B-schools get back to basics

CAMBRIDGE -- As he prepares to retire as dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management this spring, Richard Schmalensee is throwing out a challenge to fellow business school leaders and his yet-to-be-named successor: Come down from the ivory tower.

Schmalensee has been listening to a rising chorus of critics who worry B-schools have grown overly academic and removed from the actual workings of business. Speaking to faculty, staffers, and alumni gathered in the Hotel@MIT for a Sloan retreat last month, he outlined several initiatives -- some already begun, others planned for later this year -- to bring the real world of commerce into the classroom.

One is to have a Sloan professor piggyback on a course taught by retired General Electric Co. chief executive Jack Welch , tying management theory to Welch's perspective on getting things done in a corporate setting. Another is to pair students seeking master's degrees in business administration with coaches from industry.

"We're in beta," Schmalensee said in an interview, borrowing a term used in the high-tech field for the test phase of a product launch. "It's not quite baked yet, but we're running a bunch of experiments. The challenge is to connect what we teach to practice. In management, a lot of what you do is you don't prove a theorem, you exercise a skill."

Sloan's moves are part of a larger reassessment of business education, sparked in part by critics like Henry Mintzberg at McGill University, Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford University, and Warren Bennis at the University of Southern California, all professors of business themselves. While their critiques vary, each questions the relevance of the current MBA curriculums and scientific research focus to the problems graduates will be called upon to solve when they enter business.

"Business schools are on the wrong track," Bennis and James O'Toole , colleagues at USC's Marshall School of Business, wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2005. "Some of the research produced is excellent, but because so little of it is grounded in actual business practice, the focus of graduate business education has become increasingly circumscribed -- and less and less relevant to practitioners."

Since their article appeared, Bennis said, he's been invited to speak on his views at more than half a dozen business school forums in the United States and Canada. "It's caused a very healthy controversy and conversation," he said. Bennis said some of the anxiety prompting B-schools to rethink their approaches stemmed from a dip in applications at some schools and complaints by some employers that MBAs were arriving unprepared for day-to-day management.

Such concerns have even colored the search for new business school deans. "Nowadays, in looking for a dean, people who have real-life business or policy experience are taken more seriously than people with just academic credentials," Bennis said.

Some leading business schools recently have overhauled their curriculums , while not abandoning the academic research that helps them recruit faculty stars. Yale's School of Management has broken down its traditional silos of management, finance, and marketing to reflect the cross-disciplinary nature of the business world. Stanford's Graduate School of Management, meanwhile, has begun tailoring courses to individual students on track for specific jobs or sectors.

Many other schools are beefing up their "hands-on" or "experiential" learning programs, rounding up practitioners as adjunct professors, creating advisory boards of high-powered alumni who can mentor students, and strengthening their ties with employers who can recruit and supply coveted internships.

"I can hardly think of a business school anywhere that isn't doing this sort of thing as a way to be more relevant and to counter some of the criticism," said Tim Westerbeck , managing director of the Chicago consulting firm Lipman Hearne Inc.

Not all business school leaders accept the critiques, however. "We're not in the business of teaching people business practice. We're in the business of teaching people how to think," said Edward Snyder , dean of the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, a top research school. " The research that our faculty does is highly relevant, and there is a high degree of correlation between who are the best researchers and who are the best teachers."

Real world learning is a priority at Boston University's School of Management, where undergraduates draw up business plans, including product prototypes and market research, and MBA students analyze companies through the lenses of operations and finance.

"We teach about the importance of getting dirty, going into the bowels of business," said Louis E. Lataif, the school's dean. But he's skeptical of efforts to connect to practice by tapping CEOs to lecture. "Are students better trained because they hear more war stories?" he asked rhetorically.

The push for experiential learning is one way business schools are seeking to differentiate themselves in a field that has grown substantially over the past half century. After World War II, a report funded by the Ford Foundation faulted the lack of rigor in management education and spurred B-schools to seek academic respectability.

Today, academic research figures prominently in the careers of young business professors, for whom the pursuit of tenure often means publishing narrowly focused articles in scholarly journals.

"We won the last revolution too well," Schmalensee maintained. "In the 1950s, business schools were criticized for being intellectually empty. Schools got that message and became much more rigorous academically. Our challenge now is to not lose the rigor but to advance knowledge in a way that enhances the profession."

Toward that end, in addition to the Welch course and the coaching initiative, Sloan has set up a laboratory for sustainable business, known as S-Lab, to work with companies developing environmentally friendly business models. And it plans to debrief MBA students, as it does managers in its executive education programs, on how they applied their Sloan studies to their work at internships.

Feeding the urgency of such moves are fears that some companies might have second thoughts about hiring freshly minted MBAs at six-figure salaries. "When you hear that McKinsey and Goldman Sachs tell their bright young people not to go back and get MBAs, that's a bad sign," Schmalensee said. "It suggests that the product we're offering is not as well regarded as it might be."

Harvard Business School has escaped the brunt of the criticism because, through its case study teaching method, it has a mechanism to keep in close touch with current business issues,

"We've been grounded in the real world," said W. Carl Kester , the school's deputy dean. "We're doing research on real companies and decisions. We have developed standards that hold up practitioners as one of the constituencies that matter to us."

Harvard, like Sloan and other schools, has brought business leaders into the classroom in the quest for relevancy. It has enlisted more than a dozen former senior executives, such as Raymond V. Gilmartin from Merck & Co. and Stephen Kaufman from Arrow Electronics, as professors of management practice or senior lecturers.

At the same time, "all of us, to varying degrees, are participating in this debate and trying to address it," Kester said.

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.