This article looks at business schools and the failures in their curriculum that contributes to a lack of management skills among graduates. Business schools are on the wrong track. For many years, MBA programs enjoyed rising respectability in academia and growing prestige in the business world. Their admissions were ever more selective, the pay packages of graduates ever more dazzling. Today, however, MBA programs face intense criticism for failing to impart useful skills, failing to prepare leaders, failing to instill norms of ethical behavior -- and even failing to lead graduates to good corporate jobs. The actual cause of today's crisis in management education is far broader in scope and can be traced to a dramatic shift in the culture of business schools. Before asking how business education should change, we need to examine its evolution. Why have business schools embraced the scientific model of physicists and economists rather than the professional model of doctors and lawyers? Although few B school faculty members would admit it, professors like it that way. This model gives scientific respectability to the research they enjoy doing and eliminates the vocational stigma that business school professors once bore. Most issues facing business leaders are, in the final analysis, questions of judgment. What looks like a straightforward financial decision -- say, to cut costs by relocating a service center -- often has implications for marketing, sales, manufacturing, and morale that can't be shoe-horned into an equation. By allowing the scientific research model to drive out all others, business schools are institutionalizing their own irrelevance. What professors study, and the way they study it, directly affects the education of MBA candidates.