ARTICLE 3 PART 2 EVALUATING NEW AND INNOVATIVE MODELS OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION - sudhanshu

ARTICLE 3 PART 2

EVALUATING NEW AND INNOVATIVE MODELS OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION

THE MINTZBERG IMPM (INTERNATIONAL MASTER’S PROGRAM IN PRACTISING MANAGEMENT) - MODEL: A PRACTISING MANAGER’S MODEL

Mintzberg’s book outlines in depth his criticism of MBA programmes, which he regards as far too analytic in orientation and isolated from the context and practice of management. For Mintzberg management is an art and a practice but not a science. Management is a blend of experience, insight and analysis. It is a practice requiring both craft and experience mixed with careful vision and insight and enriched by appropriate analysis of business decisions for decision making.

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This IMPM model, developed in partnership with Lancaster University Management School in the UK and other international institutions, such as McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and IIM in Bangalore, India, is his attempt to put his ideas in practice.

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Framed around the concept of experienced managers as students, he developed seven tenets by which management education (ME) should be judged …..

Tenet 1: ME should be restricted to practising managers selected on the basis of performance.

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Tenet 2: ME and practice should be concurrent and integrated.

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Tenet 3: ME should leverage work and life experience.

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Tenet 4: The key to learning is thoughtful reflection.

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Tenet 5: ME should result in organizational development.

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Tenet 6: ME must be an interactive process.

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Tenet 7: Every aspect of ME must facilitate learning.

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What unites these seven tenets is the proposition that management is a practice that has to be appreciated through experience in context. Professors, in this model, are expected to spend less time lecturing and more time facilitating appropriate discussion about management issues and encouraging students to engage in ‘experienced reflection’, so that they draw closely on their own experiences in class and group discussions.

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In addition, the content of the IMPM involves the study of five cross-cutting, interdisciplinary themes unlike the conventional functional disciplinary MBA model with its ‘silos’ of marketing, operations, finance and so on that involves little or no thematic integration.

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These five themes of the IMPM constitute the five frames, or themes, of the managerial mind – five mindsets – which are linked in the design in a holistic fashion. The five themes are:

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?? Managing self: the reflective mindset

(involving such topics as the nature of managerial work, leadership, emotional intelligence and ethics);

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?? Managing relationships: the collaborative mindset

(strategic alliances, teams, knowledge management and conflict management);

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?? Managing organisations: the analytic mindset

(social capital, political dimensions of organisational analysis, complexity theory and approaches to decision making);

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?? Managing context: the worldly mindset

(looking outward, globalisation, managing conglomerates and international cultural dimensions);

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?? Managing change: the action mindset

(macro- and micro-change, personal change, managing change and managing growth).

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Together these five themes address the practice of managing in a holistic way interspersed with modules on operational excellence and value creation. The IMPM uses design principles of interactive learning, integrated learning, learning from experience, managerial experience and cross-disciplinary perspectives to understand and develop the process of managing. It is unique in its design and unlike the structure of any existing MBA programme. It treats management as a practical act and stresses the linkage between education and practice.

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THE HAAS/BERKELEY DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES MODEL

This model (Lyons, 2012), anchored by Rich Lyons, Dean of Haas, University of California, Berkeley, in the US, proposes that business schools must examine their own cultures, frame their own goals and evolve their unique pathways in order to develop the innovative business leaders of the future.

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The overarching intent of the Haas MBA model is to build innovative business leaders by moving from an implicit culture to an explicit culture; from a co-ordinated curriculum to a capabilities-integrated curriculum and from multiple, independent experiential learning programmes to an integrated experiential learning curriculum.

The cultural change involved four elements:

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Questioning the status quo: for example, by advocating bold business ideas and challenging convention

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Confidence without attitude: for example, making analysis- and evidence- based decisions involving confidence, trust and humility;

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Students always; for example, with students exhibiting a constant curiosity for personal and lifelong learning;

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Beyond yourself: for example, through leading firms by stressing larger longer-term interests in an ethical and responsible fashion.

The culture is, in essence, one of integrity and respect and is embedded throughout the processes of student admissions and orientation and the design of the curriculum.

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The switch to a capabilities-integrated curriculum required the clear identification by faculty, students and alumni of the dynamic capabilities of the innovative leader. These capabilities, ten in number, are categorised under the following three clusters.

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Defining opportunities

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Problem framing, opportunity recognition, and experimentation;

Making choices

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Revenue model identification, valuation of ideas, and risk detection;

Building organisational capacity

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Influence without authority, managing ambiguity and conflict, team creativity, and adaptive governance.

The choice of these capabilities rests on two specific criteria. First, they need to be grounded in the social sciences and be research- based. Second, they need to be demanded by recruiters and others in the marketplace.

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The culture and the capabilities are then woven into a new MBA core programme with three new or revised courses (out of twelve in total), entitled ‘Leading People’, ‘Problem Finding/Problem Solving’ and ‘Leadership Communication’.

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The third element of the model is that the core has to be implemented, with the electives, in an integrated fashion. Consequently, students are required to choose one of a range of nine experiential learning programmes including Haas@Work – involving a student work team evaluating a business problem with a major firm or an entrepreneurship project in which real business solutions and business plans are developed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

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The overall aims of the model are to provide the basic foundations from which new leaders will emerge who have the courage, characteristics and skills – the dynamic capabilities that a manager must have – to redefine how management takes place in business, government and non-government organisations. Unlike the Mintzberg programme, it is anchored in a research-based, evidence-based social science frame- work alongside a clear vision about developing ethical, practical, experiential and integrative skills in potential managerial recruits. This design required strong buy-in, clear identification of managerial dynamic capabilities, and faculty involvement during the entire change process.

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THE ROTMAN DESIGN THINKING MODEL

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Roger Martin (2009), Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada, is a management thinker who advocates a focus on design thinking in management education. He believes that ‘the problem with MBA education is structural, and it runs across three dimensions: where it should be deep, it is shallow; where it should be broad, it is narrow; and where it should be dynamic, it is static’ (Martin, 2010). His solution is to encourage an MBA design, the 3D MBA, which is deep, broad and dynamic and encompasses the development of holistic thinkers who will be critical and creative. These thinkers make moral and ethical decisions following the ideals of a ‘liberal arts’ style MBA.

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The goals of the Rotman 3D MBA are depth, breadth and dynamism and we examine each in turn.

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First, the idea of ‘going deep’ is to force the students ‘to thoroughly understand the logic structures, assumptions and limitations of the models we teach, even if they don’t like it very much’. This is done through two courses at the outset of the MBA programme entitled ‘Foundations of Integrative Thinking’ and the ‘Integrative Thinking’ practicum. Together, these courses attempt to uncover the underlying logic structure of business models and suggest appropriate revisions or re-engineering of these models. The other aim is to show how models from different areas, such as finance, operations and marketing, should be framed as more integrated business models to address real-life practical business problems. In other words, disciplinary models cannot be seen in isolation from the business problems they seek to solve.

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Second, the idea of ‘embracing breadth’ is to reinforce the under- standing that most business problems are ‘messy’ and beset by ambiguity, complexity and often multiple factors. As a consequence, students must be exposed to a broad suite of models, beyond the standard business disciplines. For example, Rotman has a number of institutes in areas such as prosperity, corporate citizenship and health strategy that expose students to more complex issues. These issues broaden the nature of the academic dialogue so that a range of different viewpoints and a multi-disciplinary set of perspectives and lenses are brought to bear on their resolution.

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Third, the idea of ‘getting dynamic’ is to encourage the creation and development of new and better models for attacking business and management models. Rotman achieves this through a set of electives engineered by the design initiative DesignWorks and the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking. The philosophy is that students are taught several fundamental principles. These include:

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?? To be innovative, an open and exploratory mindset is critical.

?? to be action-focused and human focused;

?? to remember that where people are involved design is applicable for business (both B2B and B2C). (Leung, Director of DesignWorks)

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In summary, the Martin philosophy is to embrace design principles in management education and develop skills in addressing complex management decisions from a broad, critical and dynamic viewpoint.

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IDEAS FROM HIGHLY RANKED SCHOOLS:

???? STANFORD, YALE AND ?PROGRAMME FOR A GLOBAL CURRICULUM

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As noted already, Joel Podolny, the former dean at Yale in the US, has asserted in a well-cited Harvard Business Review article that unless America’s business schools make radical changes, society will become convinced that MBAs work to serve only their own selfish interests. He argues that for business schools to regain society’s trust they must, first, stop competing on rankings and must state clearly that ‘money gain’ is not the only reason to get an MBA. Second, they must withdraw degrees from former students found guilty of violating professional ethical and moral codes of conduct. Third, business school courses must be better integrated across a mix of academic disciplines. Fourth, they must appoint cross-faculty teaching teams – balancing ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ disciplines – to ensure that analytic approaches and models are not value-free. Fifth, they must encourage more eclectic and applied research.

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As a consequence, Yale restructured its curriculum to break out of traditional ‘silo’ teaching based on business disciplines such as finance and marketing to develop a set of courses designed around the different organisational perspectives of customers, competitors, investors and society. This means that there is no such thing as a marketing problem in isolation. Rather, it is typically a much richer business or management problem. Therefore, it also added a course in problem framing that aims to develop critical perspectives about problem assumptions and business models and, thus, encourages students to view management problems using multiple disciplinary lenses and lessons learned from business history.

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Similarly, under the leadership of Dean Garth Saloner, the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in the US has completely restructured its educational process so that it now emphasises multi-disciplinary traditions and increased understanding of cultural and global contexts.

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Four key elements characterise this new model: a highly personalised programme; a deeper, more engaging intellectual experience; a more global curriculum; and an expanded vision of leadership and communication development, integrating strategy with leadership development and implementation.

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A common programme in the first quarter includes courses designed to build an integrated understanding of management: namely, teams and organisational behaviour, strategic leadership, managerial finance and the global context of management. A second aim is to get students – again in the first quarter – to examine the philosophical issues of management through a ‘Critical Analytical Thinking’ course involving critical evaluation of such issues as when markets work well and when they do not.

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The overarching aim of the new programme, personalised to students, is to develop managers who not only think critically and analytically about important management problems but also make decisions responsibly and with a strong set of compassionate, ethical and moral values.

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Although the aims of the Yale and Stanford programmes are different, they share some common goals that are seen in undergraduate ‘liberal arts’ programmes:? namely, critical thinking, multi-disciplinary approaches, global and cultural intelligence, a focus on leadership, ethics and social responsibility, and understanding and learning the lessons from business history.

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In a ?article by Stopford and Jain, reporting on the curriculum concerns of a consortium of high-ranking business schools from across the world, they present a globally oriented curriculum that mirrors some of the Yale/Stanford concerns. They report four elements: namely, insight into business functions in an integrated fashion; global perspectives including culture, history, political and economic issues; skills desired by employers including multi-culturalism, communication, leadership, creative thinking, entrepreneurship, innovation and strategic change; present-day issues including emerging technologies, sustainability, and emerging markets.

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Other elite schools, however, such as Chicago/Booth have retained their strong values and their espoused culture of a discipline-focused and strong social science-based scientific foundation. Chicago’s reputation in the business school field is at least in part a function of its academic strength and its production of a large number of Nobel Laureates in economics. It believes that business schools should focus on knowledge and theory development.

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the open university ‘blended learning’ model

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The UK’s Open University (OU) has been a pioneer in educational innovations in distance learning. James Fleck, a recent dean of the OU Business School (OUBS), points out that there have been two main models of distance learning: the early distributed learning model and the more recent evolutionary model, essentially a practice-based model. The early model involved the construction and use of high-quality distributed learning materials with structured tutorials and some face-to-face teaching while the second is an import- ant development of the early model into a practice-based model.

Thomas and Thomas discuss each of these models as follows.

The early distributed learning model

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As Fleck points out, this consists of four main elements to achieve distributed learning with structured materials, tutorials and some face-to-face teaching. The first extremely important element involves the design and construction of the university-owned curriculum by a dedicated core faculty team, who produce the teaching materials, textbooks, DVDs and so on that are distributed to students. This is an extremely expensive curriculum investment exercise, costing around $1 million to $2 million per course, but critically import- ant as it is the key to a set of high-quality, rigorous and well-designed courses.

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The second element requires face-to-face tutorials (of around twenty students) managed by adjunct faculty overseen by OU core faculty. Tutorials are designed to provide insights, oversee student interactions and explain the distributed course materials.

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The third element builds on the second, and leverages student learning by linking workplace experiences to course materials.

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Finally, all three elements depend upon the provision of a robust and flexible IT platform that can manage the learning requirements of large numbers of students across national borders as well as within the UK.

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The practice-based model

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The second model has been developed strongly over the past five to ten years. It is a practice-based model that represents a significant evolution of the basic model. It retains the process of producing and updating core materials by the full-time OU faculty but tutorials now increasingly focus on the world of management practice. They involve the careful design of practice-based experiences and professional practices in the classroom. The focus is on sharing learning experiences across students and making a virtue of action learning and student experience. The emphasis is clearly on student-centred learning. But it involves an important design challenge in understanding how students learn from practical experiences. This practice-based model also requires an extensive upgrading of the IT platform.

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While the OU has always been seen as a pioneer and has clearly been an innovator in technology and management, its distance/online learning model has attracted many entrants to the business school ‘industry’ and a range of competitors offering online management education. Iniguez ably catalogues the nature and character of the ‘industry’ entrants. The early entrants (such as U-NEXT) simply developed a basic online delivery model. The later entrants, such as the Apollo Group (University of Phoenix), the DeVry group and Hult International Business School (the former Arthur D. Little Institute), mixed the online model with a tutorial and feedback process.

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These later entrants are generally for-profit providers that attempt to achieve a low-cost product of good quality. They do not, however, always possess the depth of faculty resources of a publicly funded school such as the OU. And schools such as Indiana and North Carolina in the US and Warwick and Henley in the UK can afford to invest more core ‘cutting-edge’ faculty resources in course design and updating content.

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An interesting question for all these schools is whether the major accreditation agencies will accredit such blended learning models. To date, the OUBS has been accredited by both AACSB and EFMD, while others such as Hult and Phoenix will probably seek accreditation in due course but may lack the core faculty resources and research focus typically needed to achieve that goal.

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However, some schools, such as the Lorange Institute in Switzerland, have chosen not to employ any full-time faculty of their own but instead have chosen to create a stable network of part-time faculty, fully committed to research and research-based teaching. EFMD (EPAS) and AMBA have already accredited the Lorange Institute.

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Competition of this kind has certainly provided the stimulus for new innovations and ideas, particularly in blended learning models. In the next section we will focus particularly on the OU and Instituto de Empresa (IE) in Madrid, Spain, of the MBA programme ‘blended learning’ variants.

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?? ‘Blended learning’ and learning communities: how to incorporate?????? new social and digital media

Both the OU and IE Madrid have talked about ‘learning communities’ in their future blended learning designs. Learning communities are sometimes called ‘communities of practice’ ?in the information systems/knowledge management literature.

Fleck ?outlines the key elements of his learning community model. This stresses the importance of capturing the essence of student-based learning and networking communities as the focal element in the delivery of a blended learning programme. Such a programme, however, must be built around a high-quality and innovative curriculum designed by core faculty. The key elements are:

?? creation of a learning community;

?? a process orientation;

?? use of web resources/TV programmes;

?? student-driven learning;

?? communication via web and mobile;

?? use of social/digital media;

?? face-to-face residential schools for networking.

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It is clear that this is a strong reinforcement of the practice-/student- centred model. The nature and design of the learning community is still, however, a very fluid element alongside the problem of how to leverage the value of web and social and digital media in building such a community.

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Iniguez, in his recent book The Learning Curve, outlines the philosophy of the blended learning model used at IE (where he is the dean). He argues that managers live blended lives in which their careers, and required skills, regularly change.

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THE FOCUSED INNOVATION MODEL: UC SAN DIEGO

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Bob Sullivan, the dean at the new business school at the University of California, San Diego, in the US, focuses particularly on the role of innovation in business schools. Sullivan recently chaired the committee that produced the influential AACSB report Business Schools on an Innovation Mission. He argues that innovation’s impact on business and society must be reflected in the dynamic capabilities of business schools. Drawing on broad definitions of innovation, he stresses the need for a focus on innovatory processes in business schools to drive the change agenda. Such innovatory processes should then lead to a renewed focus on, for example, teaching and research in areas such as management and leadership.

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One of Sullivan’s colleagues at UC San Diego, Vish Krishnan (Bisoux, 2011: 26) suggests that innovation is a discipline in itself. He points out that in the first year of the MBA programme there is a three-course, year-long sequence that runs in parallel with the other basic core courses. In this sequence, the first course covers methods of ‘ideation’ (idea generation), research and development, and prototyping. In the next two courses, student teams each develop an idea and write a business plan. Throughout the sequence, students are guided by faculty, practitioners and venture capitalists.

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The underlying logic of such an innovation-based MBA is the integration of technology and management skills. It offers a problem- solving orientation involving the combination and application of multiple sources of knowledge. It also emphasises the viewpoint that pluralistic and interdisciplinary thinking leads to creative approaches and solutions to problems. Managing in such environments involves different organisational forms such as network organisations and virtual teams linking complex technologies, continual innovation, and intellectual diversity in the skill and talent base.

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The topics stressed in such an innovation-type MBA include entrepreneurship, innovation, globalisation, leadership and technology. Business areas studied might be approaches to innovation in such industry environments as information and communication technologies, biotech, healthcare, knowledge-based services and sustainable/ environmental technologies.

Clearly, the San Diego area, as well as Silicon Valley in general, is a technology ‘hot spot’. Many possible linkages between MBA students and new knowledge-based start-ups involving experiential and experimental learning communities are readily available. These provide the living laboratories and internships that create the applied, practical context for the MBA programme.

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THE STARKEY KNOWLEDGE MODEL

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Professor Ken Starkey of Nottingham Business School in the UK has been an important scholar, and critic, in the field of management education for the past decade. His influential book The Business School and the Bottom Line (Starkey and Tiratsoo,) argues that business schools should play a growing and influential role in developing knowledge as a reflective and reflexive site for inquiry about business and management. In the knowledge society, therefore, the business school has a big role to play, particularly in championing new research strategies involving practice-engaged scholarship – the co-production of knowledge – that breaks down the barriers between theory and practice and between rigour and relevance.

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Starkey views the business school as a knowledge space in which different stakeholders in management education and different disciplines can interact and learn from each other. For example, this would facilitate scientific and policy debates about business and management and allow greater public awareness of key issues to be created. This knowledge might, in turn, lead to worthwhile improvements in business and management practice. Indeed, Starkey (in Star- key and Tempest) quotes the eminent organisational scholar James March as reinforcing the role of the business school as a knowledge space in the following manner: a key role of the business school ‘is not in trying to identify factors affecting organisational performance, or in trying to develop managerial technology. It is in raising fundamental issues and advancing knowledge about funda- mental processes affecting management.’

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In summary, Starkey’s view is that the business school must pursue a fourfold knowledge strategy – knowledge for management, knowledge for society, knowledge about management and knowledge about society. His link between knowledge, management and society is a theme evident in other models such as the focused ‘innovation’ and 50t20 models discussed earlier.

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THE NETWORK MODEL OF LORANGE

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As we have noted in this discussion of new models, the Lorange model outlined in Chapter 3 is only one of several alternatives for developing business schools.

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The Lorange Institute of Business Zurich argues that it is following an innovative approach aimed at developing a revised curriculum based on strong modularisation. (Many modules are taught over weekends to make it easier for participants to work.) The focus has been on developing Executive Master of Science specialisations (such as Modern Finance, Modern Marketing, Leadership, and Management in Cycles – such as in shipping), which can then be expanded into an Executive MBA.

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In addition, many modules are offered jointly for executives and masters’ students. Faculty have been recruited from all over the world, not only those that are leading experts on particular topics but also leading practitioners with unique backgrounds and expertise. The latter group primarily teaches shorter, two-day modules.

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The school is now working hard on marketing. It takes time to make the marketplace aware of new types of offerings. And reputation based on quality is established over time and thus does not necessarily go together with intensive innovation.

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A further challenge is administrative organisation. Paradoxically, this may represent the greatest challenge. Peter Lorange argues that you can have a reasonably good idea of how to put together programmes based on emerging disciplines and which professors to involve. One can also broadly recognise what is needed when it comes to marketing, based on informing and convincing participants that they are paying for value. But to find effective new team members of such a future-focused organisation might be a more open-ended and, frankly, harder task.

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Four things seem clear, however.

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1.????? A website and its related technology offer unique additional opportunities for communicating with the world and for bonding with prospective and present participants.

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2.????? Co-ordination across modules and across offerings will be key.

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3.????? A major problem with a franchising-based network would be that the franchise-holder might be seen as rather dominant, even ‘imperialistic’.

FIGURE 2 A global balanced network

4.????? Figure 2 indicates how a better ‘intelligent’ network might work. Each of the participating schools would focus on a topic that would represent a natural source of specialisation given its local environment.

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For instance, a Brazilian school might focus on the young, computer-based consumer, a Middle East school on family business, a Nordic school on entrepreneurship and a Swiss school on finance. Each of these schools would provide a programme on its particular topic of excellence – say, through a two-day module.

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One factor that slows innovation is finance. Innovation and change cost money. The established business schools would not be likely candidates to spend financial resources on uncertain, innovative experiments.

sudhanshu

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