Columbia, MIT Explore the Future of Work With New Business School Courses

While businesses figure out how to navigate the future of work, business schools face a different challenge: how to teach it.

Unlike such MBA staples as accounting or marketing, a subject as broad and sweeping as “work” doesn’t easily lend itself to a typical classroom approach. A course could include discussion of such topics as hybrid work schedules, diversity and inclusion, artificial intelligence hiring algorithms, and the rising labor movement at Starbucks Corp. So it’s no surprise that emerging curricula on the future of work will vary widely, depending on the audience (full-time students vs. executives), the instructors (faculty members vs. consultants), and other factors. That doesn’t diminish the importance of addressing the issues; tomorrow’s leaders won’t succeed without understanding the impact their decisions will one day have on workers, be they Wall Street dealmakers or Walmart shelf stockers.