ABSTRACT
This chapter recalls the danger of a military disaster that resulted from pushing too far behind enemy lines and suggests, by analogy, that a comparable catastrophe might result from pushing too far in the adoption of a commercial ethos and the privileging of a customer orientation in the administration of the university in general and of business schools in particular. Eventually, there came a time when a new administration decided that the school’s curriculum needed changing. According to the new plan, the school would offer a core curriculum of required courses—marketing strategy among them. With delicious irony, the new curriculum created a required standardized course in marketing strategy that itself embodied the ultimate marketing fallacy. Most MBA students and those instructors who pander to their sensibilities tend to focus rather obsessively on Economic Value to the Customer—that is, Return on Investment or the Net Present Value of all future cash flows resulting from the opportunity in question.
