At 4:30 am on March 1, 2026, something unprecedented happened in the history of global commerce. Iranian drones and ballistic missiles struck Amazon Web Services data centres in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Sixty cloud services went offline. Banks stopped processing payments. Taxi apps went dark. A sovereign state had formally designated a Silicon Valley company’s cloud infrastructure as a legitimate military target. The frameworks we teach in business schools have assumed, as their foundational premise, a world in which geopolitics and commerce operate in parallel universes. That assumption is now ash.
Less than a year before the strikes, US President Donald Trump completed a four-day tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE that generated more than $2 trillion in investment pledges. The Gulf’s pitch to Silicon Valley had always rested on three pillars: capital, political alignment, and stability. Iranian drones demolished the third pillar in a single night. The entire $2-trillion AI investment edifice in the Gulf is now subject to a risk variable that no deal model, no investment thesis, and no business school framework had accounted for: the physical destruction of cloud infrastructure by a state adversary.
The Amazon data centres are the most dramatic illustration of a broader disruption to the grammar of business, one that has been building through this entire decade. The conceptual vocabulary governing management education for half a century, built on neoclassical economics, systems optimisation, and the liberal international order, is being systematically invalidated by geopolitical reality.
The most visible casualty has been the supply chain orthodoxy that dominated business thinking from the 1980s onwards. Toyota’s production system gave the world just-in-time manufacturing, and business schools canonised it. The logic was elegant: carry the minimum inventory necessary, synchronise supply with demand in real time, and eliminate waste ruthlessly. For four decades, this logic generated genuine competitive advantage and informed the design of global supply networks spanning dozens of countries.
The new heuristic is just-in-case. Inventory is insurance. Vendor diversification is a strategic necessity. Single-source dependencies are existential vulnerabilities. The frameworks taught in every operations management classroom today, lean, agile, and responsive, were calibrated for a world of stable geopolitics and frictionless trade. That world is gone, and the curriculum has yet to register its departure.
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Business schools have long taught that the rational firm outsources non-core activities, focuses on its distinctive competencies, and plugs into global value chains to access the cheapest inputs. This is the intellectual lineage that produced the “build versus buy” framework, one of the most frequently taught decision models in operations management. The framework typically recommends buying when the activity is strategically undifferentiated and when external providers offer superior economics.
That framework is broken in several critical industries. A country that outsourced the manufacture of solar panels, semiconductors, precision optics or antibiotics to optimise cost has discovered that it simultaneously outsourced strategic autonomy. The calculus is civilisational. The United States Inflation Reduction Act, the European Chips Act, and India’s Production-Linked Incentive schemes—these are a recognition that the build-versus-buy framework omitted a critical variable: the compounding cost of dependency.For three decades after the Cold War, business schools taught globalisation as an irreversible arc. The “world is flat” thesis, embedded in virtually every international business curriculum, held that technology, trade liberalisation, and comparative advantage would progressively integrate markets, harmonise institutions, and make nationality commercially irrelevant. Multinational corporations were the protagonists of this story.
International business, as taught in most schools, still largely operates within the Dunning OLI paradigm, asking firms to optimise their ownership, location, and internalisation decisions in a borderless economic landscape. The emerging reality demands an entirely different framework: one that incorporates political risk as an endogenous strategic constraint shaping the fundamental architecture of the firm, fully integrated into every investment and operational decision from day one.
Indian business schools will produce the managers who navigate this reconfiguration. They deserve a curriculum equal to that task. At a minimum, four domains that are currently absent or marginal in Indian MBA programmes must become core competencies.
First, geopolitical risk analysis must be integrated into strategy, operations, and finance, treated as a quantitative input to every major business decision. Second, resilience engineering in supply chains, drawing from ecology, military logistics, and complex systems theory, must replace the lean manufacturing canon as the primary operations framework. Third, the political economy of industrial policy must be taught as a live discipline, equipping managers to navigate subsidies, sanctions, export controls, and technology nationalism. Fourth, a revised theory of the firm must be developed, one that treats national security, strategic autonomy and societal resilience as legitimate objectives alongside financial returns.
There is a structural reason business schools lag behind reality. Academic tenure systems reward theoretical rigour over practical relevance. Curriculum committees are conservative. The institutional inertia of prestigious schools makes rapid adaptation psychologically and politically difficult. And there is an uncomfortable additional reason: many of the frameworks being disrupted were associated with specific schools, specific Nobel laureates, and specific consulting firms. Acknowledging their obsolescence requires institutional courage of a kind that academia rarely musters quickly.
The business school’s first obligation is to prepare students for the world as it is. The geopolitical ruptures of this decade, the US-China decoupling, the tariff wars, the Gulf conflagration, and the physical destruction of cloud infrastructure—these are the new normal. They are structural, durable, and accelerating.
On the morning of March 1, 2026, Iranian drones turned Amazon’s servers into smoke and metal in the UAE desert. The textbooks that govern our business schools did not have a framework for that moment.
It is time to write new ones.
Suresh Prabhu is a former Cabinet Minister and Shobhit Mathur is the Co-founder and Vice-Chancellor of the Rishihood University. Views are personal
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