My senior thesis was on Stevie Smith, an English poet of the early 20th century who illustrated her poems with odd, wry line drawings. Her best-known poem, “Not Waving but Drowning,” describes a man whose desperate signals the people around him mistake for cheerfulness. Reading Smith taught me to look for the gap between what people present and what they’re actually experiencing. I didn’t expect that to be a business skill.
I arrived at the Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 1994 as that poetry student, not knowing how to do a discounted cash flow or really read a balance sheet. I left two years later with a toolkit, a network, and options I could never have built alone. That education led to a career I love, advising companies like Netflix and Microsoft on how to build lasting relationships with their customers. I’m grateful.
So when Cambridge professor Christopher Marquis argued in The New York Times last week that it’s time to shut business schools down, I expected to disagree. Instead, I found myself nodding to much of his argument.
Marquis describes students who arrive with inspiring goals and abandon them within about 14 weeks, swept up by recruiting events, peer pressure, and six-figure tuition debt. I watched that happen to classmates who came to fix health care or education and left for banks and consulting firms. Many are thriving. Few are doing what they came to do. A few are just coming around to that original goal, many years after graduation.
That outcome is what the system is built to produce. Stanford’s motto is “Change lives. Change organizations. Change the world.” But the numbers that drive rankings and applications are starting salaries and placement rates. In Stanford’s most recent employment report, 33 percent of job-seeking graduates went into finance and 11 percent into consulting.
In my work, I help organizations distinguish between a transaction, which ends at the sale, and a relationship, which rests on what I call a Forever Promise of ongoing value. Business schools market a Forever Promise to change the world. Then they measure themselves like transactional businesses, by what happens at graduation.
The Wall Street Journal’s Callum Borchers recently showed where that leads. Chief executives are flocking back to business schools for executive education, a market one research firm projects will grow from $55.1 billion this year to $115.7 billion by 2033. They come for help with AI, but also for ethics, reflection, and something harder to name. Former Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria told Borchers that new CEOs in his workshop confess they don’t feel like masters of the universe. Their first assignment is to write their retirement speeches. Many come mostly for camaraderie, because it’s lonely at the top.
As a Stevie Smith reader, I recognize that picture: leaders at the peak of their careers, not waving but drowning.
What those executives are seeking at 55 — ethics, purpose, reflection on legacy, and peers who understand them — is precisely what the MBA crowded out at 27. Business schools now sell back, at a premium, the reflection they didn’t make room for the first time.
The stakes go beyond the C-suite. According to an analysis reported by Poets&Quants this spring, 10 current presidents and prime ministers outside the United States studied business at American institutions. [The president of the United States is a Wharton graduate.] When students learn that every relationship is a negotiation, we shouldn’t be surprised when leaders treat alliances and public institutions as deals to win rather than relationships to sustain.
To be sure, business isn’t a zero-sum game, and defenders of business schools, including London Business School’s Alex Edmans, have rightly pushed back on that caricature. Sixteen percent of Stanford’s most recent class launched their own ventures. Finance and consulting aren’t villainous careers. And executive education is a business school keeping its relationship with graduates alive over decades, which is exactly what I recommend. Abolition is the wrong answer.
The right answer is to move the reflection to the front. Assign the retirement speech in week one, before recruiting season starts the 14-week clock. Track what graduates do at 10 and 20 years, not just their starting salaries. Treat alumni as lifelong members, with support for career changes back toward the goals they arrived with. And make room for the poets. History, ethics, and literature teach that people aren’t counterparties.
Stevie Smith drew her doodles alongside her poems because the words alone didn’t tell the whole story. Starting salaries don’t either. I’m calling on my alma mater and its peers to measure whether their graduates change the world — and to start asking the question while there’s still time to answer it differently.