Kill B-School? Chris Marquis’s Case for Abolishing the MBA

“They didn’t really ever create value for the company. They shifted value. They extracted value from the workers and communities and gave it to the shareholders.” — Chris Marquis

INTRO

You would expect the man publicly calling for the abolition of business schools to be a Bolshevik. But he is, in fact, the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School. It’s a little like an angry cleric proposing the demolition of the traditional church. As the Martin Luther of the Business School world, Chris Marquis pinned his argument in the New York Times on 18 October. Its headline proclaims that “it’s time to shut them down”. But he means abolish. Kill the B-School, Marquis says.

His charge isn’t that MBAs are useless. It is that they are playing the game of bait and switch. Students arrive at B-School saying they want to change the world and, fourteen weeks later, their altruistic ambitions have narrowed to getting a corporate job and making money. Nobody lied to them. The system simply has its own indestructible logic. Faculty won’t change what they teach, and even if they did, the recruiting office is paid to slot people into the highest-salaried job it can find, because that is what the rankings reward.

And so, Marquis argues, we have created an economic culture of B-School-trained chief executives focusing on dividends and so cutting labor benefits and community investment. Rather than being created, value is moved from the workforce and community into the share price. It’s an MBA world and we are all poorer for it.

His fix is constitutional rather than curricular. He would replace the business school with what he calls a school for organizing. But what to organize? He’d like to see a new kind of economy mirroring companies like Patagonia (owned by a trust) or Mondragon (owned by its eighty thousand workers). A quarter of Denmark’s biggest firms are owned by foundations, he reminds us, and in Europe a public-interest director with a veto is unremarkable. So maybe we should just replace the MBA with a trip to Denmark. A bloodless way to kill the B-School.

FURTHER READING

•   “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down,” New York Times, 18 October 2026. The headline is the paper’s; Marquis wrote “abolish.”

•   Marquis tells Poets&Quants what he would build instead — and the trade press rounds up the reaction, which is less hostile than you would guess.

•   His books: The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs and Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise.

•   Eric Ries, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad… and How Great Companies Stay Great — the governance argument Marquis leans on here.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Chris Marquis is the Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge Business School,