At the IESE conference held in Barcelona last month, Srikant Datar, senior associate dean at Harvard Business School, announced that business school curriculums are diverging for the first time in history because there is uncertainty about what companies will need. This may be good news for schools that have been more experimental in their approach to MBA design and more diverse in their profile.

The MBA has a long history with the first business school, established in Philadelphia by Joseph Wharton in 1881, and with Tuck, which launched the first MBA in 1900. The model of two years of study, starting with foundation courses and functional courses in the first year, followed by broader general management and specialist courses in year two, has gone largely unchallenged in America. Datar believes this suits academics who need to pursue research in their field.

However, companies and applicants have been asking for something different for some time. In the first global MBA employer survey conducted by QSTopMBA in 1990, employers revealed that typical MBA graduates lacked sufficient leadership and inter-personal skills to meet employer needs and expectations. Although this gap has narrowed substantially in the intervening years, it still exists.

Graduates are a vital source of talent, however their awareness of global business issues and leadership-readiness is not always up to scratch.

Hans Ulrich Maerki, chairman of IBM for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, observes that companies need, “fewer I-shaped MBAs who possess only functional skills, and more T-shaped MBAs who also understand problems end-to-end, complemented with multi-cultural experience and well-honed leadership skills”.

Arnoud De Meyer, director of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, says: “There are two main forces bringing about the need for business schools to change. Firstly, globalisation and secondly, the internet is resulting in information overload.”

De Meyer argues that these forces are changing the nature of leadership . Today we have “collaborative leadership” which requires people with the skills to get things done through a community of people. A related skill is the ability to manage a virtual network and to outsource many activities.

Jordi Canals, dean of IESE, suggests that more focus should be placed on three stages of personal development: stage one is imparting business knowledge, stage two is the development of personal leadership attributes and stage three is the enhancement of the self-realisation. Many schools are changing curriculums in response to a general acceptance of these points.

Tom Gerrity, then dean of Wharton, overhauled the MBA in 1991. The school has featured prominently in employer-based rankings and surveys ever since. Tom Robertson, the present dean, is looking to develop more multidisciplinary courses.

The top-tier European schools have an average of 85 per cent international students and typically include international material in most courses. IMD’s general management MBA is designed to “integrate many different functional fields within each course”. Frank Brown, dean of Insead, is recruiting 50 life coaches to work with students to plan their career paths.

More deans are looking to innovate their curriculums. Joel Podolny, dean of Yale, can perhaps claim to be the most revolutionary. He says: “Research conducted by our academics confirmed the gap between what business leaders were looking for and what was being delivered. Yale has reengineered its MBA programme curriculum and today’s big issues are all multidisciplinary in nature.”

Stanford Business School introduced a new curriculum last year reversing the traditional US model. It places an emphasis on the big picture topics at the start of the course, followed by foundation courses and finally ends in customised functional courses tailored to the different levels of experience of students.

Robert Joss, dean of Stanford, says: “We are committed to accepting more fresh graduates onto our MBA programme because we are competing with other programmes around the world. We recognise that there is a demand amongst employers for younger MBAs, who they can then mould.”

These new approaches are viewed as controversial. Harvard, according to Datar, has decided to maintain the traditional, functional approach to MBA delivery in order to “maintain the depth of our MBA courses”.

Nunzio Quacquarelli is editor of TopMBA.com

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