The Future of Business Schools: scenarios and strategies for 2020

North America stands as the Mecca for management. It took less than a century for American Management to establish itself as a leader in both practice and academia. As a result, Business and Business Education throughout the world are strongly influenced and to a large extent dominated by the US. Will this remain so? Could it be that some of the various critcisms periodically formulated from within the US academic community itself and most often targeted at the MBA, the most visible symbol of American management education, would turn out to undermine an otherwise quite successful model? Could the model also be affected by some of the rare but incredibly damaging scandals of the beginning of the 21st century (unethical behavior, inappropriate governance, top management and board greediness, etc;)? In this context, will other regions of the world continue to choose to follow the US model? Could some regions be waking up to challenge the current dominant model? Could the dominant model be challenged through other means, e.g. technological innovation via e-learning? Could some alternate models emerge? This book argues that while the US is dominating the scene of management education worldwide, other players including Europe, may be waking up, not necessary in a catching-up paradigm, but possibly on a differentiation mode, thus offering the world alternate ways of thinking and educating for business practice. The game is not over yet, but we argue that this is a relevant scenario, i.e. a potential contexte for which the stakeholders in the world of Management Education may want to prepare.