An Environmental Defense Fund program gives MBA students a crash course in energy efficiency. Then the MBAs crunch the numbers to show the payoff to a company's bottom line.

Going through school to get an MBA can take a few years away from your life and work. These days you don’t always have time to take a few years and be a student. You’ve got bills to pay! This list of 100 business blogs can bring you up to speed in the briefcase world so you can take a detour around the MBA education route.

Shouldn't business and business schools be looking at their practices and precepts with the same critical eye as the economics profession? Three questions, culled from Alan Webber's book, Rules of Thumb, can help propel the thinking on these issues in the right direction.

In a world that requires business leaders to address the concerns of all their stakeholders, we must reshape management education to be both practical and aspirational.

New books and revisited history illuminate the irrelevance of today’s MBA — and ways to make it compelling again.

For years, an MBA degree has been seen as a first-class ticket to the management fast track. Some spend $100,000 or more to earn the degree, confident that it will propel their career into overdrive — and often that’s not an unreasonable expectation. To many hiring managers, an MBA on the resume is a sure sign that the candidate has long-term, corner-office potential.

To a growing number of critics, though, the once-golden MBA is quickly losing its luster. There’s a quiet revolt brewing against MBA programs, and the barbarians at the gate aren’t outsiders but rather the B-school academic elite.

When it comes to the practical value of the degree, the once-lonely voices of dissent have, in recent years, grown into a chorus of criticism. Among their accusations: The degree is over-hyped, MBA curricula are out of touch with real-world demands, and many programs have a culture that turns a blind eye to cheating. If the business world starts paying attention to these naysayers, that $100,000 tuition or the decision to pay big bucks to hire an MBA may start looking like less of a sound investment. Here’s the latest critical thinking about the MBA and implications for managers and companies that depend on them most.

Some of the top colleges and universities in the world provide free business administration courses online. Here is a list of the best sources.

Businessmen grouse about them, but the best ones have financial skills that corporations badly need.

Editor's Note: this is an interesting read even though (or perhaps because?) it was written in 1985...

Think sales managers are the only ones who worry about forecasting? A simulation tool helps students grasp the complexity of managing sales organizations.

What is the point of research carried out in business schools?

Managers want the status of professionals, but not all managers want the constraints that go along with professions. Why? For more than 100 years, business education at the top universities has been searching for its soul. HBS professor Rakesh Khurana, author of a new book, says business school education is at a turning point.

If you've ever toyed with the idea of going back to school to get your MBA, BNET's newest blog -- Back to B-School -- is for you. You'll learn how to get into business school and what to expect once you get there, but it's more than just academics. It's also about creating the right balance between work, home and school. It's about getting your MBA without losing your job or sanity.

Seth Godin reprints an article he originally wrote for Fast Company about a different kind of MBA...

Getting a good job often requires a bit of gamesmanship. But for some M.B.A. students, landing a new position is all about playing games.

Recruiters are urging students to curb their egos in job interviews.

Proponents of self-learning say that B-schools are a waste of time and money. Traditional MBAs say there's no substitute for the Halls of Ivy.

This site presents a moderately structured framework. The authors divide the discussion into four sections. First, they describe the importance of understanding the skills active learners can acquire through effective use of the case analysis method. In the second section, they provide you with a process-oriented framework. This framework can be of value in your efforts to analyze cases and then present the results of your work. Using this framework in a classroom setting yields valuable experiences that can, in turn, help you successfully complete assignments that you will receive from your employer. In the third section they describe briefly what you can expect to occur during in-class case discussions. In the final section, the authors present a moderately structured framework that can help you prepare effective oral and written presentations.

Current approaches to business education are based on an identifiable model of knowledge creation,representation and dissemination - a model that cannot bridge what political scientist T.Homer Dixon calls ‘the ingenuity gap' - the gap between the problem-solving means of the past and the problems of the immediate future. A new model is needed - one that stresses optimization over correctness, integration over specialization and adaptive views of rationality over foundational views thereof.

Just as negotiating has become an ongoing process, so too has learning new negotiating techniques. "Improving your negotiation skills," write the co-authors of this article, "is a long journey that involves constant reflection, awareness, and openness to feedback." In the article, a valuable and extremely useful primer for negotiators, they describe and outline the preparation, value-claiming and value-creating strategies that are the foundation of any successful negotiation.

Editor's Note: the title doesn't really convey the purpose of this article which is to provide analysis and advice for real-life negotions...and it really is valuable advice.

Find out what employers want in business-school grads and how some interviewers evaluate candidates.

This is a short post from Seth Godin's blog. The key idea: "The fact is, though, that unless you want to be a consultant or an i-banker (where a top MBA is nothing but a screen for admission) it's hard for me to understand why this is a better use of time and money than actual experience combined with a dedicated reading of 30 or 40 books."

Why this is interesting is not so much the post but the various TrackBacks that reference it.

This paper presents and analyzes a survey taken of core (required) finance courses in the curricula of the highest-reputation MBA programs in the school year 2004-2005. Five of the nineteen schools responding have increased hours spent in the finance core substantially, compared to results of our earlier survey in 2001. We received mixed signals on the trends or tendencies that we were able to ascertain from our previous survey in 2001. We consolidate item-by-item response from these schools in the Key Summary Table in the hope to present a true and holistic picture of core finance course teaching in top MBA programs.

Editor's Note: thanks to financeprofessor.com for pointing out this article

A research paper entitled "What's Really Wrong with U.S. Business Schools" shines a light on what has become a growing dilemma for business school deans-the yearly scorecard that assigns numerical rankings to selected business programs. The paper describes a "dysfunctional competition for media rankings that leads schools to divert resources from investment in knowledge creation and other important areas to short-term strategy aimed at improving ranking position."

The paper is written by Harry DeAngelo and Linda DeAngelo, business professors at the University of Southern California, and Jerold L. Zimmerman, business professor at the University of Rochester. It criticizes business schools for "failing to practice what they preach, particularly about the dangers of managing for the short term, but also about the importance of searching for Â… substance over form in business practices."

The writers point out that "Rankings mania also leads business schools to distort MBA curricula with ‘quick fix, look good' changes that enhance program marketability at the expense of providing students with a rigorous, conceptual education that will serve them well over their entire careers. This myopic and frenzied rankings competition has generated proposals (e.g., Bennis and O'Toole, Harvard Business Review, 2005) that would further de-emphasize the scientific research that is the source of U.S. business schools' global competitive advantage …"

The study precedes an upcoming AACSB International report that calls for the media to change the way it assigns rankings to business degree granting institutions. The AACSB document, to be released in September, calls the ranking methods used by BusinessWeek, Financial Times, U.S. News & World Report, and other media outlets flawed because of inconsistent and unverified data, which confuses rather than helps the consumer. [AACSB annotation]

Interest in integrating business with the needs of the environment is prompting a harder look at achieving a sustainable economy.

A survey of 100-plus executives in more than 20 countries identifies the knowledge, skills, and attributes young leaders need to succeed.