MBAs have a sense of entitlement and weak practical skills.
Schools are responding, according to Chief Executive magazine's July/August 2007 issue. Stanford and Yale have overhauled their curriculums; others are sending students abroad for global experience. "In two or tree years I think we'll see some very interesting changes," said Richard L. Schmalensee, dean emeritus of MIT's Sloan School of Management.
Shortly after R. Glenn Hubbard took over as dean of Columbia Business School in 2004, he made his own executive decision. He devised a new twist on the case study--the teaching format invented by Harvard Business School almost a century ago and used by most B-schools. Hubbard's so-called decision brief offers less information about a situation than the case study, and it doesn't present the solution until students have grappled with the issues on their own. So far, Columbia has produced six briefs that take on of-the-moment business challenges. "We want out students to be used to dealing with incomplete data," Hubbard says. "They should be able to make decisions out of uncertainty."
"Framing problems and finding the data to analyze those problems is a skill that MBAs need and that the classic case doesn't fully exploit," says Michael J. Roberts, the executive director of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard and author of more than 100 HBS case studies.
The first field test for the new teaching technique will be this summer, when the MBAs head out to their internships. At Goldman Sachs, which hires more Columbia interns than any other company, the co-head of campus recruiting, Janet Raiffa, hopes to encounter students who are more independent thinkers.
Source: BusinessWeek, February 4, 2008