Bringing Shakespeare to B-School

Two professors at the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles teamed up to write an article that has turned the B-school world on its head. Warren Bennis, distinguished professor of business administration and founding chairman of the school's Leadership Institute, and James O'Toole, the research professor in the Center for Effective Organizations at USC and the Mortimer J. Adler senior fellow at the Aspen Institute, call for sweeping changes in B-school curriculum and administration in their article, "How Business Schools Lost Their Way," featured in the May, 2005, Harvard Business Review.

Among the big problems the duo identifies are increasingly irrelevant course work and the type of research that professors are encouraged to do -- the authors assert the latter follows a purely "scientific model" based on the mistaken assumption that "business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology." Programs that have students confronting typical problems they will face on a daily basis when they leave school are preferrable, but are lacking in today's academic universe, they write.

These suggestions are causing quite a stir. Bennis says he received about 50 e-mails and an equal number of phone calls in response to the article. He and O'Toole recently spoke to BusinessWeek Online reporter Francesca Di Meglio. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation:

Q: What kind of reaction have you gotten to the article?
Bennis: We're stirring up useful mischief in many different business schools and associations throughout the world. Our own business school's curriculum planning committee spent a full day discussing the article. Advocates and adversaries of what we wrote about are confronting the issue, rather than just burying their heads in the sand.

Q: What motivated you to write this article?
O'Toole: In a professional school, the stakeholder who counts the most is the student. I was talking to one MBA student after another who thought that what he or she was getting in the classroom was far removed from the kind of world that they would be facing in corporations.

Learning some narrow research techniques are really not going to help them deal with real-world problems that have to do with ambiguity, dealing with people, thinking in the long term, the ethical consequences of one's actions, and complex problems that can't be shoehorned into an equation.

Bennis: I really felt for young faculty members who are caught up in a system that doesn't allow their intelligence and capacities to enter into finding a permanent job. One young professor recently put it this way: You have to write 1.8 articles in the [top academic] journals to [get tenure]. Incidentally, 99.9% of business people don't read these articles. If they did read them, they wouldn't understand them or find them relevant.

Q: Who should be teaching future MBAs?
O'Toole: Our article has been misrepresented by some people, who think that we're arguing for CEOs to teach at B-schools. In fact, if that were to happen, we would be worse off than we are. What a business-school faculty really needs is people with a variety of talents and perspectives from different disciplines.

Q: What can B-schools do to make the curriculum more relevant?
Bennis: One idea I've been pushing is to take a look at fast-breaking news. It would be interesting if you could create coursework around a timely topic. Every fall you could take a major issue facing businesses and create a course around that issue with some of your best students and a few faculty members teaching it together. There are several other examples in the article, including broad integrated courses that connect the dots.

O'Toole: If you were to take a look at the Enron case, for example, there are accounting, leadership, ethical, regulatory, and cultural elements to it. It's only when you look at all of those things together, and how they interact, that you start to get a sense of what was driving the behavior in the organization.

Q: What does the business community have to say about today's MBA programs?
O'Toole: [Companies] have cut business schools a lot of slack -- perhaps, too much. They're starting to see that what's been going on in business schools isn't closely enough aligned with their needs or those of the whole enterprise of business. Business schools are really now serving the research needs of professors and not of business organizations.

Making that switch is quite possible. Professors can use the same research techniques they're using now to address real-world problems. But they also need more interaction with the business community to make that possible.

Q: What do law, medical, engineering, and dentistry schools do that make their programs decent models for B-schools?
Bennis: A professional school has higher demands than a discipline like English literature, because you're dealing both with refined scientific material and the need to apply that material to real life.

Business doesn't seem as direct as medicine in affecting people's lives. But the destroyed lives of badly led human institutions are far more fatal than some of the mistakes made in hospitals. Every day there are more problems with the pathology of addiction and forms of disease brought on by the stress of toxic workplaces. We're playing for mortal stakes in business schools.

These other professional programs are way ahead of us in terms of having students confront real problems. The dental school here on the USC campus no longer has formal lectures. Every course is a problem-focused one with an enormous amount of field work. For example, in one course students must use the teeth from the site of a real plane crash to determine the identity of the passengers.

Q: One of your arguments is that business students need to study the humanities. Why?
Bennis: I don't think I can give a talk on leadership without referring to Shakespeare. In the humanities, you get stories that take you over a long period of time and give you context and perspective.

O'Toole: Many business schools are missing the sense of history in which decisions are being made. The problem with business school is that it's all about short-term thinking. Until you start thinking in the long term, you're doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes.

I've spent the past 30 years of my life teaching at the Aspen Institute, where we read Aristotle, Plato, and Shakespeare and relate it to the worlds of business professionals and government leaders. People can really identify with a character in Shakespeare. It reaches these practical businesspeople at a much deeper level than a mathematical formula does. It moves them emotionally to the point where they will open up and consider doing things in a different way.