3 March 2010

Changing the World was first published in the 'Australian Financial Review' on 22 February, 2010. It has been republished here with the kind permission of Roy Green.

Can business schools change the world? Or should we simply adapt to it with varying degrees of success? Or indeed can we do both? In a sense the very idea of business education changes the way we think about organisations, and how we plan for an uncertain future.

In founding "management science" as a separate field of study and practice, the extraordinary polymath Charles Babbage had already anticipated the development of business schools like Wharton and Harvard by the end of the century. Babbage even pioneered the case method, with his excoriating analysis of poor management in the London print industry, so much so that many printers refused to publish his works.

I was reminded of Babbage last week at the AACSB Deans Conference in Tampa, Florida, whose agenda included discussing not only the evolution of international accreditation but also what we might imagine to be the future of business education. The highlight was a presentation by Sikrant Datar, professor of accounting, research director and senior associate dean at Harvard Business School, on his forthcoming book, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads.

Among Datar's evidence-driven findings, business education will increasingly have three important, interrelated aspects - "knowing", "doing" and "being". The first is essentially about analytical and integrative thinking, and is exemplified by Stanford's program of "Critical and Analytical Thinking", Yale's multi-disciplinary organisational perspectives approach and Rotman's emphasis on integrative learning and skills.

For Rotman, based at the University of Toronto, this means thinking about issues from diverse, shifting angles and framing problems holistically, learning to make decisions based on multiple, often conflicting functional perspectives, and building judgement and intuition into "messy, unstructured situations". We are fortunate to have Rotman dean Roger Martin visiting us in Sydney next month, so we will have a unique opportunity to explore this direction further.

The second aspect is practical skills and how to "close the knowing-doing gap" with creative and innovative thinking. Datar noted the example of the "multi-disciplinary action projects" at the University of Michigan's Ross School, which incorporate experiential learning in sponsored student placements. In the last few years, 600 organisations have sponsored over 1200 such projects. More radically, Stanford's Institute of Design (the "d.school") offers a program of design thinking and prototyping to address open-ended problems, which it calls "creating infectious action".

As IDEO chief Tim Brown recently pointed out, design thinking "taps into capacities we all have but that are overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices... Design thinking relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as being functional, and to express ourselves in media other than words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking, the integrated approach at the core of the design process, provides a third way".

The final aspect of business education for Datar is a sense of identity and self-awareness as a basis for the development of leadership and collaboration. Few business schools do this well, but Datar highlighted the offerings at the highly regarded Center for Creative Leadership at Greensboro, with their key components of personal assessment, challenge and support, and inevitably the well-established program at his own school on leadership and corporate accountability.

How will Australian business schools respond to these findings? Some schools will carry on regardless, as we know. But others will understand the potential for combining their high volume products with high quality and uniqueness, relating to differentiated market segments. The point is that becoming distinctive is not a question of "either-or". This is what design thinking is all about, and why a fundamental rethinking of vision and strategy is such an important challenge for business education.

At UTS, we are fortunate to have the opportunity not only to design our future as a business school, but also to reflect this in the architecture of a new building. Just how fortunate was brought home at the AACSB meeting, where the impact of the financial crisis on North American business school budgets was a particularly painful topic of discussion. One dean reported that not only was his university not planning any more development, but his own rented business school accommodation had to be relinquished with faculty members dispersed around the campus. Ouch!

However, Australia's good fortune, particularly having escaped the worst of the global financial meltdown, should not induce a return to complacency. "The trouble with our times", said the French poet and philosopher Paul Valery, "is that the future is not what it used to be".

Roy Green

Professor Roy Green is dean of the Faculty of Business at the University of Technology Sydney. He recently led Australian participation in a global management practice and productivity study.

Roy Green
3 March 2010

 

 

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