Five years is a very long time in the world of business schools. The march of technology and the globalisation of the management curriculum look set to alter completely the monolithic institutions that have characterised the business school for the past century.
The growth of the US institutions, which has characterised much of business school activity for the past five years, will level off, says Thomas Gerrity, dean of the Wharton school at the university of Pennsylvania. He believes future growth will be in European schools, on the one hand, and schools in Asia and South America on the other.
All the big schools in the US are looking to become more international, in terms of faculty, student intake and liaisons. Yet they are doing so with differing degrees of success, according to George Bain, retiring principal of London business school. I speak as a boy from the Canadian prairies. If youre sitting in the middle of the Canadian or American prairies then it is very difficult to internationalise, he says. If youre in the middle of London its much easier.
If the student intake is international, members of the faculty, too, have to have an international background, and the curriculum for many schools has to be re-written, argues Prof Bain. Schools have tended to rely on what Harvard did with a bit of-local colour thrown in. But it is not enough to be American, Anglo-American or Franco-American. That is not to be international.
One of the biggest pushes towards globalisation will be the introduction of a range of technologies to help business schools communicate with each other, with students and with numerous other organisations publishers, financial institutions, even consultancy firms. At the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in Canada video-conferencing allows students to study at seven sites across the country. And the Fuqua school at Duke university, in the US, runs a similar executive MBA course across national as well as state boundaries.
Post-graduate students at the Amos tuck school of management in the US, HEC school of management in France and Oxfords Templeton college in the UK are using video links to share research information. Eventually, the schools envisage that classes could be taught jointly over the network.
While some business school deans such as Roy Herberger of the Thunder-bird school in Arizona believe that technology will be the biggest force in shaping the schools of the future others, such as Prof Bain, believe it will be simply a supporting element. Technology can free up space in the curriculum. You could put basic accounting on a CD, for example, rather than teach it in the classroom, says Prof Bain.
The growth in demand for places at the top business schools at Columbia, for example, there were 2,888 applicants for the MBA programme in 1991, 6,011 applicants in 1997 has seen the more specialist business schools broaden their focus. Schools that spurned executive education courses as being insufficiently academic a few years ago, such as Stanford and the Stern school at New York university, are now jumping on the bandwagon, and shorter courses will inevitably be one of the biggest areas of growth over the next decade.
These days, many schools that formerly did not have a commitment to high levels of academic research, such as Insead, in Fontainbleau, are moving into the area. Such changes in direction are leading to greater duplication as schools begin to encroach on each others traditional territories.
Most of the big business schools are looking increasingly similar in terms of the activities they carry out, the courses they offer and the curriculum. So much so, argues Meyer Feldberg, dean at Columbia business school, in New York, that schools now have to carve out their own niche in the marketplace and develop their own unique selling point.
Over the last decade the intellectual quality of the students in the top 10 to 12 schools is beyond question. But every school is different, says Prof Feldberg. A school in a small tight-knit community, where all students live on campus, will produce a very different culture from Prof Feldbergs Columbia. Running a school in Manhattan is different from running a school in Evanston on Ann Arbor, he concludes.
The three determining factors are staff, students and location says Prof Bain. He equates the curriculum to a piece of music Beethovens fifth symphony and the business schools to individual orchestras. The question is, how do you play Beethovens fifth and get it to sound different? he says.
Business schools are not only becoming more similar in the courses they offer but also in the way they offer them. Throughout the top-notch schools there has been a departure from teaching subjects in isolation marketing, logistics, accounting, for example. In a move that reflects that change in management generally, with the introduction of, say, cross-functional teams, subjects have been integrated.
Instead of learning how to add up the books, the emphasis now is on finding solution to particular business problems. Integration has been led by the big schools such as Wharton and Harvard in the US, which re-engineered their flagship MBA programmes earlier this decade.
In the sixties and seventies pressure was on the business schools to present their subject commerce as it was often called as a science and so elevate it to the level of other academic subjects. This was compounded in the hard-headed eighties. Now-a-days, partly due to the spread of technology, the softer management skills are increasing in importance.
Thomas Galdwin, professor in the international business group at the Stern school at New York university, believes most of the worlds business schools are not really addressing the issues executives will need in the future. They are all addicted to left brain number crunching, but we wont need our financial MBAs 20 years from now, Prof Gladwin predicts.
Managers of the future must be systems thinkers, who see patterns and loops; who do not just think in a linear way.
The rapid obsolescence of knowledge means that the factual information fed to todays MBA students will be out of date within five years. We have to help students to become life-long self-learners, Prof Gladwin believes.
The move towards softer skills is also fuelled by a growing realisation in business schools, and management circles more generally, that strategies are even more difficult to implement than they are to develop.
This will prove a further factor in the growth of shorter courses and in the development of long-term relationships between organisations and business schools. Such partnerships, which will be tailored to the individual companies and involve both open and company specific programmes, will, in turn, fuel the demand for better ways of monitoring course and measuring their effectiveness.
Three hundred and sixty degree monitoring, where junior and senior colleagues comment on a managers performance before and after a programme, is one of the first steps in this direction. Many others are already on the drawing board.
