Yale SoM featured in Wall Street Journal

On Tuesday, July 11, The Yale School of Management was highlighted in The Wall Street Journal. The following MBA Track article by Ronald Alsop appeared.

M.B.A. Programs Blend Disciplines To Yield Big Picture

Integrated...cross-functional...multidisciplinary. Those are the popular buzzwords these days for how some academics and corporate recruiters believe schools should redesign their M.B.A. curriculum.

In short, it's all about breaking out of so-called academic "silos" like finance, accounting, marketing and operations, and teaching students to take the big-picture view of how those functions blend together in business. Critics of M.B.A. programs complain that graduates too often struggle to solve complex, ambiguous problems that cut across different business units.

"Academic silos get in the way of what organizations want from their leaders today," says Joel Podolny, who was appointed dean of the Yale School of Management last year. "Recruiters and CEOs tell me they need people who can frame a problem and solve it by working across boundaries and drawing resources from different parts of the company."

Dr. Podolny has responded swiftly to concerns about academic "balkanization" with an ambitious transformation of Yale's M.B.A. curriculum. Instead of the traditional compartmentalized courses, students this fall will learn the basics from the viewpoints of a company's external stakeholders and internal constituents. These "organizational perspectives" courses will include customer, competitor, investor, employee, innovator, the state and society, the "operations engine," and the sourcing and managing of funds.

The customer perspective class, for example, will go well beyond marketing to touch on psychology, sociology, economics, operations, accounting, organizational behavior and information technology.

Other schools are taking steps toward a more integrated curriculum, too, but not on the scale of Yale's bold revision. Some are creating a single capstone course that attempts to pull everything together near the end of the M.B.A. program. In a twist on that approach, Georgia State University offers a new introductory "cornerstone" course -- "Managing in the Global Economy" -- that shows the complexity of international business and the way corporate functions interrelate.

The University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business is encouraging professors to collaborate more in its new full-time M.B.A. curriculum. Professors of marketing and economics might teach together now, or the same case study might be discussed simultaneously in finance, marketing and ethics classes. "Professors sometimes convey that their course is the be-all and end-all of business, but we want students to see the interconnections and not end up with one-track minds," says Ravi Kumar, vice dean and co-chairman of the curriculum innovation committee. To revitalize its executive M.B.A. program last year, Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland restructured classes by themes -- the language of business, stakeholder management, global business, processes and systems, and execution. "Executives don't face academic disciplines," says Betty Vandenbosch, associate dean. "They face problems."

Such a major curriculum overhaul is usually met with some resistance. Students worry that they won't learn basic business skills in an integrated curriculum and some fear that recruiters might view it as an incomplete education. The biggest hurdle, though, is usually the faculty. Some professors are reluctant to teach outside their comfort zone or to share their classrooms for team teaching with other faculty.

But so far, there seems to be unusually solid support for Yale's M.B.A. facelift. Dean Podolny believes the curriculum change has advanced so quickly because Yale's M.B.A. program is relatively small and nimble (425 students) and its faculty already tended to work well across disciplines. Indeed, after overcoming some initial reservations, the faculty unanimously approved the new curriculum.

Professors aren't getting much rest this summer as they race to finish the curriculum by August. Senior faculty meet at least weekly to hash out course details and craft new case studies and other teaching materials. "This change is requiring the faculty to stretch, but it's incredibly exciting working around the clock on it," says Jonathan Feinstein, an economics professor. "In my 20 years in business schools, I've never experienced a curriculum development like this."

Yale is prepared to deal with the inevitable skeptics. It plans to administer a proficiency test to compare the basic business knowledge of students from both the old course structure and the new curriculum. "This will address any concerns about a loss of rigor when what used to be taught in a core finance class now shows up in several different classes," says Jake Thomas, an accounting and finance professor and head of the curriculum committee. "It will help convince other people -- and even ourselves -- that the new curriculum is working."

Already, Yale has tried to reassure incoming students who were anxious about the course redesign and feared there could be kinks in the system at first. "New students felt better when they learned that the school's all-star faculty would be teaching the first-year curriculum where the changes are most dramatic," says Spencer Hutchins, who served on the curriculum reform committee and will be a second-year M.B.A. student this fall.

Rather than discourage students, Yale believes the refashioned curriculum is at least partially responsible for a big jump in the number of applicants who accepted admission offers this year. "A lot of us were joking that if business school weren't so expensive, we'd like to start over and try the new first-year curriculum ourselves," Mr. Hutchins says.