According to the Globe,
[The new curriculum's] centerpiece, set to be rolled out today, is a series of "organizational perspectives" courses focused on managing external constituencies like state and society, customers, investors, and competitors, along with internal constituencies such as innovators, operating executives, fund managers, and employees.
Frankly, that sounded to me like Manipulation 101, so I went to the source - the Yale School of Management itself - to see what they had to say. Naturally, they spin things a little differently:
The heart of the new first-year curriculum is a series of eight multidisciplinary courses, called Organizational Perspectives, structured around the organizational roles a manager must engage, motivate, and lead in order to solve problems – or make progress – within organizations. These roles are both internal – the Innovator, the Operations Engine, the Employee, and Sourcing and Managing Funds (or CFO) – and external – the Investor, the Customer, the Competitor, and State and Society. Each course draws on topics and insights from a variety of functional management disciplines to study the managerial challenges each role presents.
According to Yale, the manager "engages, motivates, and leads in order to solve problems," not just manipulate. Whew, I was worried for a moment there.
I am not all that sympathetic to Yale's need to crawl up in the rankings - who asked them to start a businss school up, anyway? Princeton and Brown don't have them, and they haven't been drummed out of the Ivy League. And what happened to their founding mission of establishing a new degree for public and private management, and not being purely profit-motivated? Guess that went the way of the lowly five-figures starting salary for grads.
What Yale's up to doesn't sound all that wowingly different - unless there's a bigger difference between the old-think word "interdisciplinary" and Yale's breakthrough "multidisciplinary" approach, this sounds recycled. But the idea of a new business school curriculum isn't bad. As a long-ago graduate of US News' #4/Business Week's #7 ranked B-School (Sloan-MIT), I can honestly say that there was not much I learned in school that I actually ended up using in business. The one thing I did pick up that helped me score my first job was an obscure econometric modeling language, TROLL. A variant of TROLL was used in a consulting firm I worked for. Other than that, business school was a place to spend 2 years with lots of smart people taking courses of some intellectual interest but little practical application. What was practical for me was picking up the credential from a ranked school. Without it, I might have stayed a Durgin-Park waitress forever.
Like most MBA's, 99.999 (a.k.a. "five 9's") of what I know about business I learned in business.
Yale may or may not be on to something, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer is "not really."
If Yale really want to innovate, I've got an idea for them.
Have your student spend the first year taking "core" courses - either the traditional "silo'd" approach, or with Yale's new, multidisciplinary curriculum. Year two, everyone gets to work together to actually run a company - into the black or into the ground. I'm sure Yale could afford to buy a few concerns in downtown New Haven. How about a factory - it's not in New Haven, but the factory that makes pink lawn flamingos is for sale, and Leominster Massachusetts isn't that far from Yale. A supermarket might be good - yup-scale or in a poor community. Call center. Book store. Cleaning service. Florist. Restaurant. Software company. Let's face it, most folks in business school have 2 years experience as a flunky in a consulting or VC firm before they race off to B-school. They weren't running anything except numbers, scenarios, and off at the mouth. Give them a company to run, and save all those firms that hire MBA's the cost of on the job training.
Under my new MBA model, the only types of firms that would be verboten are those engaged in illegal activity, hedge funds, and management consultancies.
The businesses wouldn't need to be start ups. Once Yale got a few going, the outgoing MBA's would just hand it off to the class behind them.
Budgeting. Planning. Designing. Building. Procuring. Marketing. Selling. Negotiating. Hiring. Firing. Outsourcing. Reorganizing. Everything you do in a real business. But no quitting.
I can't think of a better way to invigorate a moribund MBA curriculum, and give students a real business education.
3 comments:
What Kathleen is referring to is a review of the book "The No Asshole Rule" by Robert Sutton which was posted recently on Guy Kawasaki's blog. Within the review,Guy provides Marge's Asshold Management Metric. All very funny - check it out here: (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/10/you_have_to_lov.html
What askinstoo is doing is spamming.Once I check out how he made $900 last month having fun, I'll figure out how to filter him and his out.
Or perhaps, if they don't run a company themselves, MBA students could observe people working. If I recall correctly (and I may not, since I went there close to 40 years ago), the original design plan for Harvard B-School's first building included a factory in a large room with a catwalk one or two stories above, so the students could see actual workers working. That part of the plan got dropped though. Perhaps something like it could be revived for today's would be MBAs, except done with webcams in Chinese sweatshops, so the students would realize how lucky they are.
If nothing else, Yale can brag that it didn't issue George Dubya an MBA. Harvard did.
Mad Kane
http://www.madkane.com
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