The Man Behind Business School Rankings: Interview With John Byrne

With the Financial Times’ release of their 2016 Global MBA Rankings yesterday, there’s currently a lot of media buzz around business school rankings. But how did business school rankings get started in the first place? AACSB International interviewed the man himself, John Byrne, who first came up with the idea of a ranking system for business degree programs.

Byrne, former editor of BusinessWeek and Fast Company, tells AACSB’s chief operations officer, Dan LeClair, that he wanted to “create a real market, where there's information that people can act on.” So he came up with the idea for a survey-based business school ranking, which resulted in the first BusinessWeek publication of ranked business schools nearly three decades ago in 1988. Watch the below interview to find out why Byrne now says of business school rankings, “I'm the first to admit I created a monster, and the monster is uncontrollable.”

John Byrne Bio
Author and former Fast Company and BusinessWeek editor, John Byrne is currently the chairman and editor-in-chief of C-Change Media Inc.