Late last month, the Yale School of Management (SOM) invited administrators and deans from business schools around the globe to a two-day symposium on the new Yale Integrated Management Curriculum, which was introduced in the 2006-2007 school year.
“We believe the curriculum the faculty at SOM developed is quite extraordinary in advancing business education,” said Linda Lorimer, vice president and secretary of Yale, in her welcome address. Rather than breaking management concepts out into separate subject-specific courses like finance of accounting, the new curriculum is an attempt to teach management in a more integrated way – one that mirrors the ways in which managers are called on to perform in the business world.
According to Yale SOM Dean Joel Podolny, the new curriculum is designed to make management education more dynamic and relevant than the traditional MBA, which was developed at a time when the business world was broken down by distinct functional disciplines that didn’t mix.
“What happened sometime in the 1970s and 1980s was that, as globalization increased, corporations became flatter and broader, and there were new demands on managers to work across functions,” Podolny said. “The problem was management education didn’t adjust to the new reality.”
This failure to adjust has caused some to call the value of an MBA into question. “There’s some good evidence that it’s not clear whether the MBA degree adds a lot of value beyond it being a signaling device,” said symposium attendee Jitendra Singh of the Nanyang Business School in Singapore. Singh was also formerly a professor at the Wharton School. “The value of content must be reconsidered,” he continued. “Curriculum reform is an excellent way to think about what value we’re actually creating.”
The global draw of the symposium indicates that interest in curriculum reform is high throughout the world. Attendees included visitors from India, China, Brazil, Singapore, Mexico and Canada, among other nations.
The two-day event was divided into six in-depth sessions, in which SOM faculty explained the eight Organizational Perspectives that form the core curriculum, what makes up a “Yale SOM Case,” the Leadership Development Program and International Experience component, and the Integrated Leadership Perspective, which is designed to bring together all of the components of the core curriculum at the conclusion of the first year.
Despite high interest in Yale’s approach to redefining management education, attendees nonetheless had pointed questions about potential pitfalls. “How do you answer skeptics who say your way dilutes the absorption of hard skills?” asked Carla Sayegh ’03 of the American University of Beirut.
Podolny acknowledged that this was a question he is frequently asked. But SOM tested the final class under the old curriculum and the first class under the new one and found no statistical difference on the hard skills, he said. “We find that if you teach in context, which is crucial to the new curriculum, students retain more knowledge.”
At the symposium’s conclusion, Podolny proposed that the conversations begun there be continued going forward – perhaps at future meetings or in a virtual forum. Singh of the Nanyang Business School agreed. “With dialogue among the different parties around the world, we might just see an emerging curriculum that could influence business schools worldwide.”
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