A Good Business School Is A Networked Business School 

What makes a great business school? Rankings offer one answer. Recruiters offer another. Alumni outcomes, research output and impact, and brand reputation all matter. But behind each of these sits a less visible, more fundamental advantage: connectivity.

A good business school is a networked business school. That means more than encouraging students to polish their LinkedIn profiles and attend career fairs. It means the school itself must be deeply connected, across industries, geographies, institutions, and communities. And it means the individuals within it, especially its leaders, faculty and administrators, must be active participants in identifying, building and sustaining those connections. In a world where business is still global despite geopolitical disruptions, interdependent, and fast-moving, no school can claim to be globally integrated if it is not networked at both the organizational and individual levels.

Business schools do not operate in isolation, and they cannot educate effectively as if they do. The context in which managers lead today is shaped by global supply chains, regulatory shifts, political uncertainty, digital transformation, and cross-border flows of capital, talent, and ideas. The most urgent questions facing business, from global mobility to local integration, from AI governance to sustainability, from inclusive growth to geopolitical risk, cannot be understood through a purely local or inward-looking lens.

For that reason, a business school must be more than a physical campus with some signed, by mostly inactive, memorandums of understanding for student exchange with other universities. It must be a platform of relationships. Its relevance depends not only on what happens inside classrooms and research centers, but also on the quality of its engagement with the world beyond them. A networked business school builds sustained ties with companies, public institutions, nonprofit organizations, alumni communities, peer schools, and international partners. These organizational connections are strategic as they allow the school to remain informed, adaptive, and influential in a rapidly changing environment.

WHY ORGANIZATIONAL NETWORKING MATTERS

At the institutional level, networking expands capacity and its resourcefulness. A school with strong external networks has better access to ideas, opportunities, and partnerships. It is that because it has high-quality and active networks it is relevant. It can attract high-quality faculty and academic leaders, create more meaningful internships out of which career opportunities potentially grow for its students, attract more relevant guest speakers, support stronger executive education offerings, and develop richer global immersion opportunities. It can identify emerging trends earlier and respond with new programs, research collaborations, and convening initiatives.

Most importantly, organizational networking is essential for any business school that aspires to be globally integrated. Global integration is not achieved simply by enrolling international students or sprinkling global case studies into the curriculum. It requires active, ongoing relationships with people and institutions across regions. A school connected to academic and industry peers in multiple parts of the world can expose students to a wider range of intellectual traditions and business realities. With strong corporate ties across markets, it can help students understand how ideals in business differ across political, cultural, and regulatory contexts. A school engaged not only with others schools but in addition with global corporations, governments, multilateral bodies, and civil society can broaden management education beyond the boundaries of the firm and into the wider systems that shape markets and societies.

Networks also guard against one of the most common weaknesses in management education: provincialism. Certainly, every business school is shaped by the environment it operates in and the broader national context, and that can be a strength for some. But when local ideas and assumptions are never tested against other settings, they can quietly become limitations. Organizational networks create the conditions for comparison, challenge, and learning. They help schools ask not just, “What works here?” but also, “What travels, what does not, and why?”

At the same time, a business school’s true value lies in the quality of ideas it generates and in the critical and creative thinking it cultivates in its stakeholders, above all its students. After all, a business school is still an intellectual organization, one meant to inspire bright minds to find solutions for the world of tomorrow.

WHY INDIVIDUAL NETWORKING MATTERS 

As a matter of fact, institutions do not build relationships by themselves. People do.

This is why individual networking, networking by faculty and administrators in particular, is so important. A globally integrated business school depends not only on formal partnerships, but on the initiative, energy and credibility of the people who bring those partnerships to life. For faculty, networking is central to both research and teaching. Scholarship becomes stronger when academics are connected to broader communities of inquiry. Collaboration across institutions and countries improves the quality of ideas, methods, and interpretation. It brings exposure to different contexts, different data, and different ways of framing problems. In an era when many business challenges are transnational and cross-cultural by nature, well-networked faculty are better equipped to produce work that is rigorous, relevant, and globally resonant.

Exactly those networks also transform the classroom. Faculty connected to thought leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and international peers can bring immediacy and texture to their teaching. They can introduce live cases, convene practitioners, and help students see how management concepts play out in real organizations and across different institutional settings. Globally connected professors teach more than content. They model intellectual openness, professional curiosity, and engagement with the wider world.

Administrators, too, play a critical networking role. Deans, admissions teams, program directors, career services staff, and corporate relations leaders are often the architects of a school’s external reach. Their relationships help determine whether partnerships are active or symbolic, whether employer pipelines are shallow or deep, and whether the school is visible in the networks that shape influence, opportunity and organizational quality. In that sense, administration in a business school is not merely operational. It should be seen as relational and strategic; the very core attributes of networking excellence. The best administrators are boundary spanners. They connect internal strengths with external possibilities, turning the school outward in ways that create value for students, faculty, and partners alike.

EXCELLENCE TRAVELS THROUGH PEOPLE

There is another reason individual networking matters so much: trust is personal before it becomes institutional. Academic excellence, therefore, begins not with the institution alone, but with the people who bring it to life. A memorandum of understanding may formalize a partnership, but it does not make that partnership meaningful. Meaningful collaboration usually begins with individuals who know one another, respect one another, and are willing to invest in a shared purpose.

One faculty relationship can spark a research consortium. One dean’s connection can open the door to a new international alliance, potentially elevating a once locally oriented school into a globally relevant institution. One administrator’s long-standing employer ties can create a lasting pathway for student placements and experiential learning.

Over time, personal relationships compound into institutional advantage. This is why the most effective business schools must align organizational networking with individual networking. The institution creates frameworks, opportunities, and legitimacy. Individuals activate those opportunities, deepen them, and sustain them. When the two reinforce each other, the school becomes far more than the sum of its departments and offices. It becomes a living network.

A STRATEGIC IMPERATIVE, NOT A SIDE ACTIVITY 

If networking is this central, business schools should treat it accordingly. Too often, networking is seen as informal, secondary, or optional, valuable perhaps, but not essential to academic strategy. That is a mistake. In a globally integrated business school, networking is mission critical. It shapes how the school learns, adapts, teaches, recruits, places, and leads.

What ultimately sets a school apart is its ability to align and synchronize the many networking activities of its stakeholders. That is what makes an institution truly excellent and distinctive in today’s intense global competition for students, influence, and relevance. Achieving that kind of network excellence requires a shift in mindset.

Schools should ask themselves: Where are our strongest external relationships? In which regions or sectors are we underconnected? Which partnerships generate real collaboration, and which exist only on paper? Are we investing enough in the people who represent the school externally? Are we rewarding faculty and administrators for relationship-building that creates long-term value? These are mission-critical strategic questions, not peripheral ones. The strongest schools also understand that networking must be purposeful.

More relationships do not automatically mean better ones. What matters is the quality, diversity, and reciprocity of the network. A school should seek connections that broaden perspective, strengthen learning, support innovation, and create mutual value. The goal is not social visibility for its own sake. It is institutional intelligence and impact.

THE LESSON BUSINESS SCHOOLS SHOULD EMBODY 

There is, finally, a deeper point. Business schools teach students to lead through compassion, social influence, collaboration, and stakeholder engagement. They teach that success in organizations depends not only on expertise, but also on the ability to navigate relationships across functions, sectors, and cultures. If that is true, then business schools should embody the same principle in their own institutional life.

Students notice whether their school is truly connected to the world. They notice whether faculty proactive and collaborates internationally, whether administrators cultivate meaningful partnerships, and whether the school functions as a convener rather than a silo. When a school demonstrates these capabilities, it teaches something powerful without needing to say it explicitly: leadership is relational. That lesson matters.

Networks are not only pathways to opportunity. They are pathways to perspective. They expose students and institutions to unfamiliar markets, competing ideas, and different ways of solving problems. In doing so, they prepare future leaders not just to operate globally, but to think globally. Without meaningful exposure, and without being embedded in both local and global networks, a business school will find this goal difficult to achieve.

The best business schools today are not islands of expertise. They are hubs of exchange that connect scholarship to practice, students to institutions, and local insight to global understanding. They recognize that knowledge becomes more valuable when it travels, and that a business school’s strength lies not only in its internal resources, but in the relationships through which it engages the world. A good business school is a networked business school because business itself is networked. So is knowledge. So is leadership. And in a globally integrated era, the schools that will matter most are those that understand that connection is not an accessory to excellence. It is one of its defining conditions.

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Sven Horak, Ph.D., is the Zizza Tobin Professor of Management at The Peter J. Tobin College of Business at St. John’s University in New York. His research focuses on global networking. He can be reached at horaks@stjohns.edu.

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