The Future of Business Learning

Today our learning group had the privilege of sharing lunch with Dr. Srikant Datar, the Director of Research for the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard. He also serves on the Board of Directors for Novartis and ICF.
Our discussion became interesting as he offered his opinion on the future of business school education. Last year, 2008, was the 100th anniversary of the Harvard Business School. As part of the celebration of looking back at the last 100 years, he and a colleague were asked to look forward to envision the future of Harvard University. They took their task seriously and undertook what has become a two-year research project into the future of business education.

He first discussed the difference in emphasis between existing business schools on the scale of intellectual Rigor versus practical Relevance. Having previously taught at both Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, he suggested that Harvard has a stronger reputation for Relevance among its peers. Of course he may be biased, but I tend to agree with him.

His research involved a review of hundreds of business school programs and interviews with many corporate CEOs. Based on his research, he and his colleague have written a book, to be released within months, called “Rethinking the MBA”. It will discuss the three key teaching areas for future of business education.

1) Knowing (specific book knowledge, tools and techniques)
2) Doing (how to actually accomplish things outside of the classroom)
3) Being (how to lead groups of people)

In his opinion, business education is unique in that it involves more than just knowing. To be successful in business it is not enough to have book knowledge. As a business leader you MUST accomplish your objectives through the efforts of other people. How people react to you determines to some extent how successful you can be as a leader. He contrasted business education to Law or Medicine or Engineering by saying that business education relies more on the “doing” and “being” skills than just on knowing.

Many business schools focus only on the knowledge and Knowing. This is like teaching someone to swim through lectures and reading. You can read, discuss, and watch videos all day, but that still will not help you to swim when you graduate. There is a reason why we do not teach swimming in a classroom. It is because it is a Doing skill. So is business management.

Their research has discovered techniques now in use at a few schools that truly help to bridge the gap between Knowing and Doing. They have even documented ways that some schools are teaching the Doing skill of innovation.

The third dimension of education in future business schools will be Being skills. This is the skill that some people have which allows them to inspire people, to create trust, to influence and to lead. They have also documented techniques for teaching this skill. In our discussion, Dr. Datar agreed that our use of temporary developmental assignments at Associated Electric achieves the same objective, allowing people to test out some Being skills in real-life situations.

He described four types of critical thinking skills: deductive, inductive, analogical, and integrative thinking, and emphasized the need to teach all types.

When describing the Being skill of leadership, he has documented the change over time from a High Authority/Low Conflict culture towards a developing Low Authority/High Conflict leadership culture. This culture, which is becoming more prevalent in business, requires leadership skills that are different from those that have been taught in the past.

He said that the main challenge facing most MBA students in that in their entire life they have only known people very much like themselves – all very successful, driven, intelligent MBA students. This leaves them ill-prepared to understand what it takes to motivate the broad range of employees (factory workers to phone operators to engineers to accountants) that will be encountered in a typical business. As one CEO that he interviewed put it, “most kids don’t know how to have a conversation with a plumber. They just think of him as someone who shows up to fix the pipes, not as a fellow human being.”

He believes that this gap can be reduced through experiential learning and formal, frequent peer feedback.

He also suggested that we watch the commencement address given by J.K. Rowling to the Harvard business school graduates in 2008. The previous year they had hosted Bill Gates for the commencement address, and when the class of 2008 heard that they were getting an author of children’s books, they were vocally unhappy about the selection. Expectations were low on the day of commencement, but J.K. gave “the most impressive commencement speech ever”. This to him was another example of the Being skill; the ability to synthesize, motivate, and lead, and the kind of skill he would like to see become a routine part of business curricula worldwide.

JK’s commencement address can be viewed in three parts on the links below. The amazing thing she talked to the Harvard MBAs about was failure and imagination, something they probably had never experienced in their life.

JK Rowling Commencement address to Harvard, June 2008
JK Rowling Part 1
JK Rowling Part 2
JK Rowling Part 3