Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2005, Vol. 4, No. 1, 75–91.

........................................................................................................................................................................

Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices
SUMANTRA GHOSHAL Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM), UK and London Business School The corporate scandals in the United States have stimulated a frenzy of activities in business schools around the world. Deans are extolling how much their curricula focus on business ethics. New courses are being developed on corporate social responsibility. Old, highly laudatory cases on Enron and Tyco are being hurriedly rewritten. “What more must we do?”, the faculty are asking themselves in grave seminars and over lunch tables (Bartunek, 2002). Business schools do not need to do a great deal more to help prevent future Enrons; they need only to stop doing a lot they currently do. They do not need to create new courses; they need to simply stop teaching some old ones. But, before doing any of this, we—as business school faculty—need to own up to our own role in creating Enrons. Our theories and ideas have done much to strengthen the management practices that we are all now so loudly condemning. vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil” Keynes (1953: 306). This is precisely what has happened to management. Obsessed as they are with the “real world” and sceptical as most of them are of all theories, managers are no exception to the intellectual slavery of the “practical men” to which Keynes referred. Many of the worst excesses of recent management practices have their roots in a set of ideas that have emerged from business school academics over the last 30 years. In courses on corporate governance grounded in agency theory (Jensen & Meckling, 1976)