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Tuesday, April 12, 2005

Is the M.B.A. obsolete? Article

You see articles like this every year. Sometimes you get lucky with these articles and find some nuggets that help one to see what particular B-Schools are doing to adjust to the times. These golden nuggets are also helpful in trying to differentiate one Business School from another. The rest of the article is mumbo opinion jumbo that I didn't agree with. But it was still fun to read.

By by Justin Ewers
This spring, Penn State University's Smeal College of Business plans to hire an experienced leadership coach from the business world who will gather feedback from students' supervisors and subordinates in their pre-B-school jobs, then sit down for one-on-one feedback sessions to assess their leadership skills. The emphasis will be on how to listen better or be more decisive, or avoid the sometimes inadvertent cultural biases that may leave out members of the team. "We certainly don't believe in eliminating the analytics," says Judy Olian, the school's dean, "but the need for more leadership bench depth has just become more obvious," especially as baby boomers in executive suites get ready to retire.

DePaul University's Kellstadt Graduate School of Business, students can now take an elective called "Management at the Movies" where they mine great films for tips: The Godfather mobsters become models for organizational design; Tora! Tora! Tora! leads to a discussion about strategic planning; Whale Rider sparks debate about leadership and gender issues.

Many schools are also diving whole hog into experiential learning, where putting theory into practice inevitably requires a rich mix of both technical and people skills. At the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, a dozen M.B.A. students each year are now put on a team that operates the school's own million-dollar investment fund. Working together all year with a group of professional industry analysts, the students must decide when to buy, when to sell, and, most important, how to come to an agreement on both. "When students walk out, they've gotten the analytics, but they've also put it into practice in the real world," says Howard Frank, the school's dean.

The University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, has formed 11 research centers where students can specialize in subjects ranging from telecom management to technology commercialization to real estate. USC droppedtheir old departments in finance, marketing, and accounting in favor of an interdisciplinary approach that's more in tune with the realities of the business world.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lally School of Management and Technology, not only have the departments changed, but core classes have been scrapped in favor of team-taught courses. In "Creating and Managing an Enterprise," for example, professors of marketing, strategy, and organizational behavior walk first-years through a single company's ups and downs over four distinct stages of growth: start-up, pre-revenue, revenue, and profit.

Lally has also zeroed in on leadership and communication skills with a team-based performance-evaluation system designed to create constructive conflict between students. Four-member student teams must meet weekly, appoint a leader, keep records of their discussions--and, twice a semester, grade each other on their performance in class projects and presentations, distributing 100 points among the four members. "Usually, the first time around, everyone gets 25 points because they don't want to have the discussion," says Gina O'Connor, director of the school's M.B.A. program. But by the end of the year, when final grades are on the line, push can come to shove. "We've had fights in the parking lot--big problems--but we force them to face one another, to give this information in a way that's not personal, that's professional." That, she says, is the essence of management.
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