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B-SCHOOLS Q&A

Breaking Down Silos at Yale

Dean Joel Podolny talks about how the B-school is putting old paradigms out to pasture with its new curriculum

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Since taking office last year, Dean Joel Podolny has announced plans for far-reaching changes aimed at pushing the Yale School of Management into the top tier of the nation's business schools (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/28/05, "A Fresh Face for Yale"). The most significant change to come to fruition so far is the school's radically redesigned curriculum, implemented with this fall's entering class.

Podolny spoke recently with BusinessWeek.com reporter Kerry Miller about the new curriculum and how it fits into his broader goals for Yale and for management education. EDited excerpts from their conversation follow:

	Dean Joel Podolny Yale School of Management

What are the core elements of the new curriculum?
The most important part of the curriculum is that we're replacing the disciplinary courses that mapped onto the functional silos in organizations with new courses that are actually organized around the key constituencies that a manager needs to engage in order to be effective.

We now offer a course on the customer rather than a course in marketing, a course on the investor rather than a course in finance. All of them are multidisciplinary in both their design and their delivery. And then we have a course called the integrated leadership perspective at the end which sort of brings together all the different perspectives.

Why were these changes are necessary? Do you feel that the standard MBA is outdated?
When I talked to CEOs, to our alumni, to recruiters, it became clear that the demands for managers, for leaders, are very different today than they were in the past century. Effective leaders need to be able to own and frame problems and take real responsibility for solving those problems, and then work across organizational boundaries in order to solve those problems. The curriculum in the past was broken down by these disciplinary silos and because of that, got in the way of effective management and leadership.

I think, not just at Yale, but at any of the curricula that you would look at any of the major business schools, they were broken down by functional silos: a course in marketing, a course in accounting, a course in organizational behavior. But if you talk to any leader of a major corporation, they will tell you that the real value to be added is in working across those silos, and the disciplinary delivery got in the way of educating students in a way that could maximize their ability to add value to the organizations of which they are a part.

Who were the major architects of the curriculum?
We started our curriculum reform last year in the fall, and we had over two-thirds of the senior faculty involved on various committees. We also had the students involved. It was really kind of faculty-led, but it was led through engagement with all the constituencies of the school. Our faculty talked to recruiters. They talked with alumni. They talked with current students, in addition to the students that were on the committee.

You don't usually use words like courage to sort of talk about faculty initiatives, but I actually think that that word is quite appropriate for talking about this curriculum reform on the part of the faculty because it required them to really give up on their comfort zone in order to embrace a new model of management education. This is a faculty that's stepping up and saying, "We're ready to meet the challenge and we're going to do it now. We're going to make the investment in time and energy."

Over the summer, it has been remarkable to see that investment. In addition to having multi-disciplinary teams working on the various courses, the faculty has been meeting once a week in a large group. When the faculty in one area are presenting syllabi, the faculty from all the areas come and make comments. That requires trust, and it requires courage, but that's what's going to make this new curriculum successful.

How does the curriculum fit into your long-term goals for the school?
What attracted me to this school was the school's mission of educating leaders for business and society. And my belief after meeting the alumni on the search committee is that they aren't just words, but that the school actually lives it.

We create graduates who are looking to make a positive difference in the world, whether they aspire to be a Fortune 100 CEO or run a major nonprofit or to have influence on policy and government. We have put in place a curriculum that helps to further foster that aspiration of our students and that feature of our culture.

To the degree to which we actually put in place a curriculum that executes on that mission to the maximum degree, I believe we don't just create a great school but we raise the bar of management education. I felt coming here that because of that mission, because of the commitment of the faculty and the community to that mission, and because of the willingness of people to put the time and the energy into developing a curriculum that's consistent with that mission, that this is the place that actually can rise to that challenge.

So far, how is the new curriculum resonating?
The response has been wildly enthusiastic on all sides. We announced the new curriculum in March, which was before the Class of 2008 had to make their decisions. Our yield increased about 21% from the previous year. The employers and the alumni that we speak to are extremely enthusiastic about the curriculum as well. We have had those recruiters and alumni say to us that they feel we really have designed a curriculum that does meet the challenges of management and leadership today.

What are the other pressing issues for Yale SOM today?
We're going to build a new campus, and for the school that's a major issue that we're excited about. We're also going to be growing the school slightly. We're the smallest of the major business schools, and in a lot of ways that's great. That gives us a tremendous advantage in terms of reforming the curriculum in a way that works across disciplinary boundaries because being small, we have faculty who've grown very comfortable working across disciplinary boundaries.

Over the long run, we'll be increasing our size to about 300 students per class [from 220]. The campus is part of that growth, but it also means growing the faculty, and so those are two other issues, but the curriculum reform is all-encompassing. It touches on everything that we do, and so that will continue to remain front and center in terms of our efforts for some time.

Yale isn't the only school to announce a curriculum overhaul of late (see BusinessWeek.com, 6/6/06, "Stanford's New Look MBA") How does Yale's new curriculum fit into that overall landscape?
To the best of my knowledge, we were the first school to announce a major overhaul of its curriculum. We did so in March. I obviously am not in a position to comment on the details of other curricula. I haven't seen any in particular detail. I do know, I was at a conference with 40 deans in Toronto in March, and it is a topic that's on everybody's mind.

I think everybody is wrestling with this challenge of, O.K., how do you break out of the disciplinary silos in order to deliver a curriculum that meets the demands of management as a profession today? My own view is that the more schools that are embracing this challenge, the better off we all are. To the degree to which any of us succeed, we all succeed in raising the standards of management education and meeting the challenges of educating and professionalizing management. I'm excited to see, though, what everybody else is doing.

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