Business schools reject MBA candidates who haven’t spent five years of practice “in the trenches”— and fill the faculty lounge with professors who’ve never run a P&L, led a team, or fired a staff member. CEOs brag they don’t need “theory”—and religiously maximize shareholder value as if it’s a law of physics.

But the split is a fiction. Every practice is already theorized. Managers “just doing what works” are enacting borrowed theories—shareholder primacy, efficiency as virtue, self-interest as rationality—absorbed uncritically and repeated as common sense. Every theory is shaped by and shaping practice. Academic models don’t just describe markets—they build them, defining what counts as success, performance, risk, value, and leadership.

The fiction serves both. Academics happily celebrate citation counts from obscure journals even their deans don’t read; executives parade quarterly results and frequent flyer cards while engineering planetary collapse. Neither examines what their technical excellence actually serves.

What both refuse is meta‑reflexivity: the ability to interrogate the ideologies beneath their work. How frameworks or operating models determine what is possible, what is valued, and what is foreclosed. The result is not just bad theory or poor practice, but the relentless reproduction of a system optimized for capital accumulation while human and planetary flourishing become structurally impossible.

Theory and practice aren’t opposites—they’re two sides of the same coin. The real deficit isn’t “real-world experience” or “rigorous research.” It’s ethical courage: the guts to question not just how to perfect the means, but what ends we serve.

Without it, business breeds technicians blind to the damage their “success” inflicts, and scholars blind to how their theories justify it. We get an economy optimized for exploitation—PowerPoint decks and peer-reviewed citations fuelling the same destruction.

Leadership means rejecting this myth and reclaiming responsibility for the world we shape. Not better managers or cleverer theories, but the courage to name the good we serve—and build systems worthy of it.

#Leadership #BusinessEducation #Ethics #Philosophy #Reflexivity