Why business doesn't care for b-school academics

Managers don't take b-school academics and their output seriously- most journal papers are not even read by the academics themselves, leave alone by practising managers.

How come medical and law school academics' papers are read? How come those schools influence practice more? Michale Skapinker has an explanation in FT:

Law, medical and engineering schools are subject to the same academic pressures as business schools - to publish in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and to buttress their work with the expected academic vocabulary.

The reason that real-life lawyers, doctors and engineers have no problem with their research is not because they are smarter than business people, but because the research assists them in what they do.

Lawyers and doctors proceed from a corpus of knowledge and build on it. They look at what their colleagues do and try to do it better.

They are also dealing with more predictable material. People's hearts, lungs or nervous systems behave in similar ways. The way people behave in the office is far more mysterious. What works in one company may not work in another.

Managers tend to be practical rather than theoretical, proceeding by trial and error: this works, that doesn't. Rather than building on competitors' achievements, the best often seek to do something different.

Business schools can describe what innovative companies have done: Harvard's case study method does just that. But this is, by definition, backward-looking. Business school professors will struggle to tell us what innovators will do next. If they knew, they would surely do it themselves.