Approaching the millennium: transforming leadership education for stewardship of the planet’s resources

The education of future business leaders is centred in the many MBA programmes in the world. Most of these are based on the idea of managers acting as agents of capital whose task is then to be the agents of economic efficiency. This idea, taken from liberal market theory, is limited to a particular ideological stance. Provides a critique of that and other ideological stances from Christian conceptions of love and freedom, ethical and ecological grounds and argues that neither liberal market capitalism nor state centralism is acceptable. Argues that a changing understanding of both social and physical eco‐systems leads to a need to open up leadership education to a wider array of ideologies, including social democracy, democratic socialism and ecological conservationism. Otherwise the next generation of leaders will be less able to cope with the wider array of values in the global economy and unable to acknowledge their role of citizens as of equal importance with their organizational roles.