3 Reasons Business School is like the Business World

I guest lectured three “Management 101” classes last week and came up with three areas where lessons from Wharton might have something to say about business strategy more generally.

First, the same two forces affecting business are really important at a business school like Wharton – technology and globalization.

We are a major player in online education for several reasons. We want students all around the world to be able to get a taste of Wharton. We want to experiment in online pedagogy in ways that will help us improve tech-enabled education on campus. And if we can find great students online who otherwise wouldn’t know about Wharton and whom we wouldn’t otherwise know about, all the better.

Our student body is global. So is our faculty; and so is our curriculum. But in the 21st century, while the world will continue to come to the US, America will need to go to the world too. That is why we opened the Penn Wharton China Center in Beijing last month, and have partnerships with INSEAD, and helped found business schools in India, Singapore and Thailand. It’s not enough to say we are global, we must be in the global space. 

Second, big is not necessarily bad. Big can be nimble. Wharton is more a mini university than a pure play business school. We do everything from teaching undergraduates to cutting edge research, not to mention full time and executive MBAs and executive education. Our academic departments include public policy, healthcare, statistics and legal studies in addition to all business school staples.

Why violate the strategy mantra “focus on core competencies?” At a time when everyone is concerned about where higher education might be headed, Wharton is making (high quality) bets in lots of domains. Under uncertainty, diversification seems a pretty smart move to us.

Finally, while strategy tends to be thought about primarily in terms of analysis and formulating ideas, execution is at least as important. What’s the value of a great idea if it is never put into practice? Not much.

That is why I spend so much of my time talking to Wharton’s myriad stakeholders—students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends. The more ideas in the strategy hopper, the better. The more diverse these ideas, the better.

But consultation is crucial when it comes to execution. The more people feel they are involved in making a decision, the more likely they are to help in its execution. Consultation generates buy in, even if the responsibility for making a decision ultimately rests with a single person or a small leadership group.

Maybe the business school world isn’t so different from the world of business after all?

Geoffrey Garrett is Dean, Reliance Professor of Management and Private Enterprise, and Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Follow Geoff on Twitter.