Archive for 28 December 2006
Yale’s New MBA Curriculum: “Perspectives,” Not Functions
| Peter Klein |
Several wire stories and bloggers are reporting on Yale’s new first-year MBA curriculum. Increased study-abroad requirements are getting the most attention, but the reorganization of the core curriculum may be more significant. Says Yale:
In the last thirty years, while the management profession has changed significantly, management education has not. Most business school curricula remain compartmentalized by discipline — Marketing, Finance, Economics, and so forth. This model made sense when a successful career was characterized by vertical advancement in a single field within a large, functionally divided corporate bureaucracy. But today, managerial careers cross the boundaries of function, organization, and industry, as well as cultural and political borders. Even managers in large organizations must be entrepreneurial in the sense that their success depends on their ability to synthesize disparate information, analyze competing functional priorities, and draw together and coordinate resources and individuals in a context that is often fluid and decentralized.
Now, [Yale’s School of Organization and Management] is breaking down traditional management disciplines just as contemporary organizations blur the distinctions among management functions. Rather than teaching management concepts in separate, single-subject courses like Finance or Marketing, Yale’s approach teaches management in an integrated way — the way in which most managers must function every day to achieve success.
Organizations and Markets 
Recent Comments