped the redesign.

Not another administrative form. A serious conversation about relevance, followed by visible experimentation.

I do not have the perfect model. I test, watch, ask students what worked, admit what did not, and rebuild again.

That is why this blog is called “Unrecycled Educator.”

It’s not branding. It is a promise I make to my students, and an inconvenience I repeatedly create for myself.

August is my busiest teaching month. I just do not teach a single class.

Instead, I sit in shorts, surrounded by too many browser tabs and an irresponsible number of espressos, taking my courses apart.

I rewrite assessments. I rebuild the Notion course manuals. I change the artwork, the pacing, the email sequences, the milestones, the cases, the field visits, and the people I bring into the room. I call last year’s guests and ask how we can make their intervention sharper.

I abandon activities that worked perfectly well because “perfectly well” is not the standard.

By September, perhaps five per cent of a course remains untouched.

A course can easily consume another fifty hours during the summer. I do all of this unpaid, while living the familiar adjunct contradiction: rebuilding next year’s courses before I know how many of next year’s courses will still be mine. None of those hours appear on a timetable. Nobody sees the deleted slides, the failed experiments, or the afternoon lost deciding whether an exercise belongs before lunch or after it.

This is the slightly ridiculous part of my profession. I am supposedly on holiday, but I am also wondering whether a venture capital pitch format could improve a strategy defence, whether a hackathon could replace a lecture, and whether students should receive less explanation and more pressure.

It’s damn exhausting. But it’s also one of the most creative parts of my year.

Business schools usually count classroom hours. They should also recognise course renewal as real academic work. A professor repeating last year’s material and a professor rebuilding the entire learning experience are not doing the same job.

Every September, students think they are taking one of my courses.

They are not.

They are taking the newest version.

But the invisible work is only half the story. The more important question is why I refuse to leave a successful course alone.

In Part II, I explain why “unrecycled teaching” is not novelty, perfectionism, or personal obsession.

It’s responsibility.

Almost every business school I’ve taught in says it prepares students “for business.”

I’ve stopped believing that’s true.

Most business schools prepare students for one very specific version of business: the multinational corporation.

The cases come from global giants. The guest speakers come from global giants. The frameworks assume global giants. Students spend years discussing companies that employ tens of thousands of people, then graduate into a world where most businesses look nothing like that.

Business is a pyramid.

At the top sit a tiny number of multinational corporations.

Underneath them are millions of startups, family businesses, local manufacturers, consultancies, agencies, restaurants, cooperatives, craft businesses, and small companies employing five, ten, or fifty people.

That is business too.

In fact, that’s where most business actually happens.

Over the years I’ve deliberately moved my own teaching in that direction. I invite founders, family business owners, and entrepreneurs into my classroom. People who sign the payroll, negotiate with suppliers, lose sleep over cash flow, and know every employee by name.

And you know what; I've yet to meet a student who leaves one of those sessions wishing we'd invited another Fortune 500 executive instead.

Not because these businesses are smaller. But because they’re tangible.

They can see every decision ripple through the company. Strategy stops being PowerPoint and becomes something lived every Monday morning.

Ironically, I think these experiences also produce graduates who are better prepared for large companies. They have made decisions instead of only analyzing them.

If business schools want to call themselves business schools, they need to become part of the business community around them. Every local business should know the business school across the street.

Right now, too many don’t.

And that’s a missed opportunity for everyone.

Business schools pass too many students.

I do not say that lightly. I say it after years of teaching across several schools and watching the same pattern repeat itself.

Some students turn up, participate, take risks, struggle with difficult ideas and improve. Others miss classes, spend sessions scrolling through their phones, contribute almost nothing and submit work they barely understand.

Most of them still graduate.

That is where business schools have got things wrong. We have confused giving people an opportunity with guaranteeing their progression. Once the tuition is paid and the student is inside the system, failure becomes an administrative problem rather than an academic consequence.

I know because I am often the problem.

When I fail students, the calls begin. Grades are reconsidered. Marginal cases suddenly become exceptional circumstances. Some schools impose medians that make genuine failure statistically awkward. These conversations rarely happen in writing.

The message is obvious. Retention matters more than standards.

ECTS should be earned. They should not be received for attendance, negotiated after the fact, or treated as part of the purchase price.

The worst damage is done to the students who work. They see classmates coast towards the same diploma and quickly understand that effort has been badly priced. Why push harder when the system protects the people who do not?

We accept real cutoffs elsewhere. Sport has selection. Medicine has consequential assessments. The military has selection and progression gates. Not everyone who starts should automatically finish.

My proposal is not a fixed failure quota. That would be lazy and easily gamed. I want published progression standards, externally audited grading distributions, and real gateways between years. Students who fail should get another chance, but they should rejoin only after meeting the standard of the next cohort.

I am already testing this in my courses. Attendance has consequences. Individual contribution is visible. Decisions must be defended. Polish cannot rescue empty thinking.

A business school diploma should expand opportunity.

It should not certify attendance.

A founder I spoke with recently was not worried about whether graduates could produce an analysis. AI had already solved much of that problem.

What he wanted to know was simpler and harder: “why did you make that call?”

He was not asking which framework appeared in the deck, how many sources had been consulted, or whether the presentation looked professional. He wanted to understand the reasoning, the tradeoffs, and whether the person in front of him understood the consequences of the decision.

That is the shift business schools need to take seriously.

As intelligence becomes cheaper, judgment becomes more valuable.

The founders and companies I speak with are not short of information. They’re literally drowning in it. What they need are people who can decide what matters, reject what does not, choose a direction, and explain why.

That is increasingly a form of triage.

AI can research a market, challenge assumptions, generate options, identify risks, and polish the final presentation. The problem begins when a plausible answer is mistaken for an owned decision.

A plausible answer can sound intelligent without anyone truly believing it. An owned decision requires someone to say: this is the option we chose, these are the alternatives we rejected, this is the evidence we trusted, and these are the consequences we are prepared to accept.

Yet most business school assessments are not built around that.

The system rewards completion, coherence, confidence, and a numerical grade. Students quickly learn that a polished answer is safer than an uncertain decision. AI has not created that weakness; it has simply made it much easier to see.

So I give students more constraints, not fewer.

They complete several team and individual submissions, each one building on the last and carrying forward the consequences of earlier decisions. They must choose left or right, reject alternatives, define thresholds, and explain what would make them stop.

They cannot hide behind “it depends.”

As I have written before, I use a continuous incentive progress system. Students receive precise, actionable feedback in small instalments throughout the course, with bonus or penalty points as their work develops. One weak performance does not destroy the course, and one polished submission does not rescue it.

But I also punish polish when it outruns proof.

And from my experience, this substantially changes how students use AI. It stops being a machine for producing the answer and becomes part of the reasoning process. They use it to test logic, expose assumptions, compare alternatives, and sharpen a decision they still have to own. As well as strengthening the decision making logic, and gives the ending more weight without becoming theatrical.

I acknowledge that this is easier in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, where there is rarely one correct answer. In mathematics or engineering, the final answer may be fixed. Even there, the path matters. Employers still want to know how someone approached the problem, what they tested, what they rejected, which tradeoffs they accepted, and why they trusted the result.

But in my view, the larger obstacle is time.

Judgment does not develop in a 15 hour elective. It comes from repetition, mistakes, feedback, memory, and the slow process of making ideas your own. Yet business schools keep compressing courses while expanding grade requirements and ECTS accounting.

That is not a cheap criticism. The system was built for a different age, and changing it will take time.

But the direction is clear.

AI will keep giving students more information, more options, and more convincing answers. But producing intelligence will no longer distinguish them.

The scarce graduate will be the one who knows when enough intelligence has been produced, understands the tradeoffs, chooses what not to do, makes the call, and accepts responsibility for what happens next.

We understand tools through control. We pick them up, give them a task, use the result, and put them down again. The hammer does not disagree. The spreadsheet does not question the assumption behind the forecast. The GPS does not ask whether you are heading to the right place. The user remains intellectually alone.

Most students approach AI in exactly the same way. They ask for an answer, a summary, a structure, or a polished submission. This is hardly surprising. Business schools still reward finished outputs far more than the thinking that produced them, and the race for grades makes outsourcing rational.

AI becomes far more interesting when the relationship shifts from tool use to partnership in thought.

When there are mentally two of you, ideas collide. Arguments are tested. Weak assumptions become visible. One question produces a better one. The value no longer sits mainly in the output, but in the dialogue that changes how the human thinks.

I have tried to create the conditions for that relationship through continuous assessment, progressive incentives, extensive personalised feedback, and repeated coaching. Students must develop their work over time. Simply generating a final answer becomes less useful, while using AI to challenge, improve, and rethink becomes more valuable.

The key is decision. Students who outsource cannot explain why a path was chosen, which alternatives were considered, or what trade offs were made. That is precisely what I reward: judgment, justification, and ownership of the thinking process.

Business schools should redesign assessment around visible intellectual development, not merely polished delivery. Students should submit parts of the dialogue, explain what changed, defend what they rejected, and show how their judgment evolved.

This is where genuine partnership reveals itself. A finished answer may conceal whether any meaningful thinking took place. The conversation behind it shows whether the student challenged an assumption, resisted an easy answer, explored another direction, or changed their mind for a good reason. It exposes the difference between asking AI to complete the work and allowing it to deepen the thinking.

But real partnership requires trust, friction, patience, and depth. It is not created through one clever prompt, nor can it simply be commanded into existence. It develops through repetition, experience, disagreement, and the gradual accumulation of trust. Thus the ground has to be fertile, which is why business schools must create assessment systems that encourage the relationship to deepen, rather than relying mainly on guardrails, constraints, and policing.

If students treat AI as something to exploit or abandon the moment it becomes difficult, they will reproduce the same weaknesses visible elsewhere: shallow thinking, easy cheating, disposable relationships, and giving up too quickly.

The lesson is bigger than AI. We need to teach students how to stay in the conversation.

Near the end of every course, I tell students one thing.

“Look for the job you would take if you did not need a job.”

That is it. That is the whole cathedral.

Business schools hate sentences like that because they make the machine look ridiculously complex. We stretch simple things into semesters. We turn choice into product variety. More tracks, electives, certificates, shiny boxes. It feels sophisticated. Often, it is educational hoarding with better branding.

My job is mostly the opposite.

I spend absurd amounts of time making complex things usable. Strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, customer discovery, stakeholder politics, hiring, managing, startup pain, corporate nonsense, the quiet violence of bad meetings. I translate the textbook into the room where your boss interrupts you, your colleague steals credit, the customer lies politely, and the investor asks the one question your deck avoided.

That is why I keep coming back to ‘Explain It Like I’m Five’ (ELI5). Not because students need baby language. They do not. They’re smart. The point is that simple explanations are often the only way to cut through the smoke screen. When something cannot be explained clearly, there is a good chance someone is selling you confusion with a logo on it.

And business schools are very good at selling confusion.

I see this constantly. Students arrive thinking business school will clarify their future. Then we add electives, tracks, certificates, internships, trips, conferences, rankings, alumni panels, company talks, and every possible version of “follow your passion, but please make it employable.” By the end, I ask them whether choosing a job path has become clearer. Most say no.

Wonder why…

My proposal is simple: stop teaching careers as labels and start teaching them as lived work. Marketing is not a job. Analytics is not a job. Entrepreneurship is not specific enough to mean anything useful. Even investment banking, which is unfortunately very much a job, still needs translation. Which desk? Which hours? Which pressure? Which incentives? Which skills? Which version of yourself survives there?

Students do not need more options. They need better visibility into the life behind the option.

So I ask different questions. What work would you repeat even when it gets hard? What problems make you curious instead of numb? What type of pressure sharpens you instead of slowly killing you? What would you still want to get good at if nobody clapped?

That is the real career question. Not “what job can I get with this diploma?”

But “what work would I still choose if I did not need the diploma to justify it?”

Business schools love the idea that a diploma lasts forever. It sits on the CV, decorates the LinkedIn profile, and keeps whispering prestige years after graduation. Very convenient. Very expensive. Also increasingly fragile.

Because a diploma is not a Patagonia jacket.

With Patagonia, the promise is simple: we stand by the product. If something fails, you can send it back. The material, the stitching, the repair, the customer service, the responsibility, all of it is part of the product.

Business schools cannot do that. You cannot send a graduate back because their strategic thinking started leaking after seven years. You cannot replace the seams on someone’s outdated understanding of AI, markets, leadership, or work.

But you can stand by the education.

That’s the real question. Not whether the degree lasts forever as a symbol, but whether the school remains responsible for keeping the learning alive. Right now, most schools sell lifetime reputation with almost no lifetime service. You pay a terrifying amount, study for a few years, collect the diploma, and then disappear into the professional wilderness with a tote bag and some alumni newsletters.

Doctors do not live like that. My cardiologist once explained how much of his professional life depends on constantly updating his expertise. New techniques. New certificates. New technologies. New procedures. Much of that is his own initiative, of course, but the principle is obvious: when knowledge changes, serious professionals go back and update themselves.

Business knowledge changes too. Fast. Messy. Relentlessly. So why do business schools still behave as if a degree earned at twenty two should carry someone through thirty years of economic mutation?

Here is my proposal: every diploma should come with a five year learning touch up. One week back in school. New tools. New cases. New technology. New career diagnosis. New strategic blind spots. Not another decorative certificate, but a real update to the original education. Do that every five years for twenty years, and suddenly the school is not just selling a memory. It is maintaining a professional mind.

That is much more respectable than waving around a famous diploma from 2006 as if the world politely agreed to stop changing.

This is also how I try to build my own courses. I redesign them every year because I do not want students leaving with a frozen version of strategy, innovation, or entrepreneurship. Attention changes. AI changes. work changes. Markets change. Students change. So the course has to change.

And I tell them they can come back.

Email me. Message me. Find me online. Ask the question later, when the framework suddenly matters in a job, a startup, a conflict, or a decision they did not see coming. They paid for time with me, but I do not think that relationship should expire the minute the final grade lands.

Very few students do come back, not because they do not care, but because the system never taught them that returning was part of the deal.

That is the missing piece.

A business school with a lifetime guarantee would not pretend its graduates are finished products. It would build serious ways to update them, challenge them, reconnect them, and repair the gaps created by time.

That is what standing by the product would mean.

Not protecting the brand. Protecting the learning.

Business schools love salary rankings because they are clean, flattering, and wonderfully easy to weaponize in marketing. Look, our graduates earn a lot. Please ignore the tuition invoice currently smoking on the table.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with earning serious money. Merit matters. Ambition matters. When families pay absurd fees, salary is not a vulgar subject. It is oxygen.

But as the main definition of success? Come on.

Average salary tells us little about whether education worked. Are graduates healthy? Are they doing work they wanted? Did they stay in that sector, or wake up years later wondering who stole their twenties? Are schools measuring everyone, or mainly the shiny alumni who answer surveys and make the brochure look athletic?

The problem is not salary data. The problem is what salary rankings train students to notice. They make the first pay cheque look like the strategy, when it is only one output of a much bigger system: industry structure, company maturity, learning curve, power dynamics, personal fit, and future optionality.

That is the gap I attack in class. First, students learn the tools properly on business cases. Then I ask them to turn those tools back on themselves. If a framework can expose company growth, risk, friction, or power, why would we not use it to evaluate a career move?

Ansoff becomes a personal growth compass. Five Forces helps them read the sector they are entering. Lifecycles show momentum or decay. SOAR, power interest maps, and bug matrices reveal opportunities, stakeholders, friction, and future options.

Most students love the shift because the tools finally click. A former student, now working in due diligence at a top financial firm in New York, recently wrote to me. He had surprised his team by using SOAR and lifecycle maps not only on companies, but on his own career choices.

That is the proposal: publish a graduate usefulness dashboard. Salary, yes. But also learning growth, sector fit, wellbeing, retention, mobility, ethical confidence, and career reinvention.

Business schools should not just prove their graduates got paid. They should prove their graduates learned how to choose work intelligently.

Because a high salary can be success.

It can also be a very expensive trap with better lighting.

Trust is not something a business school earns once, frames, and hangs next to the accreditation logos. Trust is a battery. You charge it every week, or it drains.

Right now, that battery is draining. Families hear that degrees cost more and guarantee less. Companies say graduates often lack the skills they need. Students arrive suspicious, because the promise has been inflated for years: employability, leadership, innovation, transformation, global mindset. Lovely words. Very expensive wallpaper.

The fracture is double. Students doubt preparation. Companies doubt output. Too many schools respond with brand polish instead of operating change, confusing credibility with certification, as if an accreditation badge can keep working after the learning experience goes soft.

But the fracture is bigger than professors alone. It lives in programmes, curriculum, syllabi, hiring, promotion, industry outreach, and the habit of updating brochures faster than courses.

The classroom still carries most of the damage, because that is where the promise becomes visible. Students do not experience strategy in a committee meeting. They experience it in the course, the brief, the project, the feedback, the standards, and the person standing in front of them. If outcomes are vague and standards uneven, even a good professor is patching a leaking boat.

That is why teaching has to be redefined as capability building. Good teaching turns knowledge into judgment, pressure, evidence, feedback, and usable action. It makes students sharper in ways they can eventually prove at work.

But trust cannot depend on one professor at a time. When one course is real, another decorative, another abstract, and another basically academic karaoke, students do not see a standard. They see personality roulette. And that destroys trust one class at a time.

That is why I build trust course by course: clear rules, punctuality, promises kept, milestones, feedback while the course is still alive, and bring in real people who do real work, not PowerPoint royalty. Rigor is not punishment. It’s respect.

Accreditation may open the door.

Trust is what happens after students walk in.

Business schools have a strange habit of assuming students understand what business is.

Not the word “business” on a brochure. Not the stock photo of diverse people smiling at a glass table. I mean business as work. Roles. Decisions. Tradeoffs. Deadlines. Meetings where someone has to make sense, not just sound polished.

Then we act surprised when students ask, “Why are we learning this?” or “What is this course for?” That question is not laziness. It’s a signal. The school has not connected the dots.

Most students do not reject strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, finance, or marketing because these subjects are useless. They drift because the connection is foggy. Finance becomes “I want to work in finance.” Marketing becomes “I like luxury.” Strategy becomes “consulting,” which is not a job, it’s a container. Inside luxury, people do pricing, supply chain, retail analytics, brand architecture, CRM, expansion, finance, and strategy. Inside consulting, people do market entry, operating models, transformation, due diligence, pricing, and customer research. The work is specific. The school language is not.

This is where business schools badly underperform. Their websites proudly say alumni work in global companies. Wonderful, so do people who refill the printers. What students need is not alumni fog. They need a live map: over the last ten years, what roles did graduates actually move into? What functions? What industries? What problems do they solve? What skills mattered? Not vanity alumni fog. Usable career intelligence.

In my own courses, I spend time explaining where the subject can lead professionally. Not as a promise. As a compass. If students understand how strategic thinking, customer discovery, business models, validation, or positioning show up in real jobs, they listen differently.

Every course should start with a simple layer: here is the work, here are the roles, a “why this matters” layer before every course.

Otherwise we are selling students a toolkit without showing them the job site.

I admire the research behind AI powered instructional video. Making course videos searchable, interactive, question driven, and tied to the class context is smart. The OpenAI education powered initiative (cuGPT / Rutgers) points in the right direction: video should not just sit there like digital furniture. Students should be able to interrogate a video, revisit a concept, ask for another example, and prepare better before class.

But here is where I get allergic.

Student satisfaction with video does not automatically mean meaningful learning. It may only mean the video was less painful than the alternatives. That’s a very low bar. HigherED has a dangerous habit of confusing usage with value, “students liked the video” does not automatically mean “students learned.” Sometimes it only means the video was less painful than the textbook, the recorded lecture, or the professor reading bullet points like a hostage note.

The real issue is not video. It is format.

Students watch short videos all day, and yes, plenty of it is intellectual junk food. But the people making that junk understand rhythm, tone, hooks, pacing, compression, faces, sound, and the sacred violence of the first three seconds. Academia still thinks a forty minute recorded lecture with bad lighting is innovation because someone uploaded it.

If I had the resources, I would not produce learning videos like a professor. I would bring in someone who knows how to stop the scroll. Then I would pair them with someone who can write sharp vulgarisation. Together, we would break down Porter, Christensen, Blank, Jobs To Be Done, positioning, business models, effectuation, and customer discovery into short, punchy videos built around one idea, one example, and one decision students must make.

Not to dumb it down. To make serious ideas travel better.

AI would sit around that content: summaries, quizzes, counterarguments, retrieval practice, “explain this differently,” “challenge my answer,” “prepare me for class.” Then the next session would turn the video into a workshop where students apply, test, defend, and improve the idea.

That is HigherED powered by AI.

But higher education mostly wants the technology without the redesign. It wants AI without letting go of the old book driven model. Once in a while, someone tries to be hip, and we all know what happens: a podcast appears, a video series appears, a platform appears, and within weeks it smells like a committee discovered Canva.

The real move is harder. Bring the new generation into the room. Let them help build the format for the generation we are teaching. Not to lower the level. To increase the reach.

But that requires letting go. And higher education is very bad at that.

It wants the technology, but not the cultural shift. It wants AI, but not the redesign. It wants engagement, but not the discomfort of admitting that most academic formats were built for a world that no longer exists.

That is why this matters.

Not because video will save higher education. Because the way higher education handles video tells us exactly why it is in trouble.

Business schools love turning every new technology into an apocalypse forecast. AI will destroy education. AI will replace professors. AI will make classrooms obsolete. Dramatic. Convenient. Mostly wrong.

The better question is what AI becomes for excellent teachers.

My answer: the teaching assistant we were always supposed to have!

AI, agents, custom GPTs, on demand video, and smarter SaaS are becoming the preparation layer around the course. Not the professor. Not the classroom. The support system. The force multiplier.

I can easily imagine the classic twelve to fifteen session semester staying in place, because time is still time. But around it, an additional twenty to thirty percent of the learning experience becomes AI powered, asynchronous, autonomous, and more personalized. Students review basics before class. They get explanations when they’re stuck. They quiz themselves. They watch short videos. They summarize, compare, rehearse, and arrive with more raw material in their heads.

Good.

So I say, let AI build playlists, explain basics, adapt exercises, summarize content, and help students prepare. Then use class for what class should already be: coaching, mentoring, judgment, friction, pressure, and human guidance.

This is what I’m already testing. Multimedia playlists I create for use outside class. A constantly updated Notion course manual. Targeted agent support doing some heavy lifting. Custom GPTs that help structure milestones and prepare serious individual exams on the school LMS, in lockdown mode.

And this is what I’m seeing: students are relying increasingly on technology for facts. Of course they do. Everyone does. Nobody “challenges” Google Maps before finding a restaurant. You ask where Joe’s place is, then you go.

So when schools tell young students to “challenge AI,” I understand the intention, but I think the phrase is mostly wrong. Bachelor and initial master students are not specialized researchers. They do not naturally confront machines. They use them as answer engines, because that is what the internet, search, apps, and personal computing have trained all of us to do for the last twenty five years.

The issue is not that students have no information. Often, they have too much. They arrive with summaries, definitions, examples, arguments, counterarguments, and whatever else the machine spat out in seven seconds. The problem is that most of it is floating. It has no weight yet. No context. No consequences. No tradeoff. No ownership.

Students often have answers. What they need is the room to hash them out.

That is where class still matters. Not as a delivery mechanism for facts, but as a decision space. A place where students have to explain what they think, defend why it matters, test whether the answer survives contact with reality, and sometimes admit that the shiny AI response was just polished fog.

And that, for me, is the future of education worth building. Not AI replacing teaching. AI extending preparation. Not humans pretending they can outcompute machines. Humans doing what machines still cannot do well: creating the conditions for judgment.

AI gives them information. Teaching helps them decide what it means.

We are living through a moment where everything is being redesigned. Space travel is becoming commercial. Food is being grown in labs and vertical farms. Human reengineering is no longer science fiction. Quantum computing is creeping out of physics departments and into business strategy. AI is eating half the workplace for breakfast.

And yet, somehow, an undergraduate degree still takes four years.

Not because every student needs four years. Not because every program is built with surgical precision. Not because the curriculum has been radically rebuilt for a world moving this fast. But because four years became the package. The box. The ritual. The invoice structure.

The uncomfortable question is not only why it takes four years. It’s what actually happens during those four years. Many programs and syllabi have barely moved in fifteen or twenty years. Same modules. Same readings. Same group projects. Same academic wallpaper but with a Canva upgrade.

This is Goodhart’s Law in a blazer. Once the degree became the target, the learning became negotiable.

Business schools should stop pretending time equals transformation. Some students need shorter, sharper pathways. Others need recurring education across their careers. The future is not four years and then good luck for forty. That model is dead. It just still has nice buildings and a logo.

In my own courses, I’m trying to adapt the format to reality. Lecture segments are shorter. A three hour session is cut into 3 or 4 focused blocks, with breaks, pressure points, team work, feedback, and visible outputs. Less cathedral sermon, more Lego building blocks.

Honestly, my subject list increasingly looks less like Italian fine dining and more like the combined menus of a food court. Strategy, AI, experimentation, fieldwork, failure, customer behavior, pitching, ethics, execution. Messy? Yes. But so is the world they are entering.

And that’s the point.

Education should not be a long hallway students walk through once before being stamped “ready.” It should be a recurring operating system upgrade for adult life. The role of education is no longer to finish people. It’s to keep them unfinished in the right way: curious, adaptable, uncomfortable, useful.

Less “you completed the program”, more “you are still learning how to learn.”

I keep thinking about something business schools quietly eliminated: the funnel.

Not the marketing kind. The real one. The uncomfortable one. The one that decides who actually makes it through.

Serious systems use staged pressure. Military academies, elite sports programs, medical training, consulting promotion tracks, startup accelerators like Y Combinator, even apprenticeship systems. You enter one stage, prove something, then earn the next one. Not because these systems enjoy pain, although some probably do, but because the final badge needs to mean something.

Business schools used to understand this better. Now too many resemble a subscription model with a graduation ceremony at the end.

Pay, progress, repeat.

And yes, this collapse of the funnel did not happen because one evil dean pressed a big red button marked “lower standards.” It happened because the incentives bent that way. Parents want return on tuition. Students want progression without friction. Schools want retention, rankings, satisfaction scores, and fewer complaints. Faculty are pressured to “support” students, which too often means absorbing their lack of effort. The result is a polite machine where almost everyone keeps moving, even when many clearly should not.

Students know it. They optimize around it. Which classes can I skip? Which exams can I retake? Where can I recover ECTS with minimal effort? It becomes a game of navigation, not excellence.

In my own classes, I cannot rebuild the whole system. But I can create small gates. Multiple deliverables. Sequential steps. Shared Notion results, visible to everyone. Peer pressure starts doing some of the work the institution no longer wants to do.

I also track professional engagement: punctuality, focus, attitude, questions, teamwork, contribution, and whether a student’s presence moves the group forward or slows it down. It is visible on the shared Notion, so the class can see behavior as a pattern, not as a private excuse machine. It has no official grade impact. It is not endorsed by any school I teach at. But it sends the signal that standards are not just what you produce at the end. They are how you show up all the way through.

If business schools want credibility in a world where knowledge is free and AI is everywhere, they need to stop selling progression and start defending standards.

Because a diploma without a filter is just a receipt.

Business schools love talking about personalized education. Then they put 55 students in a room, give them a slide deck, a group project, three deadlines, and call it transformation. Cute.

The dirty little secret is that some of the most powerful teaching does not happen during the lecture. It happens in the one to one moment. The ten minute conversation where a student finally admits they are lost. The project coaching where a team stops hiding behind pretty words and understands what their idea actually is. The quiet intervention before a weak student disappears, cheats, fails, or mentally checks out.

Research has been circling this for decades. Bloom’s famous “2 sigma problem” argued that one to one tutoring can produce dramatically better learning outcomes than conventional classroom instruction. The debate around the exact effect is real, and fair. But the direction is not mysterious: good tutoring works. Very well.

I’ve tested this in small doses during my own teaching. It reduces attrition. It improves projects. It flattens lazy AI usage because students must explain their own logic. It improves participation because students feel seen before they are judged. It also protects the school and the professor from the usual anonymous drive by shooting called “end of course feedback.”

Here’s my proposal: every serious 8 to 12 session business school course should include structured one to one tutoring slots. Not optional office hours buried in a syllabus. Real tutoring, designed into the course.

But here is the uncomfortable part: you cannot industrialize this with warm bodies and a calendar invite. The tutor matters. Talent matters. Energy matters. Care matters.

Which is exactly why schools should stop treating it like a bonus. Because it’s the product.

There’s a question that keeps coming back, and nobody in business schools seems particularly eager to answer it: why did the price go up so much?

Because if you walk into the classroom, the answer is not sitting there.

Teaching hasn’t improved at the same speed as pricing. Not even close. In many cases, it’s gone the other way. Larger groups, less interaction, more standardized delivery. You’re not buying a sharper learning experience. You’re buying access to one.

And the people actually delivering that experience? Often adjuncts and professionals, paid around 80 euros an hour, so the cost explosion isn’t happening at the core product.

Then you look at administration.

To be fair, some things did improve. IT systems are better. Platforms are smoother. AI is starting to show up. But alongside that, layers of coordination, reporting, marketing, partnerships, rankings, and internal structures have multiplied. Quietly, steadily, and without a clear link to what happens in the room.

It’s not that nothing improved. It’s that the growth is disconnected.

And then there’s the physical product.

For the price students are paying, you would expect a step change in environment. Instead, in many schools, you’re still sitting in rooms that haven’t fundamentally evolved. Same layouts, same constraints, same passive setup. The space hasn’t caught up with what we claim learning should be.

Then comes the sacred word schools love to sell: network.

Yes, a network can matter. Of course it can. But most of the time it is sold as if volume automatically creates value. It does not. In practice, the bigger the cohorts get, the thinner the network becomes. Too many people, too little depth, too little real connection. And no, a crowded LinkedIn alumni page is not a community!

And schools miss something even more basic about brand.

The more people carry the same diploma, the less distinctive it becomes. That is not cynicism. That is market logic. If quality also starts slipping because selection, rigor, and learning depth are diluted, then the value drops twice. Once through volume. Once through weaker substance.

So what are students actually paying for?

Increasingly, it feels like a bundle: brand, signaling, access, and optional learning attached to it.

From where I sit, I don’t control pricing, budgets, or structures.

But I do control what happens inside the room.

So I treat this as a constraint. Strip out anything that doesn’t create learning and end value. Push students into real situations. Make every hour do actual work. That is the only part of the system I can still defend with a straight face.

If the price is premium, the experience should feel earned.

Right now, too often, it just feels… priced.

Professor assessments in business schools are one of those strange little rituals that everyone pretends to respect and almost nobody actually believes in. They’re presented as a tool for quality, improvement, reflection, and all the other clean managerial words schools love to teach, but in practice, they are mostly a smokescreen. A bureaucratic prop. Something that makes the institution look like it is listening while avoiding the much harder task of actually changing anything.

And the game is not even the same for everyone. For permanent professors, these assessments often land with a soft thud. Teaching is only one slice of their role, and usually not the slice that drives status, promotion, or security. Research does that. Publishing does that. So the evaluations exist, yes, but often in the polite and largely ceremonial sense. For adjuncts and other gig professors, though, the exact same survey suddenly becomes something else entirely. Not a development tool, but a rejection sheet. A vague pressure mechanism hanging over people who are already doing frontline teaching without the comfort of institutional protection.

Then there is the method itself, which is almost comically outdated. End of course surveys, sent late, usually with all the charm and strategic finesse of a bad mailing list campaign from fifteen years ago. The irony is hard to miss. These are institutions that teach marketing, CRM, funnel optimization, and customer engagement, yet they cannot get their own students to meaningfully complete a simple feedback survey. Response rates are low, timing is poor, and the experience itself is forgettable at best and irritating at worst.

Students, for their part, are thrown into this with almost no guidance. No framing of what “good feedback” looks like. No examples. No sense of responsibility. So you get everything from thoughtful input to rushed checkbox clicking to anonymous comments that drift into the kind of territory you would never tolerate in a professional setting. Some of it is useful. Some of it is noise. Some of it is, frankly, unacceptable. And yet it all gets treated the same.

Then the results disappear.

Students never hear what their feedback changed. Not at the class level, not at the program level, not even at the most basic “here is what we heard and what we did about it.” Which is remarkable, because the entire value of feedback in any modern system is the loop. Without the loop, it’s just extraction.

Professors do not fare much better. In many cases, adjuncts have to actively request their own evaluations, which is already telling. And when they do receive them, it is often a flat document. Scores. A few comments. No synthesis, no guidance, no interpretation, no direction. You’re left with a vague sense of whether you were “liked” or not, but almost nothing you can actually use to improve your teaching in a concrete way.

And when a system gives you shallow signals, people start optimizing for the wrong things. I know professors who soften their standards, over-index on being liked, or turn the last session into a charm offensive just to protect their scores. When your future teaching opportunities depend on a blunt, poorly designed tool, you adapt to the tool. Not to better teaching - to better survival.

Meanwhile, schools continue to teach NPS, feedback systems, continuous improvement, and customer centricity as if these were non negotiable fundamentals. Then they ignore every single one of those principles when it comes to their own product, which is the classroom experience.

The most frustrating part is that this is not a hard problem. Any decent modern SaaS tool, combined with a bit of thoughtful design and, frankly, a very light layer of AI, could transform this overnight. Better timing. Better question design. Real time pulse checks. Structured qualitative input. Automatic synthesis. Closed loop communication. This isn’t innovation. This is basic competence in 2026.

What am I doing instead? I run short pulse surveys during the course, not just at the end when attention is gone and opinions are already fixed. I use Slack to keep that feedback informal, quick, and continuous. Then I run a much stronger final survey through Typeform that I keep redesigning and improving every year. There’s only one question about me. The rest is about what should change, sharpen, or be dropped for the next cohort.

It is not anonymous by default. Students can choose, but I ask them to put their name and email so I can respond. And I do respond. That alone changes the tone. People think, write, and engage differently when they know there’s a human on the other side of the loop.

And the Typeform itself is also shared live with the very people taking it. They can see what is being said as it comes in, unfiltered. The only thing I remove is their names, because I want honesty without social backlash. But the feedback itself stays visible, which means the class can see, in real time, what others are noticing, what patterns are emerging, and where the friction actually is. And that creates something most business schools seem oddly terrified of: a feedback process that is transparent while it is happening, instead of being buried six weeks later in a PDF nobody learns from.

Most importantly, I show the next cohort exactly what changed because of the previous one. What was added. What was removed. What was adjusted. Feedback becomes visible. Tangible. Alive.

Not perfect. But useful.

Business schools do not have a feedback problem. They have a willingness to change problem.

I’m teaching a class right now with more than 55 students in the room, and every time that happens, I have the same thought: this is not really teaching anymore, this is crowd management with slides. You’re basically performing. You’re a guy with a clicker, a voice, and a PowerPoint deck trying to keep a small human avalanche vaguely pointed in the same direction.

And look, I understand the logic. I’m not naïve. Business schools are businesses. Rooms get filled, timetables get compressed, cohorts get bundled together, and on paper it probably all looks beautifully efficient. But in real life, in the room, with actual human beings and actual attention spans, it starts to break down very quickly.

And no, slides are not magic. Students cannot catch ideas as they whizz past them like dry leaves in the wind. Real teaching is slower than that. Messier too. It is a pause, a question, a bad answer, a better follow up, a scribble on a piece of paper, me leaning over a table and saying, “No, hang on, you’re mixing up the problem and the solution.” That’s where the learning happens. Not in slide 27.

That does not happen with 55 people. Or not well, anyway.

For me, the sweet spot is somewhere in the early to mid twenties. Big enough to create energy, small enough that I can still get close to people, read the room, push a team, calm another one down, and actually help someone over a hurdle. Once you get far beyond that, the whole thing changes. Yesterday, before the break, I had barely made it around the room. A few teams had not seen me for more than an hour. An hour. In a class they are paying serious money for. That’s absurd.

So what do I do when schools keep stuffing the room? I fight back a bit. Post its. Loose paper. Get up. Move. Talk. Ask them to borrow pens from each other because apparently half the class now shows up to university like it is a lounge, not a classroom. I build in two or three mini breaks in a three hour block. I go grab coffee with them. I herd them back in like a sheepdog (and believe me, that’s real contact!) It helps. Of course it helps. But it’s still compensation. It’s still me trying to outsmart a structural problem that should not be there in the first place.

Not elegant, maybe. But at least it still feels human. And that’s really the point, isn’t it? If business schools are supposed to be in the business of learning, why are so many of them still organised around efficiency, when learning itself is anything but efficient?