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?

For once, I’m going to defend business schools. I know, I know. Don’t get used to it.

I was on a flight back from teaching, sitting next to two senior guys. Different worlds. One in big corporate. One in a massive European family business. Complex industries. Long value chains. Layers everywhere. Plenty of room for young talent to plug in and grow.

We start talking about what I do. Then I ask a simple question.

“If you had a magic wand, who would you hire right now?”

Silence. Then vague answers. Then… nothing.

And here’s what struck me. It wasn’t just that they didn’t know. It’s that they were embarrassed not to know. You could feel it. These are people used to having answers, used to leading teams, used to making decisions. And suddenly, they were exposed.

Not because they’re incompetent. Because they’re uncomfortable.

They don’t know where their own organizations are heading. And if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you define who you need?

We love blaming schools for “not preparing students for the real world.” Fine. I do it all the time. But what happens when the real world can’t define itself?

That’s the gap.

So I’ve been doing something different. I bring companies into the course, not as decoration, but as participants. They step into the mess, conduct mid-course check-ins, and multiple managers even mentor teams. They challenge, they react, they judge.

And then something shifts.

They start seeing clearer. Through the structure, the students, and the friction. They bump into ideas they didn’t expect, rediscover problems they’d stopped questioning, and get exposed to ways of thinking their own systems quietly filter out.

The best moment for me is always after. A drink, a lunch, something informal, and one of them admits it: “We learned a lot too, about our blind spots, about what we’re not doing well enough, and where we need to double down, including the kind of people we actually need, not the ones we’ve been hiring.”

That’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

Maybe business schools aren’t just here to prepare students.

Maybe they’re one of the last places where companies can figure themselves out too.

Every few months I hear some variation of the same complaint from executives: business schools aren’t producing the right people anymore. Graduates are too polished, too theoretical, too dependent on frameworks, too slow when reality refuses to follow the slides.

I don’t completely disagree. But I also can’t help noticing a small irony. The same companies that complain the loudest are often the ones who believe their role in education begins and ends with sponsoring a chair, funding a research center, or showing up once a year to deliver a keynote about “the future of the industry.” A nice logo on a brochure, a handshake with the dean, maybe a LinkedIn photo, and everyone goes home feeling that some sort of bridge has been built.

It hasn’t.

If companies genuinely believe the talent pipeline isn’t working, the answer is not another sponsorship. It’s co-design. And that’s a much more uncomfortable idea.

What I mean is something far less ceremonial and far more operational. Executives helping define what good work actually looks like. Students working on problems that are messy, incomplete, and occasionally annoying. Deliverables that have to survive contact with people outside the classroom. In other words, the kind of work environments graduates will encounter about five minutes into their first job.

In my own courses I’ve been experimenting with fragments of this. Students pitching beverage products to an actual distillery owner instead of to me, where students quickly learn what survives contact with a real market and the producer gains fresh positioning ideas from outside his own industry bubble. Design sprints that take place in hospitals or hotels where the frictions are real and observable, forcing students to decode how people actually move and hesitate in complex environments while the organizations themselves gain dozens of practical micro improvements they rarely have the time to explore internally. Effectuation projects in seemingly barren territory like last mile delivery, where students must identify opportunities using only the resources already available around them and defend their thinking directly to senior operators, who in return get exposed to unconventional angles and reframings of operational problems they deal with every day. Or local social impact programs linking proximity NGOs with the school’s own management, allowing students to design initiatives that could realistically be implemented while gently reminding institutional SDG teams that meaningful impact sometimes exists just outside the campus walls, not only in distant partnerships that look good on a sustainability report. Teams trying to fix small operational problems under constraints rather than producing immaculate slide decks about hypothetical strategies.

The change in behavior is immediate. When students know they are performing for a grade, they optimize for safety. When they know someone from the real world is watching, they start optimizing for judgment. The difference between those two instincts is enormous.

None of this is a magic solution, and it’s definitely messier than traditional teaching. It requires companies to invest time instead of just money, and it requires schools to open the classroom door wider than they usually feel comfortable with. Bureaucracies are not famous for enjoying that sort of thing.

But if industry truly wants better prepared graduates, outsourcing the entire formation process to universities while commenting from the sidelines is probably not the winning strategy.

Funding education is easy.

Co-designing it is where things start to get interesting.

Once upon a time, and I promise you this is a true story, there rose beyond the city a magnificent chain of mountains that ambitious families spoke of in hushed and hopeful tones. They shimmered in brochures, rose heroically in rankings tables, and were whispered about at dinner parties as if they held the secret to a prosperous and well furnished life.

Parents pointed toward their snowy peaks and said to their children, “Climb those, and you will find the rainbow. At its end waits a pot of gold called Career Security. You will live successfully ever after.”

So the children climbed. They paid their toll at the gate, endured the winds of finance and the fog of strategy, and carefully collected their golden diplomas as if they were enchanted coins.

When they reached the summit, slightly out of breath and heavily in debt, they looked around for the orchestra, the recruiter on a white horse, the golden chest.

There was nothing of the sort.

Instead, at their feet lay a single parchment. A map. Completely blank.

Now here is the part I tell my own students when the fire burns low and the illusions flicker. The mountain never promised gold. It offered altitude. Perspective. A harder lung capacity. A network of other climbers who might one day rope up with you.

Business school does not manufacture happiness. It does not guarantee employment. It’s personalization is modest, its job magic rather dismal, and its fairy dust mostly administrative.

What it can offer, if you insist on using it properly, is leverage. A higher vantage point from which to draw your own map.

The rainbow was always yours to paint.

And if there is a happily ever after, it will not be because a school handed it to you, but because you decided to build it.

Resits.

I have a complicated relationship with them.

On paper, they make sense. One bad day should not nuke a semester. Students come in with uneven starting points. Schools need progression, not a bloodbath. Fine, I agree.

But let’s be honest about what most resits have become in business schools. They no longer measure mastery, they measure recovery. Compliance. Almost promote formatting skills. And now, in 2026, they often measure who can prompt, edit, and polish with the most confidence.

That’s not nothing. But it is not strategic capability.

The original logic of resits assumed something important: what a student produced under constraints was a decent proxy for what they could actually do. But today, that link is weaker. Most business schools drifted toward online, asynchronous, text based resits because they scale and they are administratively easy. But when the resit is an unsupervised essay or a take home video, we’re not testing thinking, we’re testing production.

And yes, research shows resits reduce anxiety and help performance. But they also reduce first attempt effort (students optimise, we know that), and if there’s a safety net, some will aim for it. So the question is not “resits yes or no”. The question is “what do we want the resit to measure and incentivise”.

But the bigger issue for me is design. Detection is not a strategy, and authenticity cannot be policed into existence. It has to be designed into the assessment itself. So if a resit is “submit an essay” or “submit a video”, it will almost always be scriptable. That’s not a moral judgement; it’s just the reality of the medium.

So here’s my take.

Keep resits. But stop treating them as “same exam, second try”. Make them proof of mastery. Narrow. Live. Diagnostic.

Here’s a format I would actually use because it is fair, scalable, and hard to game.

The Mastery Resit in three parts.

1. One page diagnostic autopsy.
   They write a short document answering: “What did I get wrong. What concept did I misunderstand. What changed in my reasoning.” Graded on clarity and honesty, not polish.

2. Ten minute viva.
   You ask: Two questions from the original exam outcomes. One transfer question with a twist, new context. And one challenge question, “defend your recommendation against a counterargument.”

3. Two minute weak signal sprint.
   A short prompt in real time and ask: “What signal matters. Why. What would you monitor next month.”

That’s it. Short. Clean. Hard to script.

And yes, I’d cap the resit grade at the pass threshold, or at a modest ceiling, so the incentive remains to take the first attempt seriously, and also, so it stays fair for the students who passed normally.

And maybe the contrarian view: the best resit reform is better assessment upstream. More small, low stakes proof points during the course. Fewer cliffs at the end. I do this already and I use it as collateral when grading finals.

Resits are not the enemy. Fossilised design is.

Business schools are world-class at one thing: the hand-off. We teach a high-intensity module on strategy or innovation, grade a few “team exposés” that prove nothing but a student’s ability to format a slide deck, and then spit them out into the wild. The next time the school reaches out, it’s usually the Alumni Association asking for a donation.

If a student can’t deploy the strategy I taught them during their internship six months later, did they actually learn it? Or did they just “rent” the information for the exam? It’s a broken feedback loop that fails everyone involved.

Introducing the “Trackback”.

In tech, a trackback notifies you when someone links to your work. In education, we need a Trackback Module: a formal, post-course loop that occurs only after the student has hit the real world.

Think about the missed opportunity:

• For the Student: They are left to drown in the gap between “textbook strategy” and “office politics.”

• For the Parents: They’ve paid a premium for a product that has no warranty the moment it leaves the showroom floor.

• For the Employer: They inherit a “finished product” that requires expensive recalibration.

• For the School: We have departments full of researchers who rarely research the actual impact of their own “product.”

I can see administrators rolling their eyes, but this is where effectuation comes in. This isn’t a long series of lectures; it’s a surgical, scalable, two-session audit conducted digitally three to six months post-course.

1. The Evidence: The student submits a “Deployment Log”, tangible proof of a specific skill (e.g., a business model pivot) attempted in a professional setting.

2. The Employer Audit: We pull in measurable feedback from their supervisor. Did the tool work? Did the student know how to wield it?

3. The Pressure Test: A 20-minute deep dive with the professor to look at the “scar tissue”, why a theory crumbled and how to fix it for next time.

I currently offer this informally. About 25 students a year take me up on it. It’s the most honest teaching I do. We look at why a business model failed and how an employer actually reacted to a strategic proposal.

If we want to fix the “Unrecycled” classroom, we have to stop treating graduation as the finish line. A school that offers a formal “After-Sales” service isn’t just a school. It’s a high-performance partner.

It’s time we stop producing “graduates” and start producing “proven assets.” After all, we don’t need more credits - we need a warranty on the brain.

Here’s something I’m increasingly convinced of. Business schools should be producing tinkerers. Not managers, perfect analysts, or framework reciters. Tinkerers.

That’s what companies actually need right now. People who explore edges, test unfinished ideas, break things safely, automate the boring parts, and then explain what they learned to others. Especially in a world where AI can already do the clean, linear thinking faster than any student (or their bosses) ever will.

And if that’s the goal, then today’s curriculums have a problem.

Most programs are still built around one shot submissions, polished deliverables, and grades that reward not being wrong. Students adapt quickly. Experimentation drops. Risks get minimised. And thinking gets offloaded to AI because thinking itself feels dangerous.

In my classes, I do everything I can to reverse that.

I tell students early that no one will remember their grades. I give them tons of space to tinker individually and in teams. Like multiple waves of submissions, with progressive incentive grading as the key. Recognition for progress, not just outcomes. Room to make mistakes, fix them, and try again. The effect is always the same. Once the fear drops, curiosity comes back. AI stops being a crutch and becomes a tool.

Here’s the uncomfortable extension of that idea. Schools cannot design curriculums for tinkerers if they do not hire tinkerers. Especially now. Professors need to experiment, iterate, and sometimes fail publicly with new tools, new formats, and yes, AI. But because of accreditation, rankings and heritage we’re simply not allowed. Or more accurately, not encouraged.

Safe teachers produce safe students. Curious teachers produce builders (tinkerers at the core).

If business schools want relevance, in today’s fast changing world, this is where it starts.

I just received a new wave of professor evaluations from the schools I worked with in S1, business school shorthand for last semester. The first reaction is always the same. Not surprise. Fatigue.

But what struck me this time wasn’t any single remark, but the growing sense that a system originally designed to improve teaching has quietly turned into something else entirely. Not feedback, not quality control, but a low signal, high noise mechanism that distorts behavior while pretending to measure excellence.

Most business schools still rely on anonymous student surveys as the backbone of professor evaluations and present them as feedback. In reality, they function more like an unmoderated comment section on a contentious website. Loud. Emotional. Mostly useless.

What makes this worse is that most students do not leave comments at all. Not because they have nothing to say, but because they are neither incentivized nor guided, and rarely see any consequence or follow up. The minority who do write are often reacting to frustration: a disappointing grade, a demanding course, or a bruised ego. What follows is rarely feedback in any meaningful sense. It’s venting. And once written, it is treated as data.

That’s where the real damage happens. These assessments are non operational. There’s no substance, no context, and no reliable way for a school or a professor to extract signals that lead to improvement. Just numbers and anonymous sentences floating without accountability, yet taken seriously enough to influence careers.

For adjunct faculty, the incentives are particularly perverse as hiring and renewal decisions quietly orbit around these scores. The rational response becomes obvious: be nice, inflate grades, avoid friction, and chase consensus. Inevitably, education slowly turns into a popularity contest rather than a learning experience.

This is the Uberization of teaching. Ratings without dialogue, labor without protection, and incentives that reward short term comfort over long term growth.

If schools were serious about quality, they would redesign the system entirely. No anonymity by default. Coached feedback prompts. Minimum substance requirements. AI could easily block empty or defamatory comments and push students to explain, clarify, and justify. Add a mandatory feedback loop where professors or programs can respond.

This is not rocket science.

In my own courses, I already do this outside the official machinery. Structured mid and end course feedback, named, discussed, and acted upon. Students learn how to give feedback, not just how to complain. I learn what to improve. Everyone grows. That’s what real progress looks like.

Anonymous noise helps no one. Accountable feedback builds better classrooms and better people.

It’s time to choose.