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This chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities that exist in the realm of management and business education. The author provides an in-depth analysis of the history and development of management education, highlighting the changes and evolution that have occurred over time. Furthermore, the author discusses the dominant paradigm that has shaped management education and the issues that have arisen as a result. Specifically, the author identifies the problems that have contributed to financial crises and business failures, demonstrating the inadequacies of the current approach. Finally, the author argues for the need to revolutionize the current management education system. This involves a significant departure from the traditional methods of teaching and learning, and instead emphasizes the development of critical thinking skills, problem-solving abilities and adaptability in a rapidly changing business landscape. This chapter challenges the current state of management education and offers a compelling call to action for reform. By addressing the issues that have plagued the field and proposing innovative solutions, the author aims to pave the way for a more responsible management education system.

Yair Aharoni is a Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Management, Tel-Aviv University. He received his DBA from the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. His doctoral dissertation – The Foreign Investment Decision Process – was published in a book version and was translated to Spanish and Japanese. He is a Fellow of the International Academy of Management and the Academy of International Business. During his long and distinguished academic career, Aharoni was the Daniel and Grace Ross Professor of International Business and later the Issachar Haimovic Professor of Business Policy – both at Tel Aviv University. He was the Thomas Henry Caroll Ford Foundation Visiting Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (1978–1979). He was also the J. Paul Stitch Visiting Professor of International Business at Duke University (1987–1995) and the director of CIBER (Center of International Business Education and Research) (1992–1995). He published several dozens books and monographs in Hebrew and in English, more than 100 papers and chapters in books and more than 150 cases. For his academic achievements he was awarded both Landau Prize (2007) and Israel Prize in management science (2010).

Against the backdrop of the fledgling entrepreneurship development and the imperatives of risk management to mitigate failure, this chapter discusses the impact of risk management practice on the development of African businesses. It also considers how best to align the practice of risk management in order to achieve business continuity. More than ever before, global competitiveness and the need to trade‐out of declining profits are currently driving businesses into risk management efficiencies in order to continue achieving increased returns on assets employed/equities for their shareholders. The attainment of these growth objectives can often be affected by several types of business risk (financial and operational) coupled with unpredicted movements in prices. These movements especially in times of high volatilities impact materially on profit growth potentials regardless of how well a business is managed. This chapter suggests how African business executives can evolve their business management styles to imbed risk management at all stages.

The focus of the research was to provide a business perspective to the role of real estate assets in supporting the fulfilment of corporate business plans. Based on a comprehensive survey of published literature and a series of in‐depth interviews of corporate real estate/facilities managers, an integrating resource management framework was developed to model the nature of interactions between strategic business planning and operational asset management in an organisational setting. The study supports the view that research efforts aimed at improving management effectiveness of the operational real estate asset base must be channelled to provide frameworks or models that promote understanding to all parties involved in the process, from a knowledge base that aims to define better: the operational requirements of core business(es); the key real estate and facilities service attributes; and options evaluation to meet dynamic changes.

Business process management has received much attention in the industrial engineering and management literature, and its benefits are well known. Much less has been written in the public sector management literature, and what has been written has been very general. Hence, there is confusion among public managers about how business process management concepts should be implemented. How should public organizations reorganize to accommodate business process management? How are existing or new enterprise systems aligned with business process management methodologies? This paper addresses these issues, and concludes that public organizations will have to change their organizational structures radically as well as their enterprise systems in order to implement business process management concepts successfully. The paper also discusses the benefits of public sector process management, and focuses in some detail on two of the reasons that public organizations have incentive to implement business process management methodologies.

Jagdish N. Bhagwati is professor of economics and law at Columbia University and one of the most prolific scholars on globalization. He has a BA in economics from Cambridge and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has served as an external advisor to the director general of the World Trade Organization, as a special policy advisor on globalization to the United Nations, and as an economics policy advisor to the director general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Before moving to Columbia University he was professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Bhagwati currently serves on the Academic Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch (Asia) and on the board of scholars of the Centre for Civil Society. He is senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The purpose of this editorial is to introduce the set of papers which comprise this issue of the journal, and to provide an interpretation of the current strategic debates about the future evolution of business school paradigms and, hence, identify possible strategic options.

The papers can be categorized into three broad themes: first, the impacts and environmental influences on management education including issues of globalization, global sustainability and advances in digital and social media. Second, challenges and criticisms of management education covering issues of legitimacy, business model sustainability and the need for change in business models. Third, the re‐invention of business schools and the creation of alternative models of management education and approaches for effective implementation and delivery of those models.

Globalization is an important environmental influence. Arnoud de Meyer, the President of SMU, offers his reflections. The paper by Peter Lacy and his colleagues at Accenture builds on the theme of globalization by examining the new era of global sustainability in the management arena. In discussing the second theme of challenges and criticisms, David Wilson and Howard Thomas examine the continued legitimacy of the business school with respect to both academic legitimacy in the university and business relevance and thought leadership legitimacy in the management community. Kai Peters and Howard Thomas address the issue of the sustainability of the current business school financial model and question whether it is too luxurious. Santiago Iñiguez and Salvador Carmona reinforce this urgent need to review the sustainability and viability of the existing business school models. Building on the importance of technology impacts, James Fleck illustrates how the Open University Business School (OUBS), the leader and pioneer in blended and distance learning in management education, has focused on further developing models of blended learning which will challenge the current weak adoption of such models in well‐known business schools. Rich Lyons, on the other hand, presents a thoughtful analysis of the careful implementation of a completely new MBA curriculum at the well‐regarded Haas Business School at Berkeley. Peter Lorange's “network‐based” model, on the other hand, is the most radical change model. Granit Almog‐Bareket's leadership paper offers one perspective on the importance of business school leadership in creating the conditions for innovative and insightful management of business school futures.

Clearly, debates and criticisms of business schools will continue to be addressed. It is a sign of a healthy academic and management community that such debates – particularly through the auspices of EMFD – can be presented in an open and constructive manner, as in this special issue of the Journal of Management Development.