Before you pony up $50,000 or more for an MBA degree, catch Stu Wall’s discovery at Business Insider!

It makes sense to check out what you can expect back for your investment. Recession begs us to rethink business schools, and to consider if the value of degrees have plummeted along with home prices and salaries.

Joe Gerstandt calls for  a new kind of leader. You? If you agree, you’ll likely also agree that renewed leadership requires a new kind of MBA, with classes that are millennial friendly. One that few business schools currently offer.

How so?

Imagine MBAs who suddenly added  innovative tactics for a new era to your organization. If well-equipped leaders facilitated cutting edge initiatives with more brain in mind. Your organization would know these new MBA leaders by sharply increased profitability and worker morale where they worked.

In a brain based program transformed  graduates would come into your organization with current business plans patterned after highly successful local, national and global leaders, such as:

• Talent – Bill Conaty leads business talent management.  Conaty raised the level of HR internationally, and convinced other business leaders to spot credibility of HR as an answer to unleashing talent as human capital.

• Finances – Jeffrey Sachs calls for a complete change in economic strategies for a crowed planet. In spite of the wonderful insights of President Obama, Sachs offers, we are still dealing economic lies and abuse in the back rooms of government and Wall Street.

• Curiosity - Ursula Burns leads Xerox from tired traditions that sagged in sales to position it back among top organizations, with the challenges that come from asking Where to from here? By stirring curiosity for answers in co-workers, Burns finds answers that many CEOs tend to miss.

• Innovation – George Lucas comes with creative insights for the future of cinema. Lucas never really wanted to make money, but passionately wanted to make art.  In art you make an emotional and innovative connection to people. Innovation for Lucas, involves telling stories to the population in a meaningful and emotional way.

• Tone - Barak Obama solves complex problems with statesman-like tone that engages opposing views, while finding courage to speak out against cynicism. Only by using tone skills for tough times, can leaders facilitate innovative ideas from diverse angles so that all can both teach and learn from others who differ.

• Organization – Gary Hamel offers unique management innovation plans that would revolutionize MBAs. Hamel stated in the world business forum 2009,  To succeed in the future, organizations are going to have to find ways of energizing people, so that they bring not only their skills, expertise and diligence to work, but they bring their passion and their initiative as well.

• Change – Ann Mulcahy takes charge and draws others into change. Mulcahy faced critics and cynics alike – to embrace changes that brought Xerox back from the brink of disaster and held it in archaic practices with exclusive privileges for a few leaders at its top. By launching innovative change, Xerox is back in the race as a strong global player.

You likely have leaders in mind that qualify even more for some of these slots and we’d love to hear about them. But back to the opening challenge of why buy an expensive MBA. We are drowning as a business community,  and to revive we need to create a new kind of leader,  and pass it on to the next generation of business school grads.

Many old school skills taught in current MBA program, remind us that  a new kind of leader is urgently needed. In future posts, look for innovative suggestions for teaching MBA programs with brains more in mind. It won’t be easy to accomplish in some current campuses, nor is it a task for the faint hearted. Yet the urgent need for a new kind of leader, compels us to rethink how we can develop highly effective business leaders for a new era.

Could reconfigured MBAs carry our business world back from rags of broken banks back to riches of human achievement?  Could  leadership that models a new tone for tough times, for example, offer Wall Street’s answer to an innovative future for management? Perhaps more importantly, could a new breed of MBAs open main street’s surest segue to creative progress?

Imagine leaders who build brilliant inroads that reconnect humans to innovation through technology, management,  social media, and institutional change. How so?

Leaders would begin to address the narrowing gates to resources. We still have a long way to go!

Innovation today is tenaciously blocked by bureaucrats with power, or dismissed by politicians without vision of  innovation’s new roles for humanity. Caught in hierarchies where vision fades to the right or draws to the left, but rarely reaches progressive greens, Hebbian leaders tend to prevent innovation’s steady trajectory toward future wins.

Opposite innovative MBAs, stand Hebbian counterparts,  who appear unable to renew with the brain in mind, and incapable to override the brain’s default to ruts. What’s the solution?

Imagine the active place innovation would leap to within a facilitation style leadership, that came to business from cutting edge MBA programs, armed with innovation  in your area.