Now that the teachings of business school have proved to create groups of blind mice, some of the better ones are rethinking their programs.
For some academics, the financial crisis is the ultimate "teachable moment" for anyone destined to work in financial markets, big business and start-ups, and is forcing the schools to rethink the way they teach the art of making money.
Preparing future executives for any eventuality at the top of corporations is becoming the new vogue, replacing an emphasis on simply making money using short-sighted business plans and discredited risk models.
Our younger faculty are willing to entertain ideas that would have been offensive 20 years ago," such as psychological biases in markets, he said.
For example, big banks didn't model situations where housing prices fall, assuming that what happened in the past wouldn't occur in the future, Trzcinka said.
Psychology? How about bad math? Ignoring the possibility of a major variable not going down is some seriously flawed mathematical modeling.
The real problem? Many of these new MBA graduates and even PhD level economists cannot get jobs. Could it be they were trained in fictional economics and thus more a philosophy or religion major instead of focusing in on accurate modeling and analysis?
Standards & Poor's or Moody's anyone?
Confused about "teachable moments"
The strength of science is not that you can ever be proven right, but that you can be proven wrong. ALL scientific theories must undergo experimental validation before they are accepted, and that acceptance is only until counterexamples show otherwise. Scientists as people have their own biases, but decent ones will work hard at trying to find where they are wrong.
What about B-school, or for that matter economists? Does anyone ever say, "I was wrong"? Do people even look for counterexamples to their own pet theories, much less reality without cherry-picking? Mostly I see either silence or doubling down on the demonstrably wrong.