StarPower and MBA Education

When we started UCLA’s modern approach to management in the early 1970s, the first year was divided into two components: common-knowledge courses and the nucleus. The common-knowledge courses included basic accounting, economics, finance, statistics, human resources, and marketing. These were akin to the colors on an artist’s palette – the building blocks of a managerial art. The creative art was designed into the more experiential components in the nucleus. The first-year nucleus consisted of three quarter courses: the first in individual decision-making, the second in managerial decision-making, and the third in managing complex systems. In the individual decision-making?course – one of the courses I taught in the mid-1970s – we ended with a three-week series of games.?

The first week, we used one of the many technology-based survival games. Teams were given a list of available materials and personnel, and a survival goal. Surviving a plane crash that left the group stranded in the desert, or in a lifeboat, or in remote Alaska, or on the moon, they had to move to a rescue location, taking only the most necessary equipment. While the exercise was really about some of the issues and traps in task-group communications, the MBA students invariably approached it by seeking some engineering or related expertise, thinking that technology had the right and wrong answers to the proper prioritization, and defending their problem solution as the right one in the face of equally viable, creative alternatives proposed by other teams. Students experientially learned that the agreement on a picture of reality helped them set the priorities and communicate their solutions.

Equipped with newly minted belief in their group decision-making?skills, the students approached Exercise Kolomon.[1] This exercise presented a developing country with a relatively uneducated population, minimal infrastructure, substantial but undeveloped natural resources, and a potentially hostile set of geopolitical neighbors. Setting national priorities was the nominal group task: determining allocations to the military, the education sector, nascent industry, and infrastructure projects. In this exercise, students learned that establishing a common picture of reality was a necessary but not sufficient condition for problem solving. They struggled with intractable conflicts until they took the step back to ask about values. Only after seeking a consensus on the?value?issues involved could the group move toward a solution.

Now armed with task-group skills and aware of the need to share not only pictures of reality but basic values as a prelude to problem solving, MBA students entered the third week of exercises. The final exercise, called?Star Power,[2]?sets up a rigged game: a three-tiered, low mobility, hierarchical society in which arbitrary teams traded with other teams. Depending on the arbitrary assignment to a tier, the different teams started with varying levels of initial endowments – conveying a covert and unearned advantage that tended to persist in the trading game. After a number of trading rounds, the team that was ahead got to rewrite the trading rules for the next set of rounds. The sense of entitlement, justified or not, that went with success in the early rounds translated into a new set of rules that would make Machiavellians blush. The rules went from “You must agree to any trade we demand” to “Give us all your coins.” When I, as professor, would confront the winning teams with the obvious greed and short-term thinking inherent in the new rule set, the response, too often, was that I had unfairly tricked them. After they had written the most conspicuously unfair rules imaginable, I was the one who was being unfair. Maybe they were right.

There are two lessons here. The first concerns MBA programs and students, and the second concerns venture capitalists.

First, MBA students come with a sense of entitlement. They’ve succeeded in school, advanced in work, and gained entrance to prestigious MBA programs. Like Lake Woebegone, everyone is above average. I do not deny the accomplishments that have gone into MBA students getting to their current stage. I merely claim that they have to set aside that sense of entitlement to see the game clearly. Mine has not so far been the winning position. Student complaints over the immediate utility of the soft knowledge in process-oriented courses, along with the hegemony of the traditional disciplines, led to the nucleus being trimmed, a quarter at a time, out of existence.

The advocates for each color on the common-knowledge palette would correctly complain that students needed to know more about?red, or students needed to know more about?blue. The need for integrative experiences was replaced with courses in?the?strategic uses of blue, or?engineering applications of red. The problem with MBA program design is analogous to what Collins?and Porras (1994) call the “Tyranny of the OR.” It was either more discipline-based courses OR more courses translating disciplinary knowledge into managerial art. The challenge, correspondingly, is to embrace the “Genius of the AND.” How can we emphasize both disciplinary depth and trans-disciplinary artistry? While I do not claim to know how to resolve this dilemma for our MBA program in general, I do believe that new ventures pose fundamentally cross-disciplinary problems for managers. Immersing students in strategic problem solving for new ventures requires both disciplinary depth AND integration of skills.?

One of the fundamental problems in tying technological lessons to their application is in recognizing how an ambiguous situation can be transformed into a structured one to which a known technology can be applied. In my early decades of teaching statistics to MBA students, I was continually disappointed at how they could easily answer the end-of-the-chapter exercises but fail essentially the same questions on a final exam. When they knew a problem called for a chapter-six solution, they were fine. When they had to determine which technique from their palette fit the situation best, the task was much more difficult. Trying to address the difficulties faced by new ventures forces MBA students to practice precisely the skills they will face most in their managerial careers. If the time devoted to MBA studies is going to add value to a career, then MBAs must figure out how to apply techniques they learned to somewhat ambiguous situations.?

[1]I apologize to the authors, but I have no reference for this management game.

[2]?The copy I have of the?Star Power?provides no insight into authorship. I hope someone is glad that the memory of the game has not been lost, even if the authorship has.