B-schools under fire - business schools - CE Roundtable - Panel Discussion

Chief Executive, The, April, 1993

However, this experiment carried no consequences. The students' jobs weren't on the line; they didn't receive grades.

Teamwork succeeded in the first semester. The second one was a different story. Why? Because in the second semester, students received grades, which fostered individualism. Suddenly, teamwork became a poor second to grades.

We discussed changing the grading system to alleviate the tension between teamwork and individualism. After all, we reasoned, in a company that has a major quality program, people working in teams have to be evaluated differently.

We also talked about going to a pass-fail system. But yet another problem arises: The top 10 percent of the student body want to be named Fuqua scholars. These students want that distinction on their resumes so they can be hired by the management consulting firms in the investment banking arena. For them, grades screen the student body and indicate the "best and the brightest."

Ray Wild (Henley Management College, U.K.): The situation in the U.K. is slightly different. Yes, people come to recruit our MBA graduates, and businesses sponsor or send people to our programs, but Henley also runs MBA programs tailored to individual companies' needs.

In a sense, it's like an outside training service. We run a generic MBA program, but there is no limit to the extent to which we will tailor the delivery of the program. Currently, we run MBA programs for about 60 clients--either individual companies such as Royal Dutch/Shell, or consortia.

Many of these companies would not recruit from or send employees to a regular MBA program. But they are willing to enroll employees in programs tailored to their needs.

J.P. Donlon (CE): How does that differ from hiring a group of consultants to train your people?

Wild: We will not provide a Shell MBA; we will provide an MBA for Shell. We won't substitute or replace parts of the curriculum, but we will add to the education. The students receive a generic MBA education in addition to fulfilling specific company requirements.

William E. Mayer (College of Business and Management, University of Maryland): That is one way to handle the situation. In the U.S., however, there is a serious issue of how much value is added by curriculum. All schools can never be all things to all people, just as individual businesses aren't all things to all people.

If a company doesn't like the product from this school, maybe it should go to another school and see if the product fits better. Or the company should work with the school to make the product fit better. Partnership is the key.

Rowland: We don't look to the elite business schools to find the people we want: people who have experience on the shop floor, who possess organizational skills. That's because some of us see business education as an infant industry. We don't know exactly how it will accommodate the varied and dynamic work places in the U.S. and abroad. So we focus on more modest schools.

As a result, DeVry represents an important option for us. When our employees demonstrate organizational skills on the shop floor, we send them to school where they can learn to broaden and improve their financial analysis skills, and to discover how to anticipate and accommodate changes in technology.