On the Record: Robert Joss
It may not be broken, but it's still worth fixing. That is how Robert Joss, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, views its M.B.A. curriculum, which will be overhauled by next fall. Stanford joins a small group of high-profile business schools, including Yale and the University of Southern California, that are revamping their programs. Billed as new models for M.B.A. training, these new curricula move the emphasis away from "silo" courses like accounting and finance to more-personalized, multidisciplinary classes that capture the complexity of real-world management. Joss talked with Senior Editor Justin Ewers.
Why are so many schools tweaking their M.B.A. programs?
We've done such a good job in the last 50 years of teaching students how to think and analyze-at the functional pieces of management: accounting, finance, marketing. But it's more than the sum of the parts; you've got to integrate all that. We've got to teach them how to think and act. Once you've done the analysis, what do you do?
Some people think B-school is mostly about networking and playing golf.
That's just a lot of bunk. I'm convinced there is such an important body of knowledge that we call management. It's founded in the social sciences, economics-how markets function, how firms behave, how you make money or lose money, how people function both individually and in groups and teams. An M.B.A. gives you a way of thinking.
Corporate recruiters say M.B.A.'s are better at analytics than with "soft" skills like leadership and communication.
I think that's true of all graduate students. I think that's true of engineers. That's true of scientists. That's academia, that's our strong suit, imparting knowledge to young people. The soft skills are really hard.
Can something like leadership be taught?
Clearly, it can be learned. Now, that learning is a combination of knowledge, practice, and self-reflection. Exactly when to deliver the knowledge and when to deliver the practice-I don't think anyone knows the answer to that. I'm still of a view that we can really work on the knowledge part and make sure they leave with a commitment to learning the practice part.
So what will actually change in terms of Stanford courses?
The traditional thing was to give everybody the core first-accounting, marketing, finance-which people sweated through in varying degrees of pain and pleasure. Increasingly, we've asked ourselves, are we not better off setting some context for them right at the beginning: Here's what management's all about.
And that means a new core?
There will be an opening core that's common to everybody, five courses in strategic leadership, global business, groups and teams, managerial finance, and critical and analytical thinking. Then they go into their choice of electives.
What will happen to the old core classes?
People have got to understand the core basics. God knows, we've learned from WorldCom and all these others, you can't say, 'Well, I didn't understand the accounting.' We will have two or three offerings in each subject.
It still sounds difficult.
Obviously, the changes are motivated by our views of how best to serve the next generations of students. You're always kind of projecting that and making bets on the best way to do it. The outcome of your efforts is not known for the next 20 years. It's a pretty humbling business.
This story appears in the October 2, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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