Michael Watkins on not getting tenure, and what's happening at MBA programs. I have been wondering for some time: To what extent are business schools producing insights of use to practicing managers? Is the investment that they are making in research justified in terms of results? Is the [HBS] (Harvard Business School) brand at risk? I believe that the answers to these questions are, respectively, little, no, and very much so. I further believe that this is the result of the "capture" of business schools (including unfortunately and increasingly [HBS]) by discipline-oriented academics who consume more value from their institutions than they create for them... Go too far in the direction of practice and you become a consulting/training company. Go too far in the direction of academic respectability and you become irrelevant. The latter has been the fate of many of the business schools at leading universities - they rarely produce cutting-edge thinking that impacts business practice (take a look at the top 250 books on management at Barnes and Noble and note how few are written by business school academics.) Jim Collins, the author of [Good To Great], for example, was essentially fired by Stanford... In an [HBS] faculty meeting a year or so ago, the then Senior Associate Dean in charge of Executive Programs gave a sobering presentation on the state of [HBS]'s open enrollment executive program offerings. The gist of the presentation, as I heard it, was that [HBS] was attracting fewer and fewer managers from leading US companies in growth industries and more from (1) non-leading companies in stagnant industries, and (2) international participants who continued to see the [HBS] brand as very attractive. To me, this was a clear warning sign of creeping erosion of the [HBS] brand...

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