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leadership discipline that graduates of 2026 will inherit is generative, not restorative. There are signs of change from within academia itself. As Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill puts it in her recent work: conventional leadership models work for standard change management but fail when it comes to structural redesign. To succeed at the latter, leaders must instead create the conditions for others to co-create the solution. If traditional leadership styles are in fact blocking organisational redesign, business schools must urgently rethink what their core curriculum is teaching. When I walk into a business school, three questions come to mind. Which leadership endpoint does this curriculum teach: restoration or regeneration? Where does the core curriculum teach systematic decommissioning as a discipline equal to growth, given that most business education remains net additive? What instruments does the programme equip graduates to use when their inherited governance dashboards cannot detect that the prior state is no longer available?
found that 88 per cent of company leaders believed their new organisational structure would achieve its goals, while only 36 per cent of employees working at the same companies agreed. PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey , drawing on 4,454 chief executives across 95 countries, reported the lowest 12-month revenue growth confidence in five years. These figures do not describe a failure of execution: they describe a failure of detection. Boards govern against operating models the environment has overtaken, with instruments that cannot see the mismatch. The cohorts sitting in today’s business schools will be hired to lead exactly those organisations. WHAT REGENERATION TEACHES US In social-ecological literature, transformability describes the capacity to cross into a new trajectory when the prior state is unavailable. Regeneration is the work that follows: strategic decommissioning of what no longer fits, building the substrate that supports what comes next, designing the new configuration under constraint. The
These are not questions designed to indict. This is what the operating environment of the future will demand of our successors whether we ask these questions or not. Resilience was a useful idea for a recoverable world; however, the next cohort will not lead recoverable organisations. They will lead organisations in which operating environments have been permanently rewritten by interacting pressures. Business schools hold the credibility, the convening power and the research base to teach the discipline that follows. The work, as I see it, is to teach what comes after resilience.
Stuart Green is founder of Blue-Green Advisors and author of The Regenerate Leap . A former adjunct professor at the University of Texas, Green holds an MBA and is an alumnus of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School
Business Impact • ISSUE 4 • 2026
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