The history of business teaching in the US has been consistently predictable for the past two generations of MBA programming. Ever since the signatories to the Bretton Woods agreement, a month before the end of World War II, bequeathed the governing structures of the IMF, the eventual World Bank and the primacy of the US dollar, most business schools have understood their role in the value chain – mint new leaders to run this thing.
The Hayekian doctrines of the Chicago school of economics became the framework for all things theory and practice of business in the West. This was most infamously pronounced by Milton Friedman’s 1970 guidance that, “the social responsibility of a public company is to generate profits [for its shareholders]”. For a hot take on the negative externalities of this shareholder capitalism ethos, a 2020 Harvard Law School Forum on Business Governance announced, “The Friedman doctrine was a precursor to, and became a doctrinal foundation for an era of short-termism, hostile takeovers, extortion by corporate raiders, junk bond financing and the erosion of protections for employees, the environment and society generally, all in support of increasing corporate profits and maximizing value for shareholders.” (Towards a Fair and Sustainable Capitalism, Leo Strine Jr, 2018 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/10/01/toward-fair-and-sustainable-capitalism/ )
Since the comeback following the first dotcom bubble burst in 2002, the ownership and investor class has been tantalized by the new economics of platform capitalism, summarized by the unlovely acronym of the FAANGBATs. This shorthand investor-speak grew from Jim Cromer’s 2013 naming of the basket of US-based big tech stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google – appended with the Chinese stocks of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. The markets agreed a fresh insight: this new value form inherent to tech platforms (Nick Srnicek would describe it in his 2016 book, Platform Capitalism) was replacing the traditional dynamics of company valuation. The ascendancy of power accorded to owners of these platforms’ stocks has stood, and the valorization of their business models has became axiomatic.
The b-schools adopted quickly with a programmatic focus on producing the brave new entrepreneurs and managers to scale this wealth-creating machinery, along with the VC and PE bankers necessary to gatekeep risk in their new search for unicorns. If the business schools of the 1990s and early 2000s were consciously aiming to produce the next generation of Bill Gates, Jack Welches and Warren Buffets, the programs of the teens and early 20s were intent on attracting and graduating the next generation of Brins, Musks and Thiels.
Into this accelerationist arc of higher-ed business teaching comes a well-meaning contrarian like myself. I’ve been a practitioner adjunct inside grad and undergrad programs in marketing and business for the past sixteen years. I’ve founded and run consulting businesses and agencies of my own since the late 80s. I spent big chunks of the past twenty-five years in and out of global holding company consultancies and agencies. For the past five years I’ve been building and growing an Innovation Lab inside a university who let me get away with testing a service model, academy-as-platform, which integrates real-world startups, businesses and non-profit organizations directly into the courses I teach – courses as value production labs. I’ve learned a lot these past sixteen years adjuncting and consulting across five different colleges and universities about how academia works at the business school level. I’ve come to believe we’re doing it wrong – structurally, culturally, economically and – most critically – ethically.
I’m no better and I’m certainly not smarter, but I am decidedly different. Different in how I got here, different in what I believe matters and different in where I think we could be aiming this great machinery of higher-education when it comes to training 20-somethings to imagine and build a world radically different from the one we’ve pre-immiserated for them.
About four years ago, a dear colleague and program director at one of the grad programs where I teach asked for my help in designing and standing up something he had intended to call The Center for the Ethical Transformation of Marketing and PR. I was pumped, and started sketching out a model for productively integrating businesses and their briefs into our academic programs. My colleague set off in search of funding. Three months in, he called one fateful afternoon to say, “Thom, I’m sorry – we need to drop that word ethical from our Center’s name. It seems no one will take us seriously if we don’t”.
It was one of those crushingly disappointing professional moments which I used as inspiration to prove his point wrong. I committed to finishing my first textbook, The Big Leap – An Ethics of Insight, and published it a year later, in May of 2022. Since then, I’ve been teaching to the text, assigning its chapters-as-insights to stimulate students to analyze, critique and apply its provocations towards their client project’s within their 15-week semester sprints.
What I’ve discovered is this: when you stimulate the average 20 or 25-year old with some radically alternative insights about how companies and humans can come together to make value, their strategic thinking and creative doing is breathtakingly fresh, inventive and insightfully ethical. Their research papers, project work and in-class discussions reveal an expansive generosity of spirit and compassionate intent. These ethically inventive young scholars seemed precisely not the new model army of ravenous entrepreneurs traditional business training programs seek to produce.
Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Program https://online.stanford.edu/programs/entrepreneurial-leadership-graduate-certificate defines the entrepreneur as, “an individual or a small group of partners who strike out on an original path to create a new business. … the entrepreneur assumes the greatest amount of risk associated with the project. As such, this person also stands to benefit most if the project is a success. Entrepreneurial pursuits often involve innovation.” It can’t just be me who gets creepy, Ayn Randian vibes reading pedagogical propaganda like this. But it does its job. The figure of the entrepreneur has been heroically fetishized by generations of business leaders, academics, investors, journalists and, perhaps most destructively, by politicians and policy makers. The entrepreneur figure of late capitalism is the lone wolf, the ruthless exceptionalist, the sleepless visionary – the fail fast, break things self-permissioned hero. Who am I to call bullshit on the model?
I’m just some old guy who believes a revolution in higher-ed business training might become the key to saving the species from itself.
My first book was an opportunity for me to surface cases and insights for urging my students towards a kinder, more mutual value-making in their nascent careers. Then I spent the last two years teaching-to those texts, and found myself becoming inspired by the students’ ethical response to my mildly radical stimulations. As I continued my research for my second book, I realized there was so much more at stake, and something more to be done then just tweaking the future towards a more stakeholder focused world of businessing. I recognized that the Wall Street and Silicon Valley bros were doubling down on their predatory and extractive logic fueling what economists like Yanis Varoufakis are now naming as technofeudalism. (Here’s his book, https://www.abebooks.com/9781847927286/Technofeudalism-Yanis-Varoufakis-1847927289/plp which I recommend.)
And so, just in time for this coming Fall 2024 semester I will be dropping that new text – The Bigger Leap – An Ethics of Next Capitalism. The plan is to expand my model of teaching and consulting to the text as a way of enabling the coming generation of artists and CEO’s, non-profit directors and investors, small businesses and emergent startups to work together in blasting through the edifice of whatever you call the current state of emergency capitalism to something that might lie on its other side.
I had intended to pitch the deans, department heads and program directors of business schools on granting me airtime in their programs. After publishing my first text in May 2022, I would have jumped at the chance for a guest lecture slot, a seminar series on ethics, maybe some summer workshops. I realize now, that would have been a hopelessly naïve and largely ineffective route. When your goal is helping the coming generation of careerists fix the world that I and my generation broke, maybe we focus on liberal arts students and schools. Maybe accelerating climate catastrophe, habitat decimation and species decline all suggest that we’re just about out of time – and, I don’t think we’re going to meaningfully alter how b-schools do their wildly lucrative b-schooling any time soon.
So, I turn to perhaps a most unlikely place to change the future of business and capitalism – the liberal arts college. I piloted this approach teaching to my first text, in a January course semester at a small liberal arts school in Central Maine, these past two years. I was able to apply and adapt the model we developed within the Innovation Lab, briefing student teams to design a B-corp start-up, serving a specifically underserved community of customers. Underserved audiences like the hungry or unhoused, the carless and the structurally poor, the abandoned youth and elders, the starving artist and mentally anguished, the stateless immigrant and the working single moms.
The work those student teams produced gave me the wild encouragement to expand the plan to take my project for teaching and inspiring a nextcapitalism to other liberal arts schools with the drop of my upcoming book as its blue-print for revolutionary change. I’m publishing this article with two selfish goals – to make a ‘call-for-cases’ to include in my next text and to recruit other liberal arts schools, ready to take a chance on piloting an interdisciplinary nextcapitalism accelerator lab on their campus.
I’ve begun to develop the curricula for applying the upcoming text’s insights to building these research and production labs incrementally, starting with elective courses which connect into existing programs via an interdisciplinary series of workshops, value hackathons, interactive seminars, research projects and master classes. The goal is to partner with ambitious program directors at liberal arts schools to make the business case for building a better world by inspiring and enabling their liberal arts grads.
One of our key challenges is mapping our labs’ emergent curricula into existing course catalogs of liberal arts colleges. But once you remove the filtering constraints of traditional business schools learning objectives, synergistic connections become excitingly obvious. Our lab’s insights and learning outcomes resonate deeply with disciplines like economics, environmental studies, sociology, psychology, media studies, history and anthropology. To test these synchronies, we developed a starter kit for integrated, interdisciplinary program planning, and offer the grid below as inspiration to our future colleagues from all relevant corners of academia interested in partnering with us in our project of new world-making…
| Next Capitalism concept / topic | Integrative education vehicle / interdisciplinary program |
| Regenerative businessing – beyond the neoliberal dodge of green sustainability | Economics master class moving beyond recycling (environmental studies; economics) |
| B-Corps – the tail that wags the dog | Insights incubator + production workshops on the potential for public benefits corps to become the engine of nextcapitalism (economics; sociology; environmental studies) |
| Solarpunk – positive futuring for the coming utopias | Aesthetics + ethics lecture series / workshops: The economics of a new value model (arts education; anthropology) |
| Patagonia vs Everybody else | Interactive master class of case-modeling new ventures through the lens of Patagonia’s radical business ethics of “earth as first customer” (environmental studies; economics) |
| Insight + Ethics = Impact | Master class series workshopping real-world business cases passing through our value-creation formula of (BI + HI ) * ( BE + HE ) = NS/SV (sociology; philosophy; economics) |
| Business as rhizome: building desiring machines in the age of next capitalism | A workshop series applying Deleuzian logic to business value creation (philosophy; economics; psychology) |
| The glorious spend (after Bataille & Mauss) | Seminar series on alternative strategies for a post media / post advertising world of shared abundance (anthropology; sociology; psychology; economics) |
| Real social & the future of tech – business + human value-making across the Fediverse | Project-based elective developing real-world commercial startups for the Fediverse (ActivityPub) (data sciences / information technology; sociology; anthropology) |
| Thriving vs growing – regrowth | Seminar series + experiment design and production labs in a post-growth world of collaborative abundance (economics; environmental / ecological studies; sociology) |
NextCapitalism Interdisciplinary Curricula Planning Grid, 2024
As illustrative as teaching-to existing business case studies can be, we’ve learned the most effective way to inspire student learners is for them to work, as teams, on real-world businesses and startups. As above, we’ve been optimizing this model of academy-as-platform at the Innovation Lab in New York City for five years. We’ve tested it across the past two January semesters in Waterville, Maine. Every college or university has their own local market, each with a wealth of real-world problems to solve with college-based, student-fueled project incubators like the ones we’re building. If people a lot smarter than me are right, we have very little time to waste helping these students to build a world that works more equably for all of the planet’s stakeholders … with career paths the past generation of business school instructors would have found unimaginable.
Thom Kennon is a global strategy consultant, founder, author and adjunct professor based in NYC, Philly and Tenants Harbor Maine. He can be reached at trk5@nyu.edu .