The legendary phenomenon of the Mumbai Dabbawalas has caught the attention of business fraternity, stimulating discussion covering a diverse set of issues from operational effectiveness and Six Sigma to organizational development and employee motivation. This article presents an experiential classroom activity inspired by the Mumbai Dabbawala system, designed to enhance student understanding of logistics and service operations. The activity simulates a real-world delivery system, enabling students to internalize key principles such as role clarity, coordination, and process discipline. Iterative runs of the activity demonstrate progressive improvements in execution, highlighting the pedagogical value of repetition and guided reflection. To assess effectiveness of the activity, I compare reflections on the dabbawala system of participants and non-participants using text analysis techniques. The analysis reveals significant differences in conceptual understanding between participants and non-participants. These findings offer robust evidence for the activity’s effectiveness as a high-impact teaching tool. The article concludes with exploration of potential uses of the activity in other business disciplines.

In the literature on how to prepare students to tackle Grand Challenges (GCs), little attention is given to faculty preparation to teach GCs. In this article, we explore the challenges educators face when teaching GCs through storytelling and reflexivity on their teaching and institutional experiences of embedding sustainability and a “business for good” ethos. We present an account of how public narrative theory can be utilized by instructors to engage in social reflexive practices with peers about experiences teaching GCs. The first author provides a reflexive account of challenges experienced in teaching Leadership and GCs. The co-authors engage in reflexive practice to enable a shared inquiry on how best to prepare educators to teach GCs. We discuss the value of shared reflexivity in the context of an initiative to integrate sustainability in business school education, highlighting individual, institutional, and subject-related challenges. Importantly, we propose that educators engage in self-reflexive and collective sense-making as a way to build transdisciplinary communities of practice with a greater understanding and appreciation of the challenges and opportunities faced individually and collectively in teaching GCs, which is paramount to accomplish meaningful change in management education, to prepare students better to tackle GCs.

This study examined the commitment of British universities to educating responsible business leaders capable of addressing grand challenges related to environmental sustainability. Specifically, it investigated the extent to which environmental sustainability topics are embedded in the course descriptions of business-related programs, and how these descriptions relate to universities’ formal commitments to sustainability and selected organizational characteristics. This is the first study to provide a systematic analysis of 2,758 business-related courses offered by all British universities, thereby contributing comprehensive new insights to the ongoing debate on education for environmental sustainability. The analysis focused on evaluating both the frequency and depth of integration of environmental sustainability topics within course descriptions. Findings indicate that all universities—regardless of their formal sustainability commitments or organizational characteristics—offer a similar amount of sustainability-related course content. Notably, a university’s formal commitment to sustainability at the organizational level does not correlate with a greater inclusion of environmental sustainability in course content. This suggests a degree of organizational hypocrisy in the delivery of environmental sustainability education within British universities.

This interview-based article addresses the question of how management educators can increase their effectiveness in communicating with their students. A challenge for management educators who are looking to bring their teaching and impact to the next level is that there is a voluminous literature regarding effective communication best practices. The current article focuses on what management educators should prioritize to better engage their students, communicate with their students, and disseminate their work beyond academia. To help management educators determine which of the many effective communication practices should be focused on, the current article presents an interview with someone who is among the most influential scientist–practitioners in the field of management, Gary Latham. We advocate for management educators to set a specific, challenging goal for improving their teaching performance, and to also implement one or more of the following recommendations to communicate memorably when teaching management education students: (1) using everyday, layperson rather than scientific language; (2) emphasizing the value of behavioral science theory for practice; (3) explaining the danger of ignoring conditional variables; and (4) capturing and keeping students’ attention by presenting surprising findings.

Caring has been an animating driver of the scholarship of teaching and learning and the founding of the Journal of Management Education 50 years ago. However, as business schools have moved quickly toward offering more online courses, researchers have not systematically explored the cues that students in online classes use to evaluate whether or not their instructors care. Drawing inspiration from Hawk and Lyons’ classic JME article on student perceptions of faculty caring in face-to-face classes, this study uses concept mapping to identify cues that students use to evaluate whether faculty do or do not care. Our findings suggest that students in online synchronous classes rely on many of the same interpersonal and attributional cues to infer that faculty care (e.g., responsiveness, personalization, faculty enthusiasm, and willingness to invest time) as students in face-to-face classes. In particular, we highlight a distinction between caring for students as people and caring for students’ learning outcomes. We also find, however, that the cues used to perceive that faculty don’t care are qualitatively different from those used to determine that faculty care. We discuss the implications of our findings for equipping management educators to communicate care to students in the 21st century.

Management educators have developed a wide variety of approaches to ensure students develop job-ready skills, resilience, and other forms of career capital to gain and retain employment in an ever-changing, competitive job market. Yet, concerns about the employability agenda’s consequences for students’ self-concept and wellbeing have gained urgency amid a crisis of confidence in capitalism. Humanistic approaches to management education map an alternative path, starting from students’ unique values, voices, and experiences, and leading to the pursuit of a personal purpose. In this essay, we explore the tensions and potential synergies of the career capital and personal purpose approaches to career preparation and support. Building on our experiences at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Business and Economics, we discuss how integrative learning experiences can combine these two approaches to (1) encourage students to recognize the mutual influence of career capital and personal purpose; and (2) provide rich opportunities for external stakeholder involvement to contribute to students’ career capital and personal purpose development efforts. We believe that our proposals for embracing both career capital and personal purpose considerations can help management educators recalibrate their efforts to help students develop personally meaningful and sustainable careers.

Although combining case study teaching with group learning is a popular approach for teaching business courses, pedagogical challenges arise, particularly in undergraduate classes. To address these challenges, we developed an instructional innovation called the Team- Based Learning and Evaluation (TaBLE) Case Method, which increased student engagement and deepened learning in an undergraduate introductory management course. The TaBLE Case Method is built upon specific principles of team-based learning, and comprises phases that meld together individual preparation and group participation before, during and after class. Our evaluation of the TaBLE Case Method highlights how it enhances group learning by: increasing student motivation to prepare, attend and engage; creating individual accountability for group goals; fostering critical thinking and creative debate; and making theory-practice links more visible. We also discuss the method’s “shadowsides” and limitations, and provide guidance on how the method can be adapted for a variety of class sizes and delivery modes.