Society views CEOs as useless, greedy executives who know nothing about a business and maximize shareholder value at all costs, especially long term costs like offshoring jobs. It’s partially true; many of these leaders don’t have much experience from the bottom of the rungs of a company and are unable to keep in touch with the finest details of the company; in that way, they are able to royally screw over the firm by not understanding the product and market. Many CEOs are coming directly from consulting firms, again having no real experience or tangential feedback for the strategies they devise and end up not understanding the fundamentals. Though they may pattern match how their previous clients strategized and can hide their lack of fundamental knowledge by regurgitating their now competitors instead of clientele, many CEOs do eventually kill businesses from a lack of innovation, even just for being uncreative from a strategy perspective.

Society should place blame on executives for being selfish in short-term value, but I want to comment on why a business school education is still important for the rest of society. Business is all about solving problems and providing value. Even if people get screwed over, there is a reason a company has sales: they solved something, even if not well. Now that Gen Z is fretting over AI, more and more are venturing into business. The core fundamentals of business school is to teach you the strategies of navigating the business world: formulating competitive advantage, the basics of marketing, understanding world cultures (e.g. Japanese meeting cultures), finding a wedge, teaching the basics of Excel, exposing you to technologies like ERPs, etc. Though school won’t drill hard in the fundamentals of each topic they cover, they can explain why they are important. Understanding the fundamentals of what drives a business, an industry, and the necessity for a business/competitive concept is still up to the student.

In the startup world, I’ve used many of the concepts I’ve learned from business school to craft my pitch and to plan my business. These are concepts that the YC Startup school and many Peter Thiel quotes can teach, but not in-depth, nor in a collaborative classroom setting. The way I view the world is also grounded by business school concepts rather than the hype of tech. It allows me to figure out how I’d realistically beat competition, what paths not to take, and from what angle. In the tech world, I think there’s this notion of get a lot of money and the rest will come easy, but that’s far from how most industries operate. Summarily, business school is useful for people who want to start a business and know how to tackle their competitors.

Besides exposure and learning concepts, business school is a great pipeline for consultants and finance. Those are primarily relationship-based, pattern matching jobs. A good business school provides a fantastic pipeline into those careers, so long as there are clubs that offer pipelines to internships and eventually a full-time job. Finding a job is fairly hard already, so why not go to a school that provides a pipeline into a job. There are looming threats of AI, but those businesses are early adopters of AI and technology in general, and I haven’t seen a reason why they would collapse. They are towers of knowledge and wisdom from the thousands of firms that they’ve worked with, and knowledge is very rarely passed down by writing and always through experience and direct verbal mentorship. Experience is how people gain a fundamental understanding of an industry. If knowledge and wisdom is never written down, consulting is a great career to build up knowledge (if you take the time to understand an industry’s driving force) and be useful for industries and technologies. A great example are ERPs: it’s striking how many people believe the incumbents of the ERP industry can just be replaced, but there is so much knowledge built on these ERP ecosystems and a high amount of customization making switching costs high. Even Salesforce is a great example of something built thousands of times, but their deep industry connections in consulting firms, brand, innovation, customization, enterprise-readiness, etc. makes it impossible for them to ever be replaced in the next decade.