From Managers To Agents: Teaching MBAs To Change The Game, Not Just Play It

Business schools have been built to produce managers: people trained to optimise within the system they inherit. We teach people to read markets, allocate capital, optimise processes and beat the competition. We teach them to perform within the rules of the game as they find it. That made sense as long as the game itself was not in question.

It is now. Climate change, biodiversity loss and rising inequality are not problems any single company can optimise alone. Addressing these sustainability transitions means changing how entire systems work: how we produce food, supply energy, and share value.

In my inaugural lecture at Nyenrode Business Universiteit, I argued that these transitions are both highly systemic and deeply personal. They depend on markets, policies and technologies. They also depend on individuals willing and able to change the systems they work in. That is a different kind of person from the one business schools were built to produce. We do not need better managers. We need agents.

MANAGERS & AGENTS

The difference between a manager and an agent is not talent or ambition. It is how they relate to the system they work in.

A manager takes the system as given and optimises within it; an agent sees a system that people built and people can rebuild. A manager waits for a mandate and for certainty; an agent acts before the pathway is proven, because in transitions it never fully is. A manager competes by default; an agent can choose to cooperate, deliberately.

That last difference matters more and more. Cutting emissions across a car’s full life cycle requires steel producers, battery makers, energy suppliers and assemblers to share standards and knowledge across competitive boundaries. Yet even when cooperation is the smarter choice, actors rarely make the leap. I call this the glass wall of competitive behaviour: the habits that brought success in the past block the next step.

I am not making the case for lone heroes. The claim is more modest: individuals have a real role in sustainability transitions, and taking it up is hard. Agents must weigh who wins and who loses from change, commit before outcomes are certain, and push against a system their own careers are rooted in. Knowledge alone does not prepare anyone for that. It takes a different kind of education.

EDUCATING AGENTS

I call it agentic education: education that builds the capacity to question dominant assumptions, imagine alternatives and act within contested systems. It rests on four principles.

The first is integrative systems thinking. One course on systems thinking is useful but far from enough. Every part of the programme, from strategy and finance to operations and leadership, should help students see how markets, institutions and social norms evolve together, where systems get stuck, and where they can be shifted.

The second is openness to radical perspectives. Business curricula often present growth, competition and the primacy of markets as natural and inevitable. Students who absorb this without question lose the sense that things could be otherwise. Perspectives such as post-growth, which organises economic life around wellbeing within ecological limits rather than endless expansion, unsettle those certainties. That moment of disorientation is where imagination begins.

The third is critical reflexivity. Students need to examine not only the system but also their own place in it: their assumptions, their values, and the professional identity they are building. Reflexivity also builds courage, the willingness to act even when it carries social or professional risk.

The fourth is collective praxis, and it addresses the glass wall most directly. Students must experience cooperation, not just study it. With executive MBA students, I lead an immersion programme in Chamonix and Grenoble. Walking glacier trails, practising mountain rescue and debriefing together in a refuge at altitude are not metaphors for cooperation. They are cooperation, under real uncertainty and mutual dependence. The mountain does not forgive competitive individualism. It demands attention to the terrain, the weather and each other. This is how the glass wall starts to crack through the lived experience that collective action is not a strategic choice but a condition for moving forward.

MEASURING WHAT MATTERS

Business schools are not neutral observers of sustainability transitions; they are actors in them. Through what we teach and how we teach it, we either reinforce the logics that keep today’s systems in place or help students build the capacity to change them. Agentic education chooses the second path.

That choice also changes how a business school’s influence should be judged. If we educate agents, our real impact is not measured in the careers of our graduates alone. It shows in the systems they help move: the supply chain that shifts from competition to cooperation, the organisation that redefines what success means, the sector that moves toward a stronger form of sustainability. That is a different yardstick from salary growth and promotion speed. It is harder to measure, and it takes longer to show. But it is the one that matters.

So my call to fellow business schools is this: let’s start measuring ourselves by the change our graduates make in the systems around them, and design our programmes to deserve that measure. And to applicants: ask schools not only where their graduates end up, but what their graduates have changed.

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Nicolas Chevrollier is professor of Sustainability Transitions and Academic Director of the Impact MBA at Nyenrode Business Universiteit in the Netherlands.

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