An article by Warren G. Bennis and James O’Toole, “How Business Schools Lost Their Way,” was published in 2005 in an issue of the Diamond Harvard Business Review, a publication for practicing businesspeople. The Japanese translation was entitled “The Forgotten Mission: Business Schools are Ill,” which certainly surprised many people associated with business schools. This article rang a bell of warning about a trend at that time at business schools to focus too heavily on the pursuit of “science.” The background for this was the way that business schools hired and promoted their professors. That is, too much emphasis was being placed on “academic” superiority, with little evaluation of a professor’s “professional” and “teaching” skills and abilities.

What leaders seek from business schools are suggestions and advice regarding how to interpret the facts of situations where all of the details are not clearly available, but a decision must be made. In other words, it is relatively easy to make a decision when one has all the facts. “Leadership” is the courage and ability to act, even in situations where there is a lack of understanding. In such cases, there is no scientific approach from any specific professional or academic domain that has a ready answer.

A business school thus requires all of its professors, as well as each individual professor, to have a balance in their resume of three different categories: scientific, practical, and pedagogical.