Book & Resource Reviews Disrupt or Be Disrupted: A Blueprint for Change in Management Education, edited by Brooks Holtom and Erich Dierdorff. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 413 pages, hard cover. Reviewed by Gianpiero Petriglieri, INSEAD. There are two bold pronouncements at each end of Disrupt or Be Disrupted, a landmark book edited by Brooks Holtom and Erich Dierdorff whose subtitle promises “a blueprint for change in management education.” The volume greets the reader with the boast that “The MBA program, the flagship of busi- ness schools, was the greatest educational innova- tion of the twentieth century” (p. vii) and bids fare- well with the warning that “we must choose to disrupt, renovate, and renew our current ap- proaches to graduate management education, least we allow ourselves to drift into continued complacency and, ultimately, irrelevance” (p. 371). Anyone even vaguely familiar with the rhetoric of contemporary business schools, the controver- sies surrounding and uncertainties within them, will recognize this “rise and fall” storyline. It is the kind of threatening, downward narrative arc that charismatic leaders trace to build urgency and support for their own visions. What happens be- tween those sentences, fortunately, could not be farther from advocacy for a singular and universal path to salvation, enlightenment, or growth. Holtom and Dierdorff bring together contribu- tions from an all-star lineup of management edu- cation scholars, many with recent experiences as deans. The message they deliver is both multifac- eted and complex, as well as informative and em- powering. The volume provides a detailed map of the challenges facing management education worldwide and illustrates multiple possible ways of addressing them, accounting for the resources needed and trade-offs necessary to make different choices. Disrupt or Be Disrupted is sponsored by the Grad- uate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns and administers the most widely adopted admission test for aspiring manage- ment students, and its ambition is clearly spelled out. It aims to mark “another quarter century step in the development of the field” (p. 15) of management education, an inflection similar in magnitude but different in direction to those pro- voked by reports commissioned over 50 and 25 years ago, respectively, by the Ford Foundation (Gordon & Howell, 1959) and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB; Porter & McKibbin, 1988). These landmark reports feature prominently in seminal work on the trajectory of management ed- ucation over the past century. Scholars have ar- gued that their recommendations, the 1959 ones in particular, set business schools on a quest for ac- ademic legitimacy that eroded their social stand- ing in the long run (Augier & March, 2011; Khurana, 2007). The rise of disciplinary research, of a ratio- nal approach to management, and of a utilitarian view of its function, critics contend, has proven damaging to students, society, and management academia itself (Ghoshal, 2005; Mintzberg, 2004; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). That work has helped us understand how busi- ness schools arrived at a place of such controver- sial popularity. These days, degrees in business are the most popular in the United States, repre- senting 20 and 25% respectively of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees granted (U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statis- tics, 2013). Competition for MBA slots at elite insti- tutions is fierce. And yet, scholars and practitio- ners alike voice serious concern that management education is inadequate, irrelevant, or harmful (it is indeed one of few concerns they appear to share). In Disrupt or Be Disrupted, the authors ac- knowledge how we got here, but their overarching focus is on how to move forward. If there is one universal message delivered throughout the book, it is about the importance of differentiation for individual schools if the field of management education is to survive and thrive. The collection is written with business school deans and decision makers in mind, and offers them evidence-based instruments to chart their schools’ unique courses amid an ever-more crowded and competitive domain. It is a powerful testimony of the richness, value, and usefulness of scholarship on management learning and educa- tion, as well as of its current limitations.  Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2015, Vol. 14, No. 1, 133–149. http://dx.doi.org/10.5465/amle.2014.0396 ........................................................................................................................................................................ 133 Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder’s express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.