By HO YEW KEE, KULWANT SINGH AND BERNARD YEUNG

IN this fast-changing and competitive business world, business schools are striving to meet two challenges. They want to be closer to the realities of business and to prepare students to operate more effectively in the world of business.

An overly quantitative focus and insufficient attention to people issues, which may characterise some business programmes, may produce graduates underprepared to work in and lead organisations.

Yet, business schools that get too close to business risk lose their academic objectivity and the theoretical foundations that support quality education.

Business schools have to maintain their academic rigour and focus on their core responsibilities and competencies - their focus on academic objectivity and theoretical principles - to ensure that students receive a solid foundation, understand business and organisations, and become astute leaders in a dynamic world.

Business schools should refrain from teaching programmatic job skills rather than concepts, and fads rather than analytical principles.

Striking a sensible balance is not straightforward. Defending the theoretical and analytical approach has become particularly difficult in recent times, as business schools have been accused of causing the current economic crisis!

These charges are puzzling, since they attribute a degree of influence that most business schools could not envisage having.

Paradoxically, this charge that business schools are responsible for the crisis repudiates the view that ideas professed by academics are irrelevant and impractical. Further, if the crisis had roots in business schools, the problem was not too much focus on theory, but the opposite - trivial pursuit of monetary gains using unproven and popular ideas that are not based on solid theories.

Still, academe has long been viewed as the preserve of a stable, simple and comfortable environment, with occupants of ivory towers producing ideas that are academic, an almost pejorative term suggesting irrelevance and impracticality.

Academic work is clearly important; it provides the basis for academe to be good educators. Still, we must also fulfil our basic education mission: To prepare our students well for meeting the challenges of the real business world.

Business schools face many dilemmas, but the greatest is balancing the academic principles of providing the best education possible with the need to prepare students for employment.

Business education today requires a focus on instilling values and developing conceptual understanding and critical thinking. Students must be prepared so that they are able to make sense of and overcome complex and evolving challenges in their careers.

Students must become organic learners so that they can adapt and grow into jobs and technologies in firms and industries that may not yet exist. The focus on understanding core bodies of knowledge and developing principled thoughts are the best preparation for this uncertain environment.

Students may not be immediately effective in their first jobs, but will learn quickly, and will continue to do so over the long term, if served well by their education.

Very importantly, business schools cannot succeed without meeting the needs of students, parents, employers and society at large.

At the NUS Business School, we strive to maintain this balance through rigorous academic content and standards, while offering students flexibility to explore a variety of options that address their own ambitions and needs, and improve their employability.

Our reputation - of being somewhat inflexible and theoretical but of providing a rigorous education that alumni and employers appreciate - reflects our effort to maintain this balance.

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But a key to an effective balance between academic rigour and practical relevance and employability is recognising our limitations as academics and business schools. We can do more to understand industry and future needs, so as to better educate and prepare our students.

An important means for doing so is obtaining direct inputs and advice from industry leaders. One of the key initiatives to support this effort is the establishment of a new Management Advisory Board (MAB) at the NUS Business School.

The MAB comprises senior and highly accomplished professionals with outstanding records of achievement in a broad range of contexts. It has the quality and experience to guide the NUS Business School as we strive for global standards of excellence.

The school will gain from the MAB's deep understanding of business, industry, government and environmental trends.

Members succeeded in a range of functional roles before leading a variety of organisations, and thus have a deep understanding of the people organisations need, and of the qualities that these organisations seek in people.

They also have deep understanding of the roles business plays in society.

Very critically, the school will gain tremendously from having these highly talented and accomplished individuals provide governance and advice.

At the NUS Business School, we are very conscious of the need for us to have governance of the highest standards. Our MAB will ensure this.

All the board members joined our MAB voluntarily. Appointment to the MAB imposes significant demands on their already crowded schedules.

The reward for their significant personal sacrifice is contribution to the improvement of the education of future leaders. They share their knowledge and wisdom with the school to shape the education that will serve our students and society in future.

Recognising the challenge and importance of this task, these leaders have agreed to step forward to play this critical role. We salute them!

Ho Yew Kee is vice-dean (administration and finance), NUS Business School; Kulwant Singh is deputy dean and Bernard Yeung is dean, NUS Business School

This article was first published in The Business Times.