What we teach the next generation matters.
Equipping future leaders with the mindset, tools and skills for a more prosocial economy.
What we teach the next generation matters
Traditional economic assumptions are so deeply embedded that we barely notice them; they are taught and taken for granted as the status quo, even though there is no necessity to them.
The stakes are documented. Research cited in the paper indicates that top managers with a business school background are more likely than others to act opportunistically towards employees. Acculturation to a paradigm starts in the classroom. We should be deliberate about the assumptions we pass on, and about the relationships those assumptions create.
How to teach the prosocial paradigm
Set the scene.
Look honestly at performance in the world today. Enormous wealth and capability sit alongside crises. Judged against a sustainable future, the result is not good enough.
Locate the core issue.
Selfish and antisocial behavior is produced not only by individuals but by institutions that incentivize it. Institutions look stable, but they are made, and they can be remade.
Trace the origins.
Why are institutions the way they are? Prevailing economic theory taught us to see people as individual utility maximizers who must perform and prove themselves on their own.
The realization.
Nothing is created without others. Everyone depends on others, and others depend on them. Performance is relational. This is the paradigm shift, and the flat-world metaphor makes it teachable: the world was always a globe, and once we see it that way, we act differently.
Apply it.
Use the four mechanisms and core design principles as a relational diagnostic. Have students analyze or redesign a real setting: their own job, a team, or an organization they know.
Teaching across business subjects
The prosocial paradigm is not confined to courses on performance management. As the framework on the Executives page shows, performance management as understood here spans the whole organization: vision and strategy, information systems, organizational structure, hiring, training and rewards. A paradigm does not apply to one corner of an organization; it applies everywhere. It therefore belongs in the teaching of strategy, marketing, information systems, human resources, accounting and any other business subject that deals with how people work together, and it can inform teaching well beyond business.
A natural way to bring it into any course is case work: students diagnose real organizations using the four mechanisms as a relational diagnostic. This works in many formats. Cases can be prepared and discussed, or students can find and analyze their own. It works on failures as well as successes: examining what went wrong in a corrupt organization is as instructive as examining what makes a thriving one work.
See the frameworkEducators work with cases, and students and course participants can submit the cases they analyze. Share your experience
Teaching slides
A compact deck of key slides, designed in the initiative's style, is available to download. The slides can also be viewed on this page.
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