Yale: Working Across Boundaries
According to Joel M. Podolny, dean of the Yale® School of Management, the central motivation for the school’s dramatic curriculum change reflects “the changes that have occurred in what is being demanded of managers and leaders today.” As organizations have become flatter, Podolny says, managers and leaders need to be able to “identify and frame the problems that are really important, and then work across the boundaries in order to be able to solve those problems.”
The Yale curriculum seeks to meet the needs of tomorrow’s managers via three core components. Orientation to Management invests students with “some of the basic language of management,” Podolny says. These are not full-fledged courses in subjects like economics or accounting, he says—“because a lot of the disciplinary material gets introduced later in the curriculum”—but rather provide “enough of the language so that it lays a foundation.” Students learn basic interpersonal skills and are also prompted to “think about how they craft a career that’s connected to a broader set of goals and aspirations for themselves.”
The second part, Organizational Perspectives, offers interdisciplinary courses structured around the key constituencies or perspectives that a manager needs to engage to be effective. For example, Podolny says, “the Customer, the Investor, the Competitor, and State and Society are the four external perspectives.” There are also four internal perspectives. The goal, he says, is to get students to understand “what motivates the customer” and how one can “align an organization behind the customer.”
The third component, Integrated Leadership, presents “some very knotty managerial problems,” Podolny says. Students “begin with the challenges that accrue to someone who is running an entrepreneurial organization and move up to focus on the challenges of mergers and acquisitions, and then even some of the problems and challenges of working across sectors.”
Is this approach revolutionary? “It is both a radical break and it is reasonable,” Podolny says. “In breaking down the silos, it is revolutionary. It is a major change in the way in which we think about bringing disciplines to management [and] the way we think about presenting tools. But I think it is reasonable in the sense that it is very much aligned with the way management and leadership occurs in the world today.” In developing the curriculum, Yale talked with many business leaders, alumni, recruiters, and other constituencies. Podolny says the reaction from executives to the way the courses were structured and the material presented was “that’s my world—that’s the set of constituencies that I have to deal with.”
Asked about the first year of experience with the new curriculum, Podolny draws on the famous Steve Jobs line: it’s turned out “insanely great,” he says, adding that “everybody feels that we have gotten it right.” Future incremental changes are inevitable, he says, and “my hope is that we’ll continuously improve over time.”
“I believe that this is fundamentally the right way to teach management and business education,” Podolny continued. “We’re happy to share with people what we’re doing. The truth is that, from our perspective, the more schools that are aligned with this way, the better it will be for all of us. It will create more materials, and more of a context for what we’re focusing on—some of the very fundamental and exciting challenges in management.”
London Business School: Entrepreneurial Change
In contrast to Yale, which changed its curriculum in one fell swoop, the London Business School has taken an incremental approach. After three years of what she describes as “a process of significant curriculum change,” Julia Tyler, associate dean of the MBA program, says “we now have a radically different program than the one we had.”
Tyler says that although London Business School agrees in principle that integration across subject areas is important, it purposefully decided to take another tack. “We have retained our core courses in a way that you might expect to see in a traditional curriculum,” she says. “We think that’s the most efficient way of getting people to get that basic knowledge is through those core courses.” In the process of reform, however, existing core courses were refined and new courses added.
Among the changes, the school introduced a new, compulsory core course called Discovering Entrepreneurial Opportunities, which Tyler says helps students to “understand about creating value, not just managing value.” The new course, she says, is “about the processes by which, through observation, you may discover a new service or a new product” and is designed to help students integrate core learning through practical experiences in the field with business people and investors. The effect, she notes, is that students get out of the classroom, collaborate in teams on real-life business problems, and learn to address real issues from many different angles.
London Business School has also introduced new flexibility to its MBA program, allowing students to “study in a rhythm or pace that is more congenial to them and what they want to do,” Tyler says. Students can accelerate their MBA and graduate in as few as 15 months; alternatively, they can take as long as 21 months, perhaps to accommodate the desire to take additional electives. (Students can take between 9 and 12 electives as part of the program.) The program’s flexibility, Tyler says, meets a range of student motivations, from “career advancers,” who may want to speed through the program, to career changers, who may want to take “every ounce of courses” they can possibly get. The idea is to help keep the focus on student outcomes rather than, say, on merely passing a course.
As part of what Tyler describes as its “entrepreneurial” approach to curriculum change, London Business School introduced a new course in business communications and revised a course in strategic problem solving. Selective improvements were made in the “Shadowing Project,” an elective in which students learn in the field by following executives in the course of their daily work, and in other existing program components, including a required final project. A three-day capstone experience was added at the end of the program, Tyler says, to encourage students to think about the issues they will face in the working world.
A strong emphasis on skills development guided much of the reform. For example, London Business School emphasizes language skills, part of the school’s overall commitment to make an international experience integral and central to each student’s experience. “We used to make it such that people had to learn a language other than English,” Tyler says. “Many of our students already had that. We changed what we were requiring and what we were offering so that we offered languages from scratch.” The upshot? Students graduating today are likely to be multilingual, with the ability to “speak English fluently, their native language fluently, probably another language fluently, and at least one if not two [additional languages] that they have learned to a basic level.” A first-year requirement called “The Five-Minute Presentation” helps students master public speaking in business English.
Some of the skills courses are taught by the sophisticated training companies that train employees at places like Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Shell, Tyler says, which delivers “a practical edge that we think is extremely important.” Considerations about skills, she says, were influenced by findings in The Upwardly Global MBA, by Nigel Andrews and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, a survey of more than 100 executives in some 20 countries that studied the knowledge, skills, and attributes young leaders need to succeed.
Although “we knew going in that we did not want to change our mission,” Tyler says, “we were remarkably open-minded” about possibilities for reform. It was through the process of listening to faculty, students, executives, and other experts—and assessing changes in “where business was going”—that Tyler says certain changes “became obvious and made sense.”
The current reform, Tyler says, “is now as complete as any curriculum change ever is. The marketplace changes and needs change. Like a shark, you have to keep moving or you’re dead.”
© 2007 Graduate Management Admission Council® (GMAC®). All rights reserved. GMAC® and Graduate Management Admission Council® are registered trademarks of the Graduate Management Admission Council® in the United States and other countries. London Business School® is a registered trademark of London Business School. Yale® is a registered trademark of Yale University.
