In spite of every indication that organizational decision making often involves an integrated perspective of the functional areas of business, many business-school curricula produce functional-area majors who do not have a grasp of the overall business context. Our accounting programs produce great accountants. Our marketing programs produce great marketers. But ask an accounting student about consumer behavior, or ask a marketing student about internal rate of return, and too often the reply will be, "That's not my area." If medical schools took the same approach, a cardiologist couldn't help a choking victim and a urologist couldn't perform CPR. We need to change our focus.
I believe we academics share the blame with corporate recruiters for this situation. We are often too busy to change our approach to business education, and corporate recruiters tend to recruit functional-area specialists. (An obvious exception to this, of course, is the consulting company that recruits the "best and brightest" that it can attract, regardless of major.)
We need to transform the undergraduate business curriculum in a way that focuses on what business needs people to do, not what they are hired to be. That is, business schools need to focus on successful business behaviors, not being a particular business major. Let's imagine a business curriculum that focuses on what successful business people are able to do, rather than a curriculum that is based on exposure to accounting, finance, marketing and so forth. What behaviors might we include? These come to my mind:
- Problem formulation. Business people need to be able to imagine the structure of their environment so that they may have a chance of managing it. In a world of increasing complexity and ambiguity, the benefits of understanding what problem you are trying to solve are immeasurable. Gaining consensus on the problem definition can go a long way toward exposing conflicting assumptions held by stakeholders. Besides, solving the wrong problem is almost guaranteed to be a waste of resources.
- Dealing with complexity. This is a natural topic to consider with problem formulation. Many problems are complex problems, and complex problems are often messy problems. These problems are rarely "solved." Instead, they may be "resolved." Simply considering that some problems do not have solutions would be a revolutionary idea in many business schools. For complex problems, thinking in terms of "right" or "wrong" solutions is not very productive at all. Rather, one must think in terms of "good" and "better" solutions.
- Well-being enhancement. Happy, healthy workplaces are more productive and profitable. Happy, healthy communities are attractive places to live and work. Well-being has many facets, but one that is a driver for many of the others is "financial well-being." Imagine investigating well-being concepts within functional areas at the individual, team, organization and community levels -- along with the implications for business at each level.
- Data assessment. Data drives so much of our business decision making, yet how much time do we spend teaching students to examine the quality of the data being used for decision making? Data has so many important characteristics: age, source, volatility, accuracy and precision are a few that come immediately to mind. We should explicitly consider qualitative data, too, since we tend to focus on quantitative data in our typical classes on decision making (e.g., statistics). We might also integrate discussions of data ownership, in the sense that we may need to make a critical assessment about who should be able to access, change or use data in the first place.
- Creativity development. This topic could set the foundation for a number of business topics to follow. Innovation, entrepreneurship and negotiation are topics that spring immediately to mind. I suspect that courses on creativity already exist at many campuses.
Imagine how our students might be perceived by industry or graduate schools if they were known for proficiency in these behaviors, regardless of their major.
David Paradice is senior associate dean and the Sprint Professor of Business Administration in the Florida State University College of Business in Tallahassee, Florida.
I recently took a few graduate classes at a local NY University for fun. With the exception of a small written paper, grades were based on multiple choice tests allowing students to regurgitate memorized minutiae and a group project where two of us did all the work for the group of seven. If this is what passes for college education these days, it is no wonder business is struggling to function in a global economy.
Most important aspect is ethical. Bullying is a plague. And it damages performance.
There should be greater managerial focus upon development of first-line supervisors and managers in their twenties who are experiencing power over others in the workplace for the first time.