Top B-Schools Responding to Market Demands

This past weekend the Boston Globe discussed the "rising chorus of critics who worry that b-schools have grown overly academic and removed from the actual workings of business" ("B-Schools Get Back to Basics"). Those critics include business professors (McGill's Henry Mintzberg, Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer, and USC's Warren Bennis and James O'Toole) as well as the business world (more on that here):

Feeding the urgency of such moves are fears that some companies might have second thoughts about hiring freshly minted MBAs at six-figure salaries. "When you hear the McKinsey and Goldman Sachs tell their bright young people not to go back and get MBAs, that's a bad sign," [outgoing dean of MIT's Sloan school] Schmalensee said.

As I've written about previously, several top business schools (including Stanford and Yale) have been revamping their curricula to make them more customizable and more hands-on, and the article profiles MIT's efforts in particular. What I love about this innovation is how different the entire mindset is than at stodgy old law schools where even the slightest tinkering with the 1L curriculum causes a stir (most notably changes at Chicago in 2000 and Harvard in 2006).