(Pictured: Harvard Business School)

Remember those sequestered nights spent poring over case studies? Or all those hours in the campus library, drafting executive summaries for imaginary execs? Wake up. Those days are history. Earning a master’s in business administration is nothing like you remember.

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, for example, has overhauled its curriculum. Starting in the fall of 2007, core courses in finance and management will be shortened and new workshops in listening, writing, discussion skills, and corporate social responsibility are to be added. Yale has completely scrapped single-subject courses such as finance from its business school’s first-year curriculum in favor of eight core multidisciplinary programs, including “the innovator,” “the employee,” and “the state and society.” Similar changes are taking place at Harvard Business School, with programs at new campuses and research centers around the world, and at the international graduate business program INSEAD.

What’s going on? “There’s strong recognition on the part of many people teaching in business schools that there’s a disconnect between the way careers unfold—the demands placed on leaders and organizations—and the way business curricula are taught,” explains Joel Podolny, dean of Yale School of Management. “Traditional M.B.A. programs are taught as if they were siloed by functions. Those who are running an organization are looking for people who can bring structure to unstructured problems…who can draw across boundaries of an organization to solve them.” Stanford’s effort is also aimed at closing the gap between academic work and the real world. “We believe that leadership skills and broader general-management skills are really in scarce supply, and increasingly important in business,” says Garth Saloner, director of Stanford’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, who helped design course changes. “The curriculum has to move in that direction.”

Of course, some things haven’t changed. Scratch any business school program and you’ll still find requirements geared toward building rock-solid general managers in finance, marketing, and accounting. However, it’s not always a simple matter to imbue business students with the kinds of skills included in today’s C.E.O.-to-be tool kit. “The quantitative things are easy to teach,” says W. Earl Sasser, who co-chairs Harvard’s program for leadership development, a mid-career course. “The softer things are more difficult to teach, but are the most important thing for our students.” That may explain new classes like “Lives of Consequence: How Individuals Discover Paths to Meaningful Engagement,” at Stanford, or “Emotional Intelligence at Work,” at Yale’s School of Management.

Now, M.B.A. programs not only include courses in developing emotional intelligence, they are actively looking for situations that force students to practice such skills. For instance, how do you motivate ambitious students to learn to work with others? The answer appears to be teamwork itself, now the vehicle of choice for honing the less easily quantifiable personal and leadership skills that can propel careers forward. “Each year we’re upping the investment in teams,” asserts W. Carl Kester, Harvard Business School’s deputy dean for academic affairs. Last fall Harvard brought in 50 Outward Bound facilitators to lead teams of first-year students in exercises targeted at bonding and building a sense of community. The day culminated in the unveiling and testing of catapults built by the student groups.

As business programs broaden their scope by incorporating more people skills and social awareness, student ambitions are changing as well. M.B.A. training is no longer just about making money. “The millennial generation is very, very interested in giving back,” says J. Frank Brown, dean of INSEAD. “In our M.B.A. program, up to 10 percent are interested in non-governmental organization or not-for-profit work. A key aspect to the M.B.A. program is a holistic sense of business and society.” Stanford’s Saloner agrees. “There’s an increasing awareness among business school students of growing poverty around the world, and the responsibility of all to deal with it,” says Saloner, who recently accompanied students on a two-week trip to Kenya and Uganda to study the role of micro-loans and finance in those areas.

M.B.A. programs are not only emphasizing cultural diversity in their projects abroad, but are also increasingly reaching out to a new world of candidates. Thirty-seven percent of Stanford’s incoming class is made up of international students, up from 28 percent 10 years ago. Some institutions are even setting up satellite campuses. Harvard now has research centers in Hong Kong, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Mumbai, India. INSEAD, which has the most diverse student body (the largest nationality is Indian, at 14 percent), has two real-world campuses, one in Singapore and the other in Fontainebleau, near Paris. It’s also constructing a third campus online, in the virtual world of Second Life.

Armed with softer skill sets, international experience, and a strong sense of corporate citizenship, can tomorrow’s M.B.A.’s outperform their predecessors? The answer is yes, but choose your M.B.A. carefully. “The siloed, U.S.-centric curriculum may have worked in earlier decades; it does not work today,” claims Podolny. “Those trained in an integrated curriculum are going to be more effective managers and leaders.” They’ll probably be a lot nicer to work for too.