Business School Leadership and Crisis Exit Planning, Eric Cornuel (editor), Cambridge University Press, 2022, 275 p.

As part of the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) ’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, its President, Professor Eric Cornuel, has edited this book. The book is a collection of contributions from leaders in management education from across the world, providing views from multiple perspectives and aiming to address the challenges and dilemmas facing business schools today.

The book contains four key themes: the “higher purpose” of business schools; the social impact of business schools; the internationalization of business schools; and crisis management within business schools. The authors point out that business schools need to move from an approach focused on shareholders to a logic of stakeholders. Business schools are required to provide just-in-time learning courses and cultivate leaders at the level of the whole society. Internationalization of business schools was supposed as a fundamental and inexorable trend but was undermined by the COVID-19 crisis. The limitations of international travel and the return of economic sovereignty caused a shift to virtual education, a decline in the increase in foreign students, and a change in admission criteria.

The authors believe that the COVID-19 crisis is an acceleration of underlying trends in management education. The objective of business school is to provide tools to exit the crisis, such as shifting to e-learning modes, designing new policies, and training a support ecosystem. There is an urge for business schools to provide business leaders with the skills in resilience, recovery, adaptation, and innovation to pull countries and global businesses out of the storm of COVID-19.

The book caters well to the need for social changes and will be of interest to presidents and deans of business schools and leaders of the education department. Different countries have different management situations, so we cannot copy a certain business education model. Business education must not only respond to the development of science and technology and the progress of the times, such as new technologies of artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things, but also combine the needs of different industries, such as new industries of information technology, new energy, and biology. Therefore, it is necessary to break the boundaries of business schools, cooperate with teams from other disciplines, and combine scientific research, teaching, and enterprise, establishing a multidisciplinary educational ecosystem. However, business schools can not only consider their own progress, but also the actual difficulty of students in the era of the epidemic. The epidemic has caused health and economic crises for the people, making business education more overpriced for underprivileged social strata. Business schools also have the responsibility to promote educational equity, so it is necessary to set up a multi-faceted student selection system.