Deans Digest catches up with Blair Sheppard, dean of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and the chair and founder of Duke Corporate Education, for five questions on the state of graduate management education. 

Q. In a recent issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, you spoke of a “fairly fundamental shift” in business school classrooms toward considering the larger context and a desire by students for a broader range of tools and perspectives. Can you say more about those shifts?

A. One of the things motivating students is a belief that a number of the issues that they are going to be grappling with in business cross-cut (what is typically taught in specific university) schools in significant ways. In the area of sustainable energy, for example, no matter where students will work, they will likely need to know some environmental issues, some policy issues, and probably some science. The nature of the challenges that students were thinking about when they left undergraduate school are different from what they are thinking about now. They are interscholastic in nature. That’s true for all of our students, but particularly for those who are interested in energy, the environment, social entrepreneurship, and health.

Second, there are a whole series of factors in doing your day-to-day job that weren’t part of considerations before, but now need to be. If you’re a banker, how important is it for you to know policy? If you are in finance, how important is it for you to understand behavior? The context in which business is occurring is different.

Even students who are thinking about a particular industry will realize that there is a whole series of things that weren’t being taught related to being successful in that industry as a result of what we have experienced over the last few years. That demands a much broader portfolio of course offerings and opportunities from outside the business school.

Q. What kind of realignment is necessary within business schools to accommodate the changes that you see in the environment for graduate management education?

A. You still have to teach a darn good basic business degree. At the same time, you have to allow students to develop greater depth in other areas. For example, we’re going to turn out students who can run numbers with the best of them and they have to be globalists and really intelligent generalists. The implication is that you have to simultaneously be narrow and broad. It’s not enough to be a general management school, except at the very senior executive level, and even there you have to broaden the definition of general management.

Another implication is that you have to have better relationships with other schools and more forms of joint appointments. You have to have more faculty, for example, who are appointed jointly in business along with policy, medicine, the environment, the law, even the natural sciences.

We will probably find far more joint degrees or variants of multiple degree offerings. It’s going to become de rigueur that students will graduate with two degrees instead of just one.

I also think that business schools are going to have to be sited in other parts of the world. The other contextual thing is that students don’t just want the “American” answer.