SOME BUSINESS SCHOOLS REALLY TEACH YOU THE ROPES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 5, 1993                   TAG: 9301050111
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO   
SOURCE: JONATHAN YENKIN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BOSTON                                LENGTH: Medium
SOME BUSINESS SCHOOLS REALLY TEACH YOU THE ROPES
As American executives preach new ways to run corporations, business schools are taking up the gospel.
Under the emerging credo, managers cannot succeed simply by studying marketing, finance and other technical subjects; they must understand how to combine those skills and work in teams.
In some cases, curriculum creators are dumping old ways of teaching for novel approaches such as assigning Plato's "Republic" or wilderness adventures.
"We're building a curriculum more or less from scratch," said Anthony Santomero, deputy dean at the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School.
The theme of change has taken hold at many other schools, including the University of Michigan, Duke and Syracuse. The University of Texas hired the high-powered consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to help retool its MBA program, and small Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., is developing an entirely new first-year curriculum.
Even illustrious Harvard Business School is reassessing its program. "It's a chance to stand back and say, `What should we be teaching and how should we be teaching it?' " said Christopher Bartlett, a professor involved in the project.
Several forces underpin the trend. One is a growing competition for students. Since 1974, the number of programs for a master's degree in business administration, or MBA, has doubled to nearly 800. But there have been recent signs that MBA enrollment is slowing.
Registration for business school entrance exams in October dropped 15 percent compared with a year earlier, and test volume in autumn 1991 was down 5 percent from the prior year.
"For a long time, all you had to do was open your doors and students would flow through," said Charles Hickman, projects director for the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, which accredits business schools. "There were a lot of things to make business schools feel very complacent."
An MBA, however, isn't seen as a ticket to success anymore, especially as corporate restructurings squeeze out managerial jobs. Business leaders have raised questions about the relevance of the traditional MBA program.
Such self-examination recently appeared on the pages of Harvard Business Review, the school's magazine, which presented the fictional case of an executive debating the value of an MBA education.
"Most [business schools] train us to be proficient in statistical analysis, accounting and technical skills, leaving us unprepared for the task of managing people," wrote Barbara Saka, a senior financial analyst with Silicon Graphics Inc., commenting on the case.
In response, business schools are giving more emphasis to so-called "soft subjects," such as leadership, ethics and communication skills. Other concepts - globalization and teamwork - are becoming integral parts of business education.
The Darden School at the University of Virginia offers business language courses in German, Spanish and French, and field projects in which students work with U.S. companies abroad.
The school also runs a "ropes course," in which students are taken to wilderness areas to climb. "They have to work together as a team," said Ray Smith, an associate dean. "They have to learn to trust each other."
The University of Michigan is trying to weave teamwork into experience. Students spend seven weeks of their first year working in consulting teams with companies such as Ford Motor Co. and Motorola Inc. to study business problems and propose solutions.
"That's one of the complaints we heard, that the students knew a lot of things, but they couldn't bring it together to solve real problems," said Paul Danos, associate dean at Michigan's graduate business school.
Babson also intends to offer a business-mentoring program, but what has drawn notice is the school's plan to abandon all functional courses for first-year students, such as marketing, statistics and finance.
Instead, those subjects will be woven into a broader series of modules, such as assessing the opportunity for new products, learning how to build organizations, and launching products and businesses. The goal will be to teach students to use many different skills to run a business.
Among the required readings will be Plato's "Republic," showing students "that when you make decisions, there are a series of values embedded in that, some economic and some not," said Stephen Allen, a professor coordinating the program.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB