Sloan School rethinks its mission-Developing the MBA programs of the future.

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A small group of students is gathered around a conference table in the MIT Sloan School of Management, preparing for an upcoming six-week project at a New Bedford machine design plant. The engagement will be equal parts engineering and management consulting. Not exactly mainstream business school fare.

By D.C. Denison, Globe Staff

Which makes it typical for Sloan, a school that has often eluded easy categorization. Unlike most business schools, Sloan is bolted to a world-renowned technology institute. It is a short row down the Charles River from perhaps the most influential business program on the planet. And Sloan’s enrollment is less than half the size of B-school powerhouses like Harvard, Wharton, and Kellogg. Still, students and alumni can point to a reputation that consistently earns the institution rankings in the top five in the most influential business school guides.

Yet as the school prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary later this week, it is also going through a sweeping reevaluation of its curriculum. ”We’re trying to decide what we want to be when we grow up,” says Dean Richard Schmalensee. And the process says a lot about Sloan’s future, and the future of graduate business education.

Certainly, the traditional business school model is in flux. After a heady run in the late 1990s, when a freshly-minted MBA was a ticket to the dot-com sweepstakes, many students and faculty are asking if management education is still in tune with the times.

Just last month, the Academy of Management, the world’s largest organization devoted to research and education in the management field, addressed the question, ”What is an MBA worth?” and concluded, ”Not much.” The lead article in the discussion was titled ”The End of Business Schools? Less Success than Meets the Eye,” and argued, after an exhaustive review of career-related data, that ”there is little evidence that mastery of the knowledge acquired in business schools enhances people’s careers or that even attaining the MBA credential itself has much effect on graduates’ salaries or career attainment.”

Recent scandals in corporate America have raised questions, meanwhile, about whether business schools are adequately preparing their students for the ethical quandaries that await them in the working world.

The massive number of MBAs currently being loosed on the market also threatens to downgrade the value of a graduate business degree. Every year, America’s 350 accredited MBA programs launch 100,000 freshly minted MBAs into the work force. With fewer companies hiring because of the recessionary environment, many of these graduates are discovering that an MBA no longer sets them apart from the pack.

Against this gloomy background, Sloan is addressing its own unique challenges. The collapse of the dot-com boom could tarnish the luster of Sloan’s technology-centered reputation. The school’s well-known emphasis on entrepreneurship may also be less attractive to students in an economic downturn that has dampened the start-up spirit.

So far, none of these factors appears to be affecting Sloan’s applications, which are still on an upward trend. Last year, Sloan enrolled 350 students from an applicant pool of more than 4,000. Still the leaders of Sloan’s ”curriculum redesign” committee, first convened last spring, appear to be eagerly anticipating a new approach.

”We always have some experiments going on. That’s MIT,” said Gabriel Bitran, a professor of management and the dean who is overseeing the effort.

Bitran, an expert on service delivery and manufacturing systems, cited a number of current Sloan initiatives that he says are leading the way to broader curriculum changes. One is the Global E-Lab (”E” for entrepreneurial) that consists of two six-week sessions at Sloan on either side of an intensive residency at a company in another country. Another is a collaboration with MIT’s Electrical Engineering department and area research hospitals like Massachusetts General on a ”Medical Innovations” program that aims to develop ”breakthrough innovations.”

The dual aim of Sloan’s future curriculum, Bitran said, will be to capitalize on MIT’s expertise and expose students to real innovative situations. Bitran said the danger is that Sloan will remain content to teach the same classroom-oriented business cases that are taught at business schools all over the world.

”I was meeting with a senior executive, an alum, who told me that when he graduated from Sloan, he was equipped with tools and knowledge that were new to his industry,” Bitran said. ”So when he went to his first company, he was doing things that very few people there knew about. Over time he was able to transform the company, and even the industry. But he said that now, when he hires MBAs, he finds that they don’t have that special knowledge.

”That made us think,” Bitran continued, ”because MIT is a research school. We are promoted based on our research and we have a strong connection with industry. But a good portion of that is not filtering into the classroom. That’s the challenge: to bridge that gap.”

The Alfred P. Sloan School of Management has been occupying classrooms at MIT since it began in 1914 as a single course: ”Engineering Administration.” Over the ensuing decades, the program expanded into a cluster of courses around organization and business. Then, in 1952, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., an MIT graduate and the former chairman of General Motors Corp., established the School of Industrial Management through a gift from the Sloan Foundation. In 1964, the school was renamed in his honor.

Although the school earned an early reputation for producing engineering-oriented leaders and quantitative analysts, it has worked hard to broaden its mandate, recently adding areas of expertise like entrepreneurship and international management. Schmalensee, dean since 1998, is determined to continue the process.

”The changes we are making are an answer to the question, `How do we produce people who are more effective at leading innovation?”’ he said as he sat in his office overlooking the Charles River last week.

The curriculum redesign actually started a year and a half ago, Schmalensee said, ”with a bunch of internal conversations” and some help from the blue chip consulting firm, McKinsey & Co.

”We asked, `How are we known? How do we want to be known? How should we be known? What are we good at? What do we want to be the best at?”’ And the answers to those questions were:

”That we are about innovation, we always have been,” Schmalensee replied. ”That’s what our education program ought to focus on. We’re innovators. We go out and do stuff.”

Student members of the curriculum redesign committee are also pushing for more practical, ”innovation oriented” experience, according to committee member Tanaz Sowdagar, 29, a second-year MBA student.

”Many of us are aiming to integrate better with industry,” she said. ”We want to know how can we practically apply these topics. … We are interested in implementation rather than abstract theories, because you cannot be an advocate for change if you are doing things the same way they’ve been done for the last 20 years.”

The working assumption at Sloan is that MIT provides the ideal environment for this ”experiential, innovative” approach.

”Our differentiator, our competitive advantage, has to be that we’re part of MIT,” Schmalensee said. ”We’re not richer than anybody else, we’re not older than anyone else, we aren’t bigger than anyone else. But we are MIT’s business school. What do we do with that?”

How Sloan answers Schmalensee’s question will start to become apparent next September, when the first pilot projects will be launched, including the creation of a volunteer subset of the entering class that will evaluate various experimental ideas like off-site learning experiences and cross-MIT collaborations.

”Undoubtedly it will be a mess,” Schmalensee admitted. ”If it’s not a mess, it means we aren’t reaching far enough.

”Fortunately, some of our best teachers are dying to do it,” Schmalensee added. ”So even if it’s not quite baked, the students will get really good people making it up as they go along.”

Committee chairman Bitran is also bracing for a tumultuous fall semester, although he believes that it’s only a matter of time before other business schools face many of the same issues.

”Some of these improvements will probably happen in many business schools eventually,” he said. ”But because we are used to change, we’re hoping it will happen here faster, and with less difficulty, than at other places.”

D.C. Denison can be reached at [email protected].

This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 10/7/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.

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