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.

Let’s be honest for a second. We’re living in a culture obsessed with individuals. Social media amplifies it. Institutions reinforce it. Business schools, in particular, have turned it into doctrine. Faces on alumni walls. Best student awards. Best professor titles. Employee of the month. Everything signals the same message: stand out or stay invisible.

For a handful of people, that is motivating. But for most students I teach, aged twenty to twenty five, it’s paralyzing.

They are not finished products. They are still figuring out who they are, how they speak, where they belong, and whether their voice deserves space. When you over promote individuals at that stage, many do not rise to the challenge. They retreat. They compare. They self censor. Confidence erodes quietly, behind polite participation and group work that never quite ignites.

I spotted this regretful trend years ago and knew I had to do something. So last semester, I stopped promoting individuals in one small way and started promoting collectives (on top of the usual team projects).

In courses with multiple sections, I published a live ‘Best Class’ ranking on Notion. A five criteria rubric. Part playful - part serious. Updated a few times during the semester. Fully transparent. Talked about openly in class.

The effect was immediate. The energy shifted from individual performances to team dynamics, and then to something rarer: a whole room moving in the same direction. Students stopped optimizing for personal visibility and started pulling each other forward. Participation rose. Silence disappeared. Belonging became a performance lever.

This is how sports teams work. This is how real organizations work.

So in in my view, business schools should start promoting cohorts, classes, shared missions, and collective contribution. Not just individual shine.

We’re not lacking talent. But we are starving rooms of confidence. And no wall of alumni portraits will fix that.

Every business school has them. Long corridors lined with framed alumni portraits. Names. Job titles. Company logos. A carefully selected quote that sounds suspiciously like it was written by someone who has never met the person in the photo.

These walls are supposed to motivate students. In practice, they mostly embarrass them.

I’ve talked about this with students many times, across different schools, different programs, different years. The reaction is remarkably consistent. They don’t feel inspired. They feel patronized. They know exactly how these people were selected. A tiny group of outliers pulled from thousands of graduates and presented as if this is the default outcome of effort and ambition. They also know, instinctively, that most of the quotes aren’t real. They’re marketing artifacts, not lived words.

What schools fundamentally misunderstand is what students are actually searching for when they look at those walls. They’re not looking for heroes. They’re looking for reassurance.

Reassurance that a meaningful life does not require a C-level title. That success isn’t limited to those born into the right networks or polished into visibility early. That it’s possible to build a career with balance, curiosity, dignity, and space for life outside work. They’re looking for examples that feel reachable, not curated.

Business schools borrowed this idea from institutions like the military, but stripped it of its logic. The military doesn’t glorify the single general. It shows paths, roles, progression, and notably - service. Business schools kept the frames and lost the meaning.

If schools insist on keeping these walls, they need to radically change what they show. Not just the former CEO, but the alum who became a project manager and stayed there because they liked their evenings. The graduate who tried consulting, hated it, left after eighteen months, and rebuilt a life that actually fits. The one who started a company, shut it down quietly, then found meaning inside a mid sized organization. The teacher. The freelancer. The person who took a pay cut to move countries. The one who paused their career for family. The one who never climbed very high and never wanted to. Show plateaus. Show detours. Show years where nothing spectacular happened except learning how to live. Let alumni write their own words, in their own tone, without polishing the doubt out of it. Variety is not a weakness here. It is the message.

What these walls should show instead are ordinary lives. Not ideals to chase, but paths you can recognize yourself in. People who chose differently and are still doing just fine.

And to the students who might be reading this: if those walls make you feel like you’re already behind, you’re not. Your life will not follow a script, it will not fit in a frame, and it does not need a title to be legitimate. You are allowed to take your time, change direction, and define success on your own terms.

And that’s not a failure. That’s the whole point.

The first week of class in January always tells the truth. Not the glossy brochure truth. The operational truth.

Students walk in wired, overloaded, and quietly unsure. Laptops open by reflex. Tabs multiplying. AI sitting there like a co pilot nobody asked for but everyone uses. And the institution? Still pretending this is a minor adjustment year.

It’s not.

Here’s what most serious observers agree will shape business schools in 2026. I am not inventing this stuff, I am reading the same reports as everyone else.

• AI is no longer a tool. It is infrastructure.
  AACSB, FT, GMAC, McKinsey, pick your acronym. The consensus is clear: AI will sit underneath every discipline, whether faculty like it or not.

• Experiential learning is no longer a differentiator. It is the baseline.
  Live projects, simulations, field work, messy constraints. Schools that cannot prove learning through action will struggle to justify tuition.

• Credentials are fragmenting.
  Micro credentials, certificates, badges. Not because students hate degrees, but because degrees struggle to prove what graduates can actually do.

• Students are more transactional than schools admit.
  They care about employability, skills, and confidence under pressure. Prestige still matters, just less than before.

Now here’s where I stop nodding politely.

The real issue is not AI - it’s that the classroom contract is broken. Open internet plus generative AI means you cannot teach, assess, and manage attention the same way and pretend rigor still exists.

So what should business schools actually do this year?

1. Redesign assessment so it cannot be outsourced.
   More live defenses. More oral reasoning. More “explain why you chose this.” Less lonely Word documents written at midnight with a chatbot.

2. Make AI usage explicit and graded.
   Students must declare where AI helped, where it misled them, and where they overrode it. This is key, because then “judgment” becomes the deliverable.

3. Decide what happens with devices in class.
   Either you design activities that require connected work, or you ban devices to protect thinking. Half rules create half attention.

4. Stop rewarding speed and volume.
   Fewer slides. Fewer frameworks. More depth. More friction. Learning is not a content race.

5. Integrate adjunct faculty properly or stop pretending quality matters.
   Last minute parachuting produces last minute learning.

What am I testing in January? A published class operating system. Clear device rules. Mandatory AI usage traces. Live defenses replacing part of written exams. Fewer slides. Less guidance. More whiteboards, constraints, and uncomfortable silence. Students thinking out loud instead of hiding behind AI polish. In a nutshell, I’m removing the safety wheels.

Why now? Simple. I’m writing this because there is a growing gap between how business schools talk about learning and how learning actually feels on the ground. Students feel it first. Faculty feel it quietly. Institutions rarely feel it at all. This post is my way of putting that gap on the table. Not to provoke for sport, but to say clearly that credibility will not be saved by language. It will be saved by what happens, concretely, in the room.

So, it’s the start of a new year, and that feels like the right moment to stop pretending. At least in the classroom.

If you want to understand how it feels to teach in a business school today, try this: burn your toast, spill coffee on your only clean shirt, open five different apps to enter the same date in five different calendars, then walk into a room of students - half of whom are scrolling Instagram, the other half politely waiting for ChatGPT to do the assignment for them. And that’s before 9:10 AM.

I came very close to quitting this year.

Not because of the students. Not even because of the AI. But because I’m tired of the system pretending it’s still functioning while everything around it breaks in slow motion. I’ve had to explain to students why they need to think, while the school refuses to ban open internet access during in-class work. How do you teach anything real when your audience is outsourcing comprehension to a tab next to Netflix?

And then there’s admissions. Let’s not sugarcoat it: too many students should not be here. Admissions departments chasing quotas are filling classrooms with tourists. It’s killing curiosity and replacing it with entitlement (and ruins the experience for the one’s that have always dreamed to be here). That nonchalance, that arrogance, that open disrespect - it’s not a mystery. It’s a design flaw.

I’ve been an adjunct for over a decade. The only people who talk to me are the security guards and cleaning staff - the only ones around when I arrive, and still there when I leave. The cafeteria food has gotten so bad that I now consider a triangle sandwich a gourmet item. Syllabi are so overstuffed that real class participation is nearly impossible, outcomes suffer, and yet the pressure to pass students keeps rising. The quiet nudges, the backroom whispers, the subtle nods to “just let it slide” - it smothers standards and guts the meaning of grades. That’s how a school’s value gets hollowed out. And if that wasn’t enough, I haven’t had a single euro of raise in eight years. This, despite sitting in the 97th percentile in student evaluations. It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing. And it’s starting to rot something at the core.

Don’t even get me started on admin. Hundreds of startups have revolutionized basic business processes, but in business schools, we’re still copy-pasting class schedules by hand. Most courses have ten sessions. Multiply that by five courses. Change one date, and the whole thing collapses like a bad Jenga tower. Grading? School’s use Excel. And every time I open their sheets, I feel like I should be issued morphine. Blackboard and Moodle look like they were coded in the Nixon era. Classrooms? The AC rattles like a haunted fridge. The projectors belong in a VHS museum. The Wi-Fi works for exactly one student, and always the one watching F1 highlights mid-discussion. I pay for most of the tools I use (Notion, Slack, Pitch, Miro, Typeform…) just to make this chaos vaguely functional.

And yet.

Something keeps pulling me back. It’s not nostalgia. It’s not loyalty. It’s the moment a student says, “I didn’t know I could think like this.” It’s watching a shy kid stay after class to pitch me their startup idea, eyes lit up, hands shaking. It’s the weird, messy, wonderful tension of seeing something click - not because I gave them the answer, but because I didn’t.

I believe in students. More than ever. They’re overwhelmed, distracted, skeptical, but they’re also smart, sensitive, and bursting with questions no one is letting them ask. They feel the world shifting beneath their feet. They know something has to change. And when they sense that you’re not just teaching a class - but fighting for something real - they show up. And that is what brings me back. Every damn time.

I almost walked away this year. And maybe one day I will. But not yet.

Because every time I get close to giving up, one of them gives me a reason not to. A question I wasn’t expecting. A team that suddenly clicks. A little defiance in their eyes that says, “I want this to matter.”

This job isn’t about comfort. It’s about consequences. I still believe the classroom is one of the last places where change can start quietly, dangerously, beautifully - one student at a time. And for now, that’s enough.

That’s why I’ll be back. Not because the system works. But because the spark still does.

PS. If you’re one of my students reading this - yes, I saw you trying, even when you thought I didn’t. You are the reason I show up. And the reason I still believe.

Business schools do not close for Christmas. They simply rebrand suffering.

Students unwrap presents. Professors unwrap exams. And immediately start negotiating with their coffee about how much truth they’re emotionally ready to face.

This is the season of take-home exams. Two glorious weeks of squinting at handwriting from a generation that has not voluntarily held a pen since 2014, except to sign for delivery drivers. We call it assessment. It feels more like forensic analysis, minus the training and emotional support.

The irony is delicious. I teach strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship. Ambiguity. Judgment. Point of view. The ‘no right answer’ stuff. Then I ask students to sit alone, in silence, and pretend the real world comes with margins, word limits, and a single correct answer. I say this confidently, of course, while enforcing the exact margins and word limits myself.

Modern written exams were not invented to make people smarter. They were invented to sort people efficiently. Imperial China used them to select obedient administrators. Nineteenth-century Europe loved the idea and industrialized it. Bureaucracy needed filters, and exams were cheaper than thinking. And so, business schools inherited the ritual and never asked why. Ooops.

Correction is where the comedy peaks. You read the same idea three hundred times, each slightly worse than the last, until you start questioning your own syllabus. You want to give thoughtful feedback but no one reads it. You want to fail work that shows zero engagement, and you’re are gently reminded that “we don’t really fail here.”

And yet we persist. Because tradition. Because logistics. Because “we’ve always done it this way.”

Somewhere around exam number 147, you briefly wonder if this is how the Grinch got started. That’s when it becomes obvious; I’ve seen students reveal ten times more competence in business games, debates, simulations, and real projects with real stakes. Messy. Human. Uncomfortable. Exactly like work.

Enough said.

Yes, I still keep one written exam. One. Like fruitcake. Symbolic. Technically traditional but rarely enjoyed (though it does reassure my program director).

Yet I can’t stop thinking that the future of business education isn’t better exams. It’s fewer of them.

Merry Christmas!

There was a time when students walked into my classroom with a kind of natural steadiness. They weren’t always sure of the answers, but they were sure they could at least try. I really miss that. These days I see more hesitation in the room. More glances toward screens. More quiet deflation when things aren’t instantly clear. I’ve come to believe it’s not laziness. It’s been replaced by something softer, more fragile, almost tender: dependence.

AGI didn’t just give students answers. It gave them relief. For many of them, it is the first voice in their life that never judges, never interrupts, never sighs, never says you should know this by now. It wraps them in certainty. And what they don’t realise is that certainty is a sedative.

Those of us that have lived through it know, confidence is built in the gaps. In the moment you hesitate, try anyway, stumble, recover. In the moment you look at a blank slide or piece of paper and think well, here goes nothing. Today those gaps are filled instantly, effortlessly, invisibly. Students don’t wrestle with uncertainty anymore. They outsource it.

And here is the part that caught me off guard: it hurts. Not because they are using the tools everyone uses now, but because it creates a distance between us. A shield. I can feel them learning next to me rather than with me, because they trust the machine’s warmth before they trust mine.

So I’ve started doing something I never did in my early years: slowing down. Staying closer. Sitting with them longer than the schedule says I should. Not as a professor trying to maintain authority, but as an adult showing them what confidence looks like in practice. Being present. Being predictable. Keeping my word. Giving them small wins they can own; like intermediary grading, letting them integrate my idea in their team project, or simply class wide recognition. Building the muscle memory of “I can do this without the machine”. And there’s a twinkle of hope.

Because here’s the truth no one in business schools wants to say out loud: students are not lazy. They’re just scared. Scared of being wrong. Scared of disappointing (their stakeholders). Scared of grades. Scared of being exposed. AGI didn’t invent that fear. It just made hiding easier.

If business schools want to matter, they need to rebuild confidence as a human craft. Confidence from being seen. Confidence from trying. Confidence from failing with someone waiting on the other side. Tools like AGI can scale knowledge but they cannot scale courage.

And from my locus, courage is what our students need most.

Students do not arrive in my classroom helpless. They arrive conditioned. Trained to wait. Programmed, politely, to follow instructions like well behaved passengers on a bus they did not choose. Years of color coded syllabi and microscopic grading rubrics have taught them one thing: wait for instructions. Simply put, they’ve learned that learning is something that ‘happens to you’, not something you do for yourself. Then we hand them a diploma, drop them into the economy, and act surprised when they stall at the first unstructured problem.

The research crowd talks about autonomy as if it were a luxury. Dewey argued it was the foundation of real learning, not the decoration on top. He was right, yet business schools still treat it like a side salad. We talk about empowerment, yet design systems that infantilize. We build courses around checklists. We spoon feed, scaffold, double cushion every fall. Then we expect graduates to walk into companies and show initiative. That’s just magical thinking.

In my courses, autonomy is not a slogan. It’s the operating system. I tell students from day one that my job is not to mother them through a degree. It is to teach them how to teach themselves. I don’t want them dependent on me. I want them dangerously capable without me.

So I design around that goal. They get an absurdly rich Notion (ever evolving) library, progressive incentive grading (with bonus points for climbing back up after a fall), and 24/7 assistance via Slack so risk taking is rewarded instead of punished. They get chances to try, fail, rebuild, adjust, and try again. More importantly, they get a teacher who believes in them more fiercely than they expect (sometimes more than they believe in themselves), in their ability to climb without me holding the rope.

But autonomy is not chaos - it has structure. You don’t drop students in the desert with a bottle of water and call it character building. You give them space to roam, but you also give them paths, signals, maps, and the confidence to improvise when the map becomes useless. You build systems that let them learn from mistakes without sinking their entire semester. What matters is giving them a second chance so they are not terrified of the first one.

And here’s the part schools love to ignore. Autonomy has to be learned before the real world hits. Out there, the mistakes have stakes. No extensions. No clearer instructions. No grade curves. Out there, it is unstructured problems, shifting targets, political landmines, and expectations that feel brutally unfair. Out there, nobody cares if you were top thirty percent in your Strategic Management elective. They care if you can figure things out when nothing is explained and everything is blinking red. School is the only environment where you can practice that with training wheels. If we do not teach autonomy inside, students will learn it outside through pain.

Business schools say they prepare students for the real world. Fine. Then let’s stop raising them in bubble wrap. Give them permission to try. Give them space to trip. Give them systems to get up. And most of all, believe in them long before they believe in themselves. Because the Colosseum is coming. And no multiple choice exam is going to save them.

I still remember the day I walked into the Army recruiting office. Standard strip mall lobby. Dingy carpet. A coffee machine that looked older than me at the time. And then this guy comes out from the back. Calm. Built like granite. The kind of person who does not need to raise his voice because everything about him already says: follow me. And that’s what I did.

Only later did I learn he was Special Forces. And that this moment lined up with the very beginning of the new 18X program. I enrolled. I went through the steps. I met people who were hungry and relentless. People who made you want to stand a little taller. Leaving that path is one of my life regrets. I still feel it in my chest when I think about what might have been.

That experience taught me something I wish business schools understood. Admissions is not a formality. It is culture setting. When you walk into a place and think, “Everyone here wants to be here,” the entire system changes. Standards rise on their own. People push themselves because the room demands it. It’s visceral.

So here’s what schools should do. Copy the Army. Put the best people at the door. The best faculty, the best admin, the best alumni, the best student ambassadors. The ones who live the mission and have the energy of people who are proud of where they work and study. Build the admission journey the same way we teach the customer journey map. Every touchpoint is a moment of truth and every step is a signal. And the message should be unmistakable: excellence starts here, and if you’re not up for it, back out.

Yet too many business schools treat admissions like customer service. Anyone who can pay is waved through. The first faces future students meet are faculty who know theory but never walked the walk, or tired administrators who are forced to take part. Alumni? Sometimes on the walls, but physically absent. And the only student reps are those that are popular and spend more time partying than studying. Result? No spark. No conviction. No pride.

I’m testing a simple fix in my own world. Every new class begins by hearing directly from previous students. Raw comments. Mini interviews. Real words, not brochures. They see the expectation before I teach anything. And instantly you feel the tone shift. They straighten up. They listen. The message is clear. This is for real.

If schools want better graduates, they must start with the door. Admissions is the foundation. Get that right and everything else becomes easier. Get it wrong and you spend years trying to fix problems that began on day one.

Business schools keep giving students problems that have nothing to do with their lives. They work on cases about companies they do not care about, in markets they will never set foot in, solving challenges that belong to someone else. Then we act surprised when the learning does not stick. It’s simple. You cannot develop real judgement by role playing someone else’s job.

Here’s the fix. Every student should start school with a personal project. Not a passion manifesto or a dream board. A concrete problem or idea they can investigate, build, test, and refine over the entire degree. It does not need to be brilliant. It just needs to be theirs.

This project becomes the one place where everything they learn can land. Strategy forces them to make choices. Marketing forces them to explain themselves. Finance forces them to stop hand waving. Leadership forces them to own decisions. Over time the project turns into evidence of who they are and how they think. And when it comes to job hunting, evidence beats résumés every time. They can put it on their portfolio site (I do a lot of out of class clinics on job search and this is a cornerstone), send it in a cold email, walk a recruiter through it, and say here is the work that proves I am worth your time.

I have started introducing this idea quietly in my own classes. Nothing formal, no banners, just a simple rule: link the assignment to something that actually matters to you. The impact is immediate. Students stop decorating answers and start thinking. They argue with themselves. They push back. They take risks. And from a teaching standpoint, it is a relief. You finally get to see their instincts, not their compliance. When the work belongs to them, the learning does too.

Business schools look impressively organized from the outside. Courses stacked neatly into two or three-hour blocks, nine or ten sessions per term. Everything scheduled to the minute, like a train timetable. On paper, it looks efficient. In reality, it’s a chokehold.

The whole system runs on the clock, not on learning. We start at nine, finish at noon. Maybe ten minutes to pack up before another professor barges in. Some schools don’t even allow that. The turnover is brutal. Students barely finish a thought before the next slide appears. And with twenty or thirty concepts crammed into a thirty-hour course, even a fast talker (I’ve tried) can’t keep up.

Add to that the way most schools actually run: around two-thirds of courses are taught by adjuncts (professionals) like me dropped in, sometimes with a week’s notice, to make the schedule work. We rarely see the exams, never wrote the syllabus, yet we’re expected to “cover” it all. And the syllabus? Same one someone typed up years ago. Frameworks stacked on frameworks that no real company has opened in decades.

Yesterday I did what I always do. I grabbed a chair, pulled it up to a team, and we dug into their VRIO grid. Ten minutes later, we were still wrestling with what “rare” actually means in their project company’s case, and whether it even belonged there. Then on to the next team, and the next. Eight groups later, eighty minutes gone. I could’ve done another round. That’s where the teaching lives. Not in the slides, not in the grading sheet, but in those chaotic ten-minute detours where students stop parroting the frameworks and start thinking through them.

But those windows are rare. Because we keep running out of time.

If schools were honest about learning, they’d start selling time. Every thirty-hour course should have another ten hours built in call it “ThinkTime” where small groups of eight or ten sit down with a professor and actually chew on one complex idea until it makes sense. No new content, no extra slides, just digestion time. Maybe a visiting professional drops in, maybe it’s student-led. Whatever shape it takes, it needs to exist.

And let’s stop pretending we can teach the entire strategic universe in one module (in my case). You can’t cover internal analysis, external analysis, and strategy design in thirty hours. Pick one, do it properly, and move on. An “Internal Analysis” course followed by an “External Strategy” course; logical, manageable, actually learnable. I know, a pretty “radical thought”.

My students this semester didn’t master every framework and I’m fine with that. What they did learn is that the point isn’t filling out a SWOT; it’s pulling something meaningful from it. That’s learning. It’s slow, sometimes messy, always human. And it takes time something business schools seem allergic to valuing. Because no company out there cares how neatly you color-code a SCORE Framework. They care about the story you can tell from it, the sharp insight that moves a decision forward. That’s the real value students could bring if only we stopped teaching against the clock.

Walk into any “international” business school and you’ll see the same picture: clusters of locals on one side, exchange students on the other, and professors quietly pretending it’s fine. It’s not.

Business schools brag about diversity, but diversity without integration is decoration. Students are thrown into “multicultural teams” with zero preparation on how to work across cultures. The result? Oil and vinegar. Ten weeks later, I’m mediating team meltdowns over cultural friction instead of grading presentations.

The irony: teamwork is the cornerstone of every business curriculum. But schools treat cross-cultural collaboration like an optional elective - if it’s mentioned at all. Instead of preparing students to actually work together, they waste time on social mixers, ice-breakers, and those tragic “phone-poll gimmicks” that solve nothing.

The fix isn’t complicated. During admissions and throughout the year, schools should host recurring, work-focused workshops led by people who’ve actually managed multicultural teams on things like conflict, decision norms, and feedback styles. No gimmicks. Just face-to-face sessions on conflict, communication, and trust across nationalities. The stuff that makes teamwork, work.

I spend hours outside class mediating these implosions. I’ve sat with German and Brazilian students over coffee, trying to bridge their completely opposite approaches to deadlines. I’ve walked Chinese students through how to challenge ideas in Western-style debate without feeling disrespectful. I’ve calmed French students who think their foreign teammates are “too passive.” None of this is in the syllabus, but it’s the real curriculum. And I do it off the books, one coffee chat at a time. But it shouldn’t depend on professors like me moonlighting as mediators. School’s need to realise they’re producing graduates who crumble the moment real diversity enters the meeting room.

Both students and schools should start with The Culture Map by Erin Meyer. It’s not theory - it’s a mirror. Her research breaks down how cultures think, decide, and disagree, and why teams fall apart when those differences go unspoken. I met Meyer during my INSEAD years, and her work should be baked into every teamwork class, case, and project. I think it’s the missing operating system for the global classroom.

Teamwork is 60% of the curriculum. Cross-cultural competence gets 0% of the training. If schools keep dodging this, they’re producing graduates fluent in buzzwords, but lost the moment real diversity walks into the meeting room.

Working across cultures isn’t about slides and slogans. It’s about sitting across from someone different - and still getting the job done.

Ambition doesn’t mean the same thing everywhere. In the U.S., it’s practically patriotic. In Japan, it’s socially suspect. In Northern Europe, ambition gets politely neutralized - be competent, not exceptional. Even in France, where I teach, ambition is often confused with arrogance, especially in the business school classroom.

When a student dares to question, challenge, or push further, classmates roll their eyes, and faculty members tighten their smiles. It’s not hostility—it’s discomfort. I think we’ve built educational systems that reward obedience, not aspiration.

Sociologists call it normative conformity pressure: the instinct to blend in, not stand out. It keeps peace, but kills progress. Schools claim to “develop leaders,” but mostly they produce survivors—trained to meet requirements, not exceed them. Grades are the finish line, not the launch pad.

That’s why I decided to make ambition the core of my teaching. I try to remove boundaries by rewriting the rules. I tell my students there’s no such thing as “off limits.” I make them use AI - not to cheat, but to stretch what’s possible. I assign multiple deliverables, with every round a chance to improve the mean removing the fear. And I let them fall, hard, then hand them benchmark examples so they can rebuild and reach for the stars.

We sketch strategy frameworks on paper because I want them to think with their hands, not their slides. We bring in random outsiders—distillers, startup founders, local officials—to tear apart their ideas. We’ve built visitor journeys through airports, redesigned patient flows in hospitals, even argued ethics while half the class was still finishing their croissants. I tell them, forget the grade—it’s not the prize. What matters is that moment when they realize they can think faster, go deeper, and stand taller than they thought possible. That’s what I really want, is for them to switch their mindset from “I hope I can do this” to “I’m going to make this happen”.

If schools really wanted ambitious people, they’d stop admitting only the polished ones - the GMAT grinders, LinkedIn curators, professional hoop-jumpers. They’d start hunting for grit: the kid who built something, broke it, rebuilt it. They would also stop grading for obedience and start rewarding intelligent rebellion. And they’d cut the faculty who mistake rigor for rigidity. Replace case studies with field tests. Build admissions around curiosity, not compliance. Most of all, they’d scrap the fake “leadership workshops” and put students in rooms with real founders, activists, engineers, creatives—anyone who bleeds for what they build. That’s where ambition gets contagious again.

Because ambition is learned like anything else: through freedom, risk, and the belief that someone actually expects you to soar.

And if ambition feels dangerous, maybe that’s the point.