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Here is a letter from our Dean, talked about the priority thing in our school. From that, you could know what's the trend and hopefully you can touch those points during your interview. Good Luck!
_*Executive Summary*_
Two years ago we had three top priorities for the Daytime MBA program: 1) provide consistent, high quality, teaching in all core classes on a sustainable basis; 2) develop an integrated vision for the Daytime program activities and align or add resources here needed; and 3) bring ethical leadership to the forefront in two ways--correcting the misperception that Fuqua students are "only team players and not leaders," and roviding more curricular support to help students develop ethical leadership capabilities.
We have made substantial progress on these three fronts, allowing us to shift our priorities. Specifically, are now moving forward with an integrated vision (i.e., aligning activities in Admissions, the CMC, Student Services, the International Center, and the academic program) to tackle three highly inter-related issues that evolved, at least to some degree, from the previous priority of bringing ethical leadership to the forefront in the Daytime program: 1) taking a hard look at the curriculum to provide strong functional skills while effectively leverage and enhancing the Team Fuqua culture in order to attract students from around the world and provide our graduates with a ifferential advantage in the global marketplace; 2) protecting and enhancing the Team Fuqua culture that currently provides us with a strong source of competitive advantage; and 3) defining the Fuqua MBA product, i.e., our "brand," both in terms of what we say we are and what the program offers that gives our graduates a differential advantage. Of course, maintaining high quality teaching in our core classes while offering a strong slate of elective classes is an unchanging and ongoing priority.
_*Update on Original Priorities*_
Before addressing these current priorities, here is a very brief update on the original priorities. With respect to teaching quality in the core, for the second year in a row, every area has kept their commitment to staff the core with experienced, successful teachers. The core is now staffed with teaching award-winning faculty, and the evaluations for the core courses positively reflect this staffing. Furthermore, moving forward, every area understands that the core is a top priority in allocating teaching resources. We think this is a sustainable position, and, as noted, will be an ongoing priority.
With respect to developing an integrated vision for the Daytime program, we now have outstanding coordination between the different areas connected to the Daytime program. This is critical, because what happens in any one area of the Daytime program can have a big impact on another area. What follows is a simple example of the power of a coordinated response to this interdependency. The CMC was getting a message from recruiters that our students were great on the collaborative dimension, but lacking on the leadership dimension. We were able to respond to that message in the academic program by adding a bundle of leadership courses (Integrated Leadership and Ethics I and II) to the core. Furthermore, we were able to respond to that message in Admissions by changing the application to help us better select students on the leadership dimension.
Finally, closing the loop, the CMC went back to recruiters to track perceptions of our graduates' leadership capabilities. As I report below, these results are extremely encouraging. Looking forward, this kind of integration will be a continued point of emphasis as we make curricular and branding decisions.
In terms of having the appropriate resources in place for the Daytime MBA support areas, I believe we have outstanding leadership in all of these areas. Furthermore, these leaders have identified areas where more resources were needed, found exceptional people to fill these roles, and have created high performance teams that I believe are "built to last."
With respect to bringing ethical leadership to the forefront, resources from COLE and DUKE Corporate Education (CE) have moved us forward. Those resources are critical, both in terms of design and delivery of the ILEs, and in helping to build out our elective offerings in the area of leadership. It's also worth noting that over the past year we also worked with COLE and student leaders to develop Fuqua's multi-dimensional vision of leadership for the Daytime program.
_*Looking Forward: The Team Fuqua Culture and Leadership*_
As noted, we now have three highly inter-related priorities. One of these priorities is to protect and enhance the Team Fuqua culture. This culture provides us with a source of competitive advantage in attracting students; it adds value in the overall MBA
experience; and many companies prize the collaborative skills that our students possess.
I'll elaborate on one of these claims: our culture helps us attract students to Fuqua. We collect data from a sample of students we admit, roughly half who accept our offer of admission, and half who go elsewhere. We ask these students to compare the Fuqua Culture to their top choice relative to Fuqua (for half of the sample, this top choice relative to Fuqua is where they go). These data show that Fuqua dominates the competition on the culture dimension. For example, in our 2005 data (Class of 2007) not one school beats Fuqua on culture. Even those who don't choose us credit us with an advantage. Moreover, in modeling the decision "accept versus reject Duke," the culture attribute has the biggest coefficient. In sum, culture is very important to our prospective students, and we do very well on this dimension.
Despite the great value we receive from Team Fuqua, capabilities left unattended are at risk. What if, for example, Team Fuqua loses one of its core values of inclusiveness? We risk alienating sub-populations that make Fuqua wonderfully diverse and therefore add to the MBA experience. Imagine how much poorer the MBA experience would be if women, individuals from other countries, etc., did not feel included, valued and thus chose not to attend Fuqua. Similarly, left unattended, the fundamental meaning of Team Fuqua could be lost. The idea of being a part of something bigger than yourself, i.e., Team Fuqua, to accomplish more than you could on your own could become distorted. Instead of focusing on the idea that a team can accomplish more than any one individual, what if people decided that being a part of a team means being nice, easygoing, and non-confrontational? If this happens we risk losing students who want to be challenged and want to challenge each other; we risk a diminished academic experience; and we risk providing an MBA product that is less appealing to the corporate community. Simply put, companies are uninterested in hiring people who are unwilling to push themselves and others to be the very best.
The flip side of this risk is a great opportunity. If we enhance Team Fuqua by directly and fundamentally connecting leadership to this culture we have a wonderful opportunity to produce graduates who have a deeper and richer view of leadership relative to graduates from other MBA programs. ILE II was designed as a proactive measure to respond to the duality of the Team Fuqua risk/opportunity. The goal of ILE II is to enhance Team Fuqua by directly embedding a culture of leadership within the overall culture. Is this necessary? In my opinion, "yes." Some recruiters were saying our students were team players, but not leaders, some current students and alums started to use words like "soft," "unchallenging," "too nice," "frat party" to describe the Fuqua culture. While those comments were coming at the margins, those are unacceptable associations with the Fuqua brand at any level. Thus, the Leaders Court activity in ILE II was designed to force students to reflect on their personal, team, and community leadership behaviors.
The goal was, and is, for every student to identify areas for personal and team development by highlighting the importance of principles such as challenge, accountability, candor, projecting a personal vision, inclusiveness, and community in leading high performance teams/organizations. On the opportunity side, the payoff from successfully connecting effective collaboration and leadership skills is enormous. Connecting those skills will allow you to succeed over the course of your career, regardless of your industry or functional interest. As noted in the closing of ILE II, collaborative skills without leadership skills will only take you so far in an organization. Further, analysis from different rankings data suggested our students were not as successful as we would like over the course of their careers. Our goal is to create more success for our graduates in their careers by providing more leadership development opportunities. In this regard we are completely incentive compatible: students want to succeed in their careers, and we want you to succeed, both because we care and because the single most important factor that cuts across the various rankings of MBA programs is how well you perform in your job.
_*Looking Forward: What is the Fuqua Brand?*_
Clearly, this issue of directly tying leadership into the Team Fuqua culture connects to our current priority of defining our MBA product, and more generally, the Fuqua brand.
If we make this connection, we have the opportunity to position our students as uniquely gifted at building community and making a difference via collaboration and leadership.
In contrast to the negative data previously received from the recruiter community, early returns on this strategy are highly promising. For example, a survey from our recruiter population shows that Fuqua ranks first, as we would hope, on "most effective collaboration skills" (Kellogg second, Michigan third), but also ranks first on "most effective leadership skills" (Kellogg second, Harvard third), and first on a dimension necessary for projecting a personal vision, "most effective communication skills" (Kellogg second, Harvard third). Admittedly, this group is biased in our favor because they currently recruit our students. However, they know our product (you) better because they recruit here. They also recruit at other schools and therefore are familiar with competing MBA products. Thus, they are in a good position to evaluate us relative to other schools. Moreover, succeeding with our brand positioning with this group is a prerequisite for generalized success with this strategy. You can learn more about our branding initiative in the branding forum with John Lynch (Chair of the branding task force that includes faculty, staff, and the BOV). I can think of no one better than John to lead this branding initiative.
_*Looking Forward: Examining the Curriculum*_
Finally, taking a hard look at the curriculum is our number one priority. The curriculum is a critical part of providing the substance behind the Fuqua brand. I am chairing a task force that is tackling this assignment, and have the pleasure of working with Jennifer Francis, Cam Harvey, and Will Mitchell--all deep thinkers, gifted researchers, and teaching award winners.
We were told to start with a blank sheet of paper to see what could be accomplished. To structure our task we agreed on the following guiding principles for any curriculum design:
1. Intellectually rigorous
2. Successful differentiation that attracts strong students and recruiters from around the world (and, as a result, supports strong rankings from the business press), i.e., we provide the platform for the best MBA product
3. Both leverages and enhances core capabilities (e.g., faculty research, Team Fuqua culture, place and space teaching knowledge, global knowledge)
4. Supports/helps create the Fuqua brand
5. Operationally viable
With these guiding principles, we identified eight building blocks for our curriculum design:
1. What core concepts do we want all students to know as Fuqua graduates? Which core concepts need to be sequenced and which can have flexible timing?
2. How actively should we create formal and informal concentrations options? Which concentrations might focus on industries? Which might focus on skills? Should concentrations require additional courses?
3. How actively should we use "place and space technology (distance based learning)" within the daytime program and to link the EMBA programs to the daytime program?
4. What culture do we want to promote and leverage?
5. What is the best approach for "globalizing" the curriculum? Global content in core courses and standard electives? Specialized global courses? Globalization during orientation?
6. What program formats make sense?
* Term length and structure (e.g., basic term length, the availability of shorter mini-terms within standard terms and/or between terms, a concentrated "core term" at the beginning of the program, possible integration across some core courses)?
* Program length (e.g., can we offer both two-year programs and accelerated "1-year" programs)?
7. How do we match our student recruitment and placement activities to match the new curriculum?
8. How do we link our curriculum design with our branding activities?
Again, we are early in the process but have begun the process of collecting data from different constituents. For example, we are collecting data from each faculty area and running focus groups with current students to get reactions to various proposals--e.g., adding concentrations. After collecting all relevant data we begin the difficult task of building a curriculum that is true to our guiding principles and successfully integrates across the eight elements above, recognizing that these elements can be highly interdependent.
If you made it this far in the email, thank you for your time and attention. These are activities that are critically important to the future of the school.  lease feel free to share your thoughts on any of these activities. We have a great opportunity to move forward, and I look forward to your input, your help, your energy, and your passion in pursuit of our shared legacy of leaving Fuqua better than when we arrived.
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发表于 2005-11-6 19:48:00
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发表于 2005-11-8 00:16:00
