Just as competition and evolution have shaped the natural world, so it goes in the business world. "Adapt or die" is a mantra that holds true just as much for multinational companies as for humans and animals.
Business schools are no different, argues Prof Dipak Jain, dean of Chulalongkorn University's Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration, in an interview with the Bangkok Post.
"My view is that general demand for the traditional MBA, what I would describe as a full-time MBA, is not increasing at the moment. The market for this type of MBA is already mature. Demand for this traditional MBA will likely be confined to a set of very top schools," he says.
The top students will still attend the best business schools. But for others, what will be the focus of their management programmes?
"Technology, real estate, marketing, finance, whatever is the area of specialisation—the world still needs good human talent. That is not the problem. The question is what kind of focus will be best for each school," Prof Jain says.
"If you look at Asia, there are many management schools in the region. But there is a lot of variance in the quality of the programmes. A better focus for each school will help with this quality gap."
Prof Jain, 58 years old and a mathematician by training, has been a visiting professor at Sasin since 1989. He was dean of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois from 2001-09 and dean of Insead from 2011-13. He took over as director of Sasin last year.
Sasin, founded in 1982 in a collaboration with Kellogg and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, must position itself as "the leading management school for Asean", Prof Jain says.
"There are two kinds of specialities: geographical and topical. To me, Sasin can be the source of human talent for corporations operating in the region or for multinationals that want to have a presence in Asean."
Prof Jain points to Sasin's research capabilities about business in the Asean region as a core advantage: not only research generated by its own faculty, but also research done by visiting scholars hosted at Sasin.
The school's management programmes, whether it be regular MBA, executive MBA, dual MBA/Master of Engineering or customised training courses, will be a draw for companies within the region, as well as for global firms interested in doing business in Southeast Asia.
Currently 5-10% of the school's student body are non-Thais, though this excludes exchange students who study at Sasin through collaborations with schools such as Wharton, Kellogg, Duke, the University of North Carolina and some European schools.
Prof Jain says that while he believes demand for full-time MBAs may have reached its peak, demand for part-time MBAs and executive MBAs would continue to grow.
"MBA education has not lost its glamour. People still need to know management fundamentals. But some people may have an engineering degree, or a degree in science. When they work for a company, and they want to be promoted, they know they need to understand management. And so they will search for an executive programme or a part-time programme.
"If you have a management degree, your value can only go up within a company. In meetings, people will say, oh, two years ago when I used to hear him, he only focused on the technical aspects. Now I see that he has a broader perspective on what we do."
An executive MBA represents a "journey of leadership", Prof Jain says.
"It's aimed at people with 10 years or more of experience. From a manager, you become a leader."
But in an increasingly specialised world, is management training still even necessary to succeed in the corporate world?
Prof Jain, unsurprisingly, says yes.
"The engineer knows how things are being done on the shop floor. What management education can do is expand his or her horizons," he says.
"I tell people from different functional disciplines that we all live under the same sky but we seem to have different horizons. And where is the difference in horizons coming from? It's based on your background and training. That's where I think the additional value comes from. You had the technical skills, and now you've acquired the management skills you need to succeed."
But applying the lessons of the classroom may take time, particularly in the family-dominated business world of Thailand and Asia.
Prof Jain says that compared with those at Kellogg or Insead, Sasin students are more likely to go back to work for their family business or become entrepreneurs rather than join a Thai company or a multinational.
"If you ask what is the value of an MBA, it's how to come up with a structured framework for unstructured problems. That is the biggest contribution of management knowledge.
"In family businesses you are not looking for that, because the structure is there already. And as an entrepreneur, you are just starting out."
Prof Jain shrugs. "Everything that you learn isn't necessarily applied tomorrow. It takes some time. For example, in 1905, Einstein wrote a paper on photoelectric effect, for which he got the Nobel Prize. It took years for that paper to become a garage door opener.
"So what we teach, the relevance has a time dimension."
Prof Jain believes Asian companies will eventually follow their US and British counterparts and move away from family-run hierarchies towards professional management.
"Members of the new generations in the family business have studied abroad," he says. "The moment they become the chief executive or chairman, they will look at the business in a different way from the way their father or grandfather is looking at it now.
"The family nature [of businesses] is not increasing. The professional nature is increasing. And that's why I believe demand for management education will not decline. It may take a different form, but the demand for the content will increase."
Prof Jain suggests prospective MBA students consider the impact of globalisation and how this will change the business landscape. "You don't know if you will get a job in Chicago or be posted in Ho Chi Minh City. The likelihood of going somewhere else is much higher today than it was 10 years ago."
This will put a premium on understanding different cultures and learning how to work and negotiate with people from different countries.
Indeed, Prof Jain says that structured courses such as microeconomics or statistics could be increasingly shifted online, while more classroom time will be focused on discussions with multiple viewpoints, such as cross-national business negotiations.
Regardless, Sasin's task is to train its graduates about the importance of adaptability, anticipation and coping with ambiguity, something Prof Jain knows from personal experience.
"My first day as dean of Kellogg was on Sept 11, 2001. At that time, our MBA candidates who had started the programme in 2000, were due to graduate in 2002. By then, the world was a very different place."
Because of the sudden change in the economic situation in the US at the time, Prof Jain said he and the school's leaders had to reach out to the top companies and recruiters to help their graduates find jobs. They also developed more coursework was on international business, in anticipation of a drop in hiring by US companies.
"From October 2001 to April 2002, I was on the road every day meeting recruiters. By the end of that year, we had a 91% success rate in placements.
"Even today, the world is fraught with huge geopolitical risks," Prof Jain said. "So you have to plan and anticipate what might happen and be proactive."