CURRICULUM & COURSEWORK
The problem with prestige Yet for all this innovation, uncomfortable questions remain. What do MBAs fundamentally reward? What traits do they select for? And which behaviours do their ranking systems incentivise? Despite widespread rhetoric about purpose and responsibility, MBA prestige is still significantly tied to graduate salaries, employer brand and corporate placement. If leadership education continues to valorise financial outcomes above all else, we should not be surprised when graduates internalise those priorities, regardless of how many sustainability modules appear on the syllabus. Business schools increasingly position themselves as institutions shaping ethical, socially conscious leaders. However, unless the logic of competition, assessment and reputation also changes, these claims risk becoming a superficial branding exercise rather than a transformation of educational philosophy. I am not suggesting schools should abandon commercial relevance, but they must redefine it. In a world of systemic risk, the ability to generate short-term financial returns is no longer sufficient. Leadership must be understood as the capacity to sustain organisations, societies and ecosystems over time, and to govern intelligent technologies responsibly. This is why redesign, not incremental reform, matters. When treated as an add-on, sustainability is easy to drop the moment it becomes politically or socially unpopular, or simply inconvenient. We see this now, with some firms not only deprioritising sustainability, but also actively rolling it back, placing management education will better prepare leaders to face the complexity of modern decision-making. For example, the trade-off between short-term growth and long-term sustainability, or between legitimacy built through consistent values and the credibility lost when commitments are watered down under pressure. With the current fragile levels of public trust when it comes to business, the MBA could struggle to retain moral and intellectual credibility if programmes remain structurally aligned with a model that externalises environmental and social costs. In this climate, leadership education cannot afford not to evolve. The real short-term pressures ahead of stated values. Embedding sustainability into the core of question, then, is no longer whether MBAs should teach sustainability; it’s whether they can remain credible if they do not redesign themselves around it. In an age of climate risk, inequality and institutional crisis, the notion of what ‘leadership’ means is being renegotiated and the MBA must decide whether it wants to be at the vanguard of that conversation or be overtaken by it.
modern executives face are rarely isolated or purely economic. They involve navigating trade-offs between competing stakeholders and managing long-term environmental risk. They also require responding to social expectations and operating within ethical constraints that cannot be reduced to financial metrics. Cultivating a different skillset What I am advocating for is not just curricular reform, but a shift in the very purpose of management education, from producing proficient managers to developing leaders capable of operating within complex systems. This shift becomes even clearer in the emphasis Trinity Business School places on applied learning. MBA teaching often revolves around the use of case studies. These tend to sanitise reality, rarely capturing the political and social ambiguity that characterises real-world decision-making. By contrast, applied projects expose students to problems that don’t have neat solutions. They force future leaders to confront uncertainty, conflicting interests and imperfect outcomes. In doing so, they cultivate a different set of skills: judgement, ethical reasoning and the ability to operate under constraint. This matters because the leadership challenges of the coming decades will not resemble those of the past. Climate adaptation and AI-driven technological disruption cannot be addressed through efficiency gains alone. They require leaders who can work across sectors, engage with policymakers, understand social dynamics and accept that not all value can be measured in financial terms. Flexible programme structures also play an important role. Many of today’s MBA cohorts are composed of mid-career professionals juggling work, family and study. Their learning is shaped by lived experience rather than abstract ambition. Designing programmes around this reality instead of an idealised image of the full-time student brings leadership education closer to where it occurs.
BIOGRAPHY Laurent Muzellec is professor of marketing & digital business and dean of Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, where he shapes the school’s strategy under its mission of “Transforming business for good”. Muzellec is also the founder of the school’s Centre for Digital Business and Analytics and established its MSc in digital marketing strategy. He joined Trinity in 2015
Ambition • ISSUE 2 • 2026 41
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