“Universities are in the business of making an impact on society through preparing people for a lifetime.” Herbert Simon, Novus, 1976

Alumnus Harsh Manglik (MBA 1976), former editor of Novus (predecessor to Tepper Magazine), contacted us before the 75th Anniversary Academic Symposium regarding the "Disrupt or Be Disrupted: Business Education in the Age of AI" panel. Manglik's 1976 Novus piece, "Talking With the Who’s Who of Management Education," featured prominent thinkers on management education, including Herbert A. Simon and Arnold Weber (CMU), George Leland Bach (Stanford), Lawrence Edward Fouraker (Harvard), Richard Rosett (Chicago), and William Donaldson (Yale). The following excerpts offer a unique perspective on management education.

Harsh Manglik. "That we begin to look into the future is only appropriate, for the goal behind these interviews was to obtain a feel for the challenges of the next quarter century."

Herbert Simon. "… almost every subject ought to be taught as a problem-solving course; that you are not teaching … mainly content, but you are teaching people methods of tackling problems in a subject matter area and the materials they need to tackle those problems with."

Arnold R. Weber. "… we would be doing our students an injustice if we let them get out of here believing that the world is as neat and unambiguous as their professors' lectures."

George L. Bach. "We can't teach students the answers to many of tomorrow's problems. What we can, and must do, is to teach them problem-solving skills, especially for dealing with the unstructured, messy problems; and flexibility in approaching new situations."

William Donaldson. “ … one of the greatest potential pitfalls for [generalist] managers is that if they do not understand a number of fundamental disciplines, they may be scared by their applications or intimidated by the people who operate in those disciplines.”

Lawrence Edward Fouraker. "In another fifty years … how do you recapture some of the opportunity, the excitement of the first twenty-five years of the institution? The response involves a very heavy reliance on human behavior skills and human relations skills. These are the most difficult processes to understand and teach in a professional curriculum; and they are the most important."

Read the full issue of the 1976 Novus here.