'We Don’t Need No Education’ – Or Do We? The Impact of Management Education upon Alumni Adoption of Strategy Tools

The debate about the relevance of management education to management practice has been intense and full of contradictory findings, with increasing concerns about the application of management education within the workplace. Despite these concerns, there is relatively little evidence about whether graduates use the tools, techniques and concepts taught as part of management education. This paper addresses this gap by providing evidence from a large-scale survey on business school alumni’ patterns of adoption of those tools, techniques and frameworks typically taught within strategic management education. The results clearly indicate that education characteristics on four dimensions, level of formal education, exposure to and frequency of management training, and specificity of strategic management education, are important drivers in alumni adoption of strategy tools. Moreover, using regression analysis, we find a cumulative effect, that also indicates the relative weight of each of these educational characteristics in predicting tool adoption.