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

Chief Executive, The, April, 1993

THE RIGHT STUFF

Thomas S. Haggai (IGA): We have 4,000 supermarkets in the U.S. and six countries abroad. Few MBAs knock on our door--despite the fact that the grocery business has continued to create jobs. MBAs don't want us, and we don't want them. I'm not sure we could survive them, unless we let them count our money, and that would cost us too much.

We don't think much of the regular MBA, but weekend courses, on-the-spot courses, and short courses are vital to our employees.

Rowland: The question is: What kind of business education is appropriate for our employees? Some of it is competency-oriented. Some of it is more generalized. Other people need the MBA credential.

It is difficult to settle on one established way of doing things, because of the diversity of businesses--both in the U.S. and abroad.

Finding the proper balance is a test of human resources leadership--and the CEO's ability to help his organization make judgments on this issue. Frankly, I doubt my own competence in this area. I think picking people is the hardest task.

Thomas D. Gleason (Wolverine Worldwide): We've never hired an MBA for manufacturing, although we've encouraged some of our manufacturing people who display people skills to get an MBA or enroll in an executive education program that runs at night or on weekends. This works well. These employees already have a basic understanding from the ground up of how things work. It's easier to find workers with people skills first and then teach them analytical skills rather than to try to create a people person out of a great analyst.

GETTING SOFT

Scott S. Cowen (Weatherhead School, Case Western Reserve): Traditionally, the MBA curriculum in the U.S. developed around a common body of knowledge, which usually translates into functional areas such as accounting, finance, and marketing.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Weatherhead began to think more about the development of soft skills. We looked at the research accumulated over the years on the abilities of people who have been successful in various areas. Based on that literature, we focused our program on competency in 22 soft skills, in addition to the common body of knowledge.

After choosing those 22 soft skills, we asked our MBA students, faculty, CEOs, and human resources vice presidents to tell us the skills they sought.

Ideally, the clusters would overlap. In reality, they rarely touched at all.

Theoretically, skill development is terrific, and we ought to do it. But there's a paradox: We can't agree on what we mean by skills and what skills we want to focus on. The other dilemma pertains to knowledge areas. Since accreditation is built around knowledge areas, when we attack the skills area in the curriculum, we tend to do it on the outskirts instead of throughout the entire curriculum. Otherwise, every professor would have to change every course.

If you really want skill development, you can't just do it in the front or back end of the program. You have to do it across the board. And that's been a problem.