NEW HAVEN -- When the name on the door is Yale, there's no room to be second class in the field of business education.
So the Ivy League university last year hired a dean with Harvard and Stanford credentials to reinvent the Yale School of Management, founded three decades ago with a goal of bridging public and private management. The new dean, 41-year-old Joel M. Podolny , started by tossing out the school's curriculum and fashioning a new one. His goal: to lift Yale into the pantheon of elite business schools that includes Harvard, Stanford, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
"This school aspires to be in that pantheon," Podolny said in an interview. "It requires an ability to take risks, to teach outside our comfort zone. There is a deep-seated belief in this institution that our mission is so important -- to educate leaders for business and society -- that we have to set out a model that other schools will want to emulate."
Podolny, who arrived here from Harvard Business School in July 2005, immediately began working with the Yale management school faculty, students, alumni, and recruiters to remedy what most agreed was a disconnect between its MBA curriculum and how management plays out in today's business world. The result was a decision to scrap traditional courses like marketing, finance, and organizational behavior, which aligned with the "siloed" structure of businesses in an earlier era, in favor of an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to integrate the challenges and interests 21st century managers will face.
The new curriculum was unanimously approved by the faculty last March. Its centerpiece, set to be rolled out today, is a series of "organizational perspectives" courses focused on managing external constituencies like state and society, customers, investors, and competitors, along with internal constituencies such as innovators, operating executives, fund managers, and employees. Another course, which commenced last month, explores how multi discipline management careers unfold today, a subject seldom encountered in business schools.
"What happened here is we just destroyed the old curriculum and built a new structure," said Jonathan Feinstein , a professor of economics who designed and is teaching the careers course.
Podolny unveiled the new curriculum last winter in time to attract applicants. One result was a "yield rate" -- the percentage of admitted students who accept the school's offer -- of 43 percent for the class that entered in September, an increase from the 37 percent yield rate over the previous year.
Several faculty members interviewed last week said they feel energized by the new approach, which they called the most sweeping change in the management school's 30-year history. "There's been a nagging sense of discontent," acknowledged long time management professor Douglas W. Rae . "By various public measures, we're ranked somewhere between the 10th and 20th business school. And that's not OK at Yale. The standard should be excellence."
Yale's move, while distinctive, is part of a larger trend of experimentation at business schools, with Stanford and University of Southern California, among others, recently designing new curricula "trying to replicate the environment students are going to face when they go into business," said Arthur Kraft , chairman of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, a non profit educational group.
"Certainly any time you're making a change you're running a risk because you're deviating from the status quo," Kraft said. "You could be missing what the market's looking for. And faculty have to be able to adjust to do it right. But managing risk is part of what business schools teach, so you have to make your program competitive."
Yale's School of Management, founded in 1976 as the university's youngest professional school, has a much shorter history than most of its peer s. It's also smaller, admitting about 200 students a year, compared to 900 at Harvard and 360 at Stanford.
Its original name, the Yale School of Organization and Management, reflected a focus on preparing students for management jobs in government and non profit institutions as well as businesses. Its management model was founding dean William H. Donaldson , former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and co founder of the investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, whose career straddled the public and private sectors. And the school initially awarded graduates master's degrees in public and private management .
The name was changed to the School of Management in 1994, and its degree to a master's in business administration, partly to alleviate the confusion of corporate recruiters. While nearly a third of its students today still come from jobs in the public or nonprofit sectors, about 90 percent enter the private sector after graduating. The most popular first jobs for Yale graduates, as at most of the elite business schools, are in financial services, investment banking, and consulting, though many students say they want to bring values from their earlier experience to the business world or eventually return to the public or non profit sectors.
"One of my classmates made a joke the other day: 'You have to make room for people who don't want to make money,' " recalled first-year student Sumana Chatterjee , a former journalist.
Podolny, a native of Cincinnati, has written extensively on the role of status in market competition. After earning a PhD from Harvard University in 1991, he spent 11 years on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business before returning to Boston as professor and research director at Harvard Business School. He is currently commuting between homes in the New Haven suburb of Woodbridge, Conn., and Belmont, where his wife continues to live while their son finishes middle school. The family plans to reunite in Woodbridge next year.
Since arriving here, Podolny has been a man in perpetual motion. He lost no time in raiding one of his former employers, hiring Stanford's star professor James Baron to join the Yale faculty. He has also been out on the stump, raising more than $105 million toward a $300 million goal in a capital campaign that, among other things, will fund a 230,000-square-foot campus for the management school. The school today is crowded into about 110,000 square feet in four Georgian-style mansions along Hillhouse Avenue.
And he has been invited to speak about Yale's new business curriculum at other schools and education conferences across the country, invitations he accepts with relish. "When you have only 200 students, your ability to impact the world is your ability to pioneer a design that is seen as a model in other places," Podolny said.
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发表于 2006-11-10 09:35:00
