From Heroic Leaders to Responsible Systems: Rethinking Management Education in 2025

In 2025, the business world is experiencing a reckoning, where terms like “ESG” and “DEI”* have become political lightning rods. In the US, President Donald J. Trump has issued three executive orders that put a target on corporate diversity, equity and inclusion policies, essentially declaring the concept illegal and discriminatory. President Trump’s anti-DEI policies have global implications, influencing policy and practice in other countries and impacting international conversations around fairness and equity. What role does management education play in times like these?

In 10-K investor filings by publicly traded US-based companies, mentions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” have gone down by 57%. How companies in Switzerland will ultimately respond, it is still too soon to tell. While some are hedging their bets, waiting and seeing, or even doubling down on their DEI efforts, some larger international companies headquartered here have cut their DEI goals or changed their DEI guidelines.

As practitioners in the field of responsible management, this means asking some hard questions: Why is the anti-DEI rhetoric finding such a ready audience with receptive ears? Why is it seemingly so easy for large conglomerates to dismantle their DEI programs – hailed as key corporate values only the year before? Was it all just cheap talk?

Diversity programs fail if they operate on the surface, framed as part of a business case (such as “our customer base is diverse, therefore, our employees should reflect this”) or legal obligations to reach certain diversity markers. They fail if they only go skin-deep: If they take the form of top-heavy management diversity goals, a once off unconscious bias training and employee resource groups without addressing the underlying systemic inequities and outdated power structures. Values like fairness, equal opportunities or inclusion seem to not have translated into systems and daily practice.

As we have come to realize in this turbulent year, DEI programs thrive on leadership buy-in and sponsorship and die when the leadership changed. Individual leaders can’t – and shouldn’t – be solely responsible for upholding DEI. Real, sustainable inclusion requires systemic changes: policies, processes, incentives, and structures engineered to make equitable outcomes the default. If inclusion relies on leadership heroics (bravery, “doing the right thing”), it signals design failure. DEI should be embedded into structural design, not left to managers’ goodwill. Put more bluntly: If inclusion in your organization depends on selected leaders to implement it, you’ve already lost the DEI plot.

As faculty in the field of responsible management, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions, too: Are we teaching our students the right concepts and skills to build and maintain a sustainable DEI framework? As business school academics, we have a responsibility and opportunity to radicalise responsible management learning and education. In rethinking and redoing how we teach “implementing and living DEI” to our students, it may be time to de-emphasize a popular trope of business schools, which have historically groomed charismatic, boundary-pushing heroes – the “leaders of tomorrow” – who are framed as instrumental in handling the major crises of tomorrow. Amid unprecedented DEI backlash, the heroic leadership language feels outdated. The real challenge isn’t producing heroes – it’s teaching future professionals to design organizations and systems where responsibility isn’t heroic, but a integral part of the organization.

If your MBA grad needs moral courage to make your company inclusive, that’s a red flag. The fix isn’t bravery – it’s blueprint. Management education must shift from inspiring lone visionaries to cultivating system architects –leaders who embed responsible behaviors into processes, incentives, and culture.

Instead of asking: “What kind of leaders do we want to produce?” Ask: “What kind of systems will we equip them to build, so that leadership isn’t an act of heroism, but a lived practice of responsibility?”

*ESG: Environmental Social Governance – in other words, environment, social issues and corporate governance. The term originates from the world of finance and serves as a basis for decision-making for investors and other stakeholders when investing in sustainable investment products. This is because the published report makes ESG indicators measurable and comparable.

Due to the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD), ESG reporting has been mandatory for insurance companies, banks and large capital market-oriented companies in the EU since 2017.

DEI: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – are organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability.