I was in one of the world’s top MBA programs 30 years ago this year. It is really striking to think about how much has changed in business education. At first I misunderstood the program I was attending. I thought it was about business. I thought my classes would teach me about business, we would discuss business cases and business news, and by the time I hit finals I would know something about business that would impress and astound potential employers. Something like the F=ma of business. I was not expecting Einstein, just a little Newtonian mechanics.

One of my first courses was with a world famous economist who won the Nobel Prize in economics about 15 years later. Knew his economics, no doubt. I kept asking annoying questions like, “So how do I use this to price my product?” Finally, a more experienced second-year student approached me after class and set me straight. “Quit asking questions. It is a math class. Just do the math.” He was right; as soon as I just started doing the math, all was good, an A was earned, and I was in the game for another semester.

This pretty much summarized my MBA training. Figure out what the professor wants, produce it, and take your grade without any questions. Of course, this was also how corporate jobs were structured. Most of the people I graduated with joined “management training” programs at large corporations — it is hard to believe these used to exist, but they were the jobs of choice. In the management training program, everyone learned to figure out what the boss wants, produce it, and take the next rung on the ladder that is offered with pride and commitment to earn the next rung. Organization man was not a critique; it was a career objective.

At some point in the last 30 years, the world changed. IBM abandoned lifetime employment — remember lifetime employment? — bosses got too busy to spend time bossing and started looking for entrepreneurial employees, and careers started belonging to individuals instead of companies. Whether you want to be empowered or not, career success depends on it today. Companies cannot remember ever having a training program, employees are expected to “invent your job and find a way to add value,” and careers are created by preparing for your next job on the current job.

It is great. For individuals who are entrepreneurial and willing to take initiative, there are no more ladders to climb and bosses to please. Success is there to grab, and there is no greater success than becoming an entrepreneur and running your own company.

So, what does this mean for business education? In some schools, it means figuring out what the professor wants by taking good notes and giving it back on the final. This is a real mismatch given employer expectations, but universities have a lot of inertia and it can be hard to make changes. It is clear empowered employees require an empowering education. This is a challenge business schools need to meet if business degrees are going to maintain their value with employers.

In my experience at the David Eccles School of Business, empowered education requires student engagement and it requires faculty create an educational space for discovery-based learning. Like modern employers, the best business educations engage students as strategic partners. The reality is faculty cannot teach what students do not want to learn. The best teaching motivates students to grab the learning and make it their own. It involves cases and classroom discussion, study groups, and field experiences in which the student integrates what is learned to create professional expertise that prepares the individual to succeed on his/her own terms in the business world.

Empowered learning also gives students the latitude to create their own learning experiences through opportunities that embrace discovery learning. This might be by creating a new student organization, traveling to a national convention to learn about programming, and then building the organization on campus, which is how our Net Impact program started. It might be developing a program like our Board Fellows program, which places students as advisors to non-profit boards in our community, a program created by David Eccles School students and open to other students on campus (i.e., innovative business schools are engaged with the university, too). Or it might involve creating an entirely new statewide program in partnership with the School. This was how we created the original Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, which is now one of the largest entrepreneurship programs in the world. It was started by a group of 8 students. This is how we are creating the Utah Tech Titans program, a statewide innovation and design competition for students with a background in product design, engineering, computer science, and web design. Students are creating the program, they are raising the money for it, and they are running it for the first time this year. The School is the venture backer and the students are the entrepreneurs.

It is tough to create an empowered educational environment that has opportunities for every student in a large program, but it is possible. Our students run the Low Income Taxpayer Clinic for Utah, we have a stock fund managed by students, we have a non-profit consulting practice run by students, we have the world’s largest student venture fund with $18.3 million managed by students, and we have students in our real estate program looking at development opportunities for the University’s married student housing. If students are empowered and engaged, these programs require leadership, not management.

We still have classes in statistics and economics, although I think the professors know why they are important and the cases and exercises deal with business situations and develop business skills. But like all the very best business programs in the world, our program demands student engagement and empowers students to lead while in school. Expect no less from your business education, from the business school where you hire employees, and from the business education your company reimburses.

Later.