It is a good idea to collect data about the outcomes of heart surgeries and make it available to the public. Report cards help patients find the best hospitals and doctors, while the providers have an incentive to improve quality. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it.
Well, in a paper I read a little more than 20 years ago, the authors found that publicly available cardiac surgery report cards “led to higher levels of resource use and to worse health outcomes, particularly for sicker patients.” They concluded, “at least in the short run, these report cards decreased patient and social welfare.” The report cards motivated providers to select against treating the sickest patients, who are more likely to have poor outcomes. The model is more intricate, but that’s the basic idea.
At the time, my interest in the article, and others like it, was not only because of my continuing curiosity about economics but also because by then I was working at AACSB, initiating efforts to collect and share data for benchmarking. I’ve been thinking about the article and its provocative title “Is More Information Better?” and am writing this short piece to share some notes about metrics and management education.
The report card article first returned to my mind when I started watching a television series called “The Resident” on Netflix. In the show, set in the U.S., a hospital CEO is single-mindedly focused on the bottom line (he previously worked in private equity), while the protagonists, doctors, and nurses on the hospital staff, fight to prioritize patient health. What I like about the show is that it doesn’t gloss over the issues. There are real tradeoffs, and the series puts them front and center. It makes for great television and illustrates just how difficult it is to manage a hospital—and how challenging our job is in business schools.
It’s getting more challenging. How do we prepare students for a more complicated business world in which short-term profitability (rightfully) isn’t the only important objective? Hasn’t it been hard enough under the dominant view that the sole responsibility of business to make as much money as possible (“subject to the basic rules of society”)? We must rethink management education to foster real business model changes that advance the role of business in promoting societal well-being. Increasingly, consumers, investors, and employees expect it.
But we are not there yet. It is fair to say we have a handle on financial metrics and have made some progress on environmental ones, but we need to think more clearly about how to measure our social impact. Researchers at the NYU Stern Center for Business & Human Rights examined 12 socially oriented measurement frameworks and found 1,753 different indicators between them. Only eight percent of the indicators addressed the effects of company practices. The other 92 percent measured “company efforts and activities, such as issuing policies or commitments; conducting audits, risk assessments, or training; participating in membership organizations or other collaborations; or engaging stakeholders,” and are not likely to be helpful to investors or consumers, much less managers, in trying to move the needle on social responsibility. This is where business school research can be especially helpful, but are the incentives aligned?
The cardiac report card study was conducted by economists working in business schools (at Northwestern and Stanford) and was eventually published in Journal of Political Economy which has an impact factor of 6.9, making it one of the top journals in
economics. According to Google Scholar, it has been cited 980 times, making it highly influential in the academic field.
The article also carries a high Altmetric Attention score, in the top 98 percent of articles the same age, indicating a higher probability that it influenced policy and practice. Such broader measurements have been enabled by digitization but are not yet highly valued in academic settings. In line with our report card theme, it would be interesting to consider the kinds of changes that can be motivated by metrics that consider readership and utilization across a wider range of audiences, which could include more interdisciplinary and international collaborations, stronger engagement with practitioners and policymakers, new faculty models, and improved channels for communicating. All good things as far as I’m concerned.
Beyond research, it is important to continuously consider the way we assess and report on business schools and universities. While they are changing, rankings, for example, are still dominated by metrics like graduate salaries, acceptance rates, and publications in top journals. These metrics can motivate schools to prioritize selectivity over access and inclusive education and focus on higher-paying industries rather than cultivate social entrepreneurship, build leaders for non-profits, and address global challenges like inequality and sustainability. To align education to the needs of society moving forward, and to help business schools accelerate the transformation of business, we must develop and embrace broader metrics that reward societal impact and long-term contributions to the development needs of society. This is especially important for the work of GBSN.
There is much more to consider, but we will have to look to future blog posts to fully explore the changing metrics shaping business and business education. I’m especially interested in considering the impact of AI and policies related to confidentiality and privacy of data.