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Posted 9/10/97
First-year students in the full-time M.B.A. Program at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management (WSOM) are experiencing a new curriculum this fall, one that stresses interdisciplinary learning and ongoing assessment of the knowledge and skills received during the two-year program.
"The new Weatherhead M.B.A. curriculum is designed to provide future leaders with the skills, knowledge and insights they will need to create value for their organizations and for society," explained Scott Cowen, WSOM dean and the Albert J. Weatherhead III Professor of Management. "As organizations become increasingly global, M.B.A. students need to understand the relationships among the various aspects of management practice. We believe our new curriculum will enhance students' potential to lead organizations in a diverse, global context."
Key to the M.B.A. curriculum changes is "Strategic Issues and Applications" (SIA), a first-year course introducing students to organizations and management. "The goal of SIA is to show students the integrative nature of strategic analysis," explains Sayan Chatterjee, associate professor of management policy and co-developer of the new course.
SIA begins with a two-week case study examining the range of strategic and operational issues confronting an organization -- this year, catalog retailer Land's End -- to provide students with a broad framework for analyzing business problems. "Once students understand some of the general concepts of strategic analysis, they should be able to take the small logical steps that will enable them to apply the concepts to virtually any organization," Chatterjee says.
For the remainder of the first year, the SIA course components are integrated with the eight M.B.A. functional core courses that further explore the relationships among the management disciplines through case studies, systems projects and field work.
Part two of SIA begins in the second semester, when students consider the problems involved in implementing their strategies, again using real-world case studies. "The emphasis in this semester will be on understanding how even the best analytical strategy may have to be modified because of administrative problems," Chatterjee explains. At the end of the second semester, the course concludes with a case competition involving a multinational corporation. This year's competition will be intramural, although teams from other top M.B.A. programs will be invited to participate in the future.
SIA was launched last month at the Weatherhead School's partner campus at the International Management Center (IMC) in Budapest, Hungary, and students received it "extremely well," says Stanton Cort, associate professor of marketing at WSOM. "Our M.B.A. students enrolled at the IMC campus have a wide variety of work experiences and represent nations throughout Eastern Europe, but they had no difficulty grasping the concept of the integrative nature of the disciplines we are teaching in the Weatherhead M.B.A. program."
In addition to introducing SIA, the Weatherhead School is expanding its pioneering "Management Assessment and Development" course, in which M.B.A. students develop learning plans for their entire time at the WSOM. Previously, full-time students developed their learning plans at the beginning of the M.B.A. program, but the school has found that students' career goals frequently change during the course of their studies.
In response, students will develop learning plans at the end of the first semester, revisit them at the beginning of the second year, and if necessary, recreate them to reflect revised goals. At the end of their M.B.A. program, students will evaluate their skill and knowledge development as compared to their expectations.
"This is the first time that an M.B.A. program has held itself accountable for the extent to which students attain the management competencies targeted in their learning plans," says Frances Cort, WSOM assistant dean for professional programs. She cited other distinctive features of the Weatherhead M.B.A. program: first-year seminars on enhancing management skills, including negotiation and effective management of groups; the Winter Institute, a January course at IMC that focuses on management issues in emerging market economies in eastern Europe; and emphasis on community service.
The new Weatherhead M.B.A. curriculum is being adapted for the school's other program formats. A revised curriculum will be introduced in the WSOM accelerated M.B.A. program (a one-year program for students with undergraduate business degrees) in the summer of 1998, and in the school's part-time (evening) M.B.A. program in the fall of 1998.
Founded in 1930, the Weatherhead School of Management has been recognized in Business Week's Guide to Business Schools as "one of the most innovative business schools in the world."
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