In a recent conversation with Daniel Serrot, MBA Director at Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, he made a point that reframes what business education can look like at its best.
Business schools globally celebrate the case study. The turnaround. The breakthrough. The pivot executed at exactly the right moment. It is a format that works; it builds analytical rigor, structural thinking, and the ability to diagnose a business problem quickly. What it is less naturally suited to is sitting with failure honestly, as a pedagogical tool in its own right.
Serrot’s argument is not a criticism of the model. It is an observation about what the Argentine context makes possible, and what that possibility reveals about leadership education more broadly.
The context that forces a different kind of honesty
In Argentina, the macroeconomic environment does not allow for the kind of retrospective tidying that makes failure feel instructive in hindsight. Students at San Andrés have watched well-run companies collapse due to conditions entirely beyond anyone’s control. They have seen talented, experienced leaders make sound, well-reasoned decisions that still produce bad outcomes. Not because of poor judgment. Because that is sometimes how it goes.
That exposure teaches something that is genuinely difficult to build into a curriculum by design: epistemic humility. The understanding that leadership is not about being right. It is about making the best possible call with incomplete information, communicating it clearly, and then adapting when circumstances change without losing the confidence to make the next call.
Why this matters for leadership development
The skills that compound most reliably over a leadership career are not purely analytical. They are dispositional. The ability to tolerate uncertainty without becoming paralyzed by it. The capacity to make a decision, own it, and update when the evidence changes. The willingness to say, clearly and without defensiveness: I made the best call I could with what I had, and here is what I am doing now.
Those capabilities are built through genuine encounter with complexity, including the complexity of decisions that were reasonable and still went wrong. Serrot’s insight is that the Argentine context naturally creates that encounter, and that the pedagogical instinct to build it intentionally is one that any school can develop, regardless of geography.
The schools that pursue that instinct, that treat epistemic humility as a teachable capability rather than a byproduct of experience, tend to produce graduates who are more honest about uncertainty, more resilient under pressure, and more effective over time.
What it means for candidates
For candidates evaluating programs, this is worth taking seriously as a selection criterion alongside the more visible measures. Not just what a school teaches, but how it handles complexity and failure in the curriculum. Whether the culture rewards intellectual honesty as much as confident performance. Whether the environment is designed to build genuine resilience or simply simulate challenge.
