In this article, Michael Page, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, and Professor Roy (Chip) Wiggins III, dean of business and the Graduate School of Business, describe the history, goals and successes of Bentley’s MBA program. It originally appeared in Global Focus, the business magazine of the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD).
In the book Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads authors Srikant Datar, David Garvin and Patrick Cullen argue that the MBA required to develop the leaders and entrepreneurs our societies need, involves a far stronger focus on knowing, doing and being.
These are components fully embedded in Bentley University’s 11-month MBA launched in 2010.
The program was designed to develop three crucial characteristics of leadership articulated in a Forbes article on why mba programs don't produce leaders: the ability to understand people; the ability to see the big picture; and the ability to execute.
It does this through a curriculum, learning environment and international experiences that ensure:
- analytical components do not swamp time required to examine behavioral dimensions
- integrative methodologies rather than silo approaches are used to develop knowledge elements
- experiential elements develop execution capabilities rather than just strategic formulation ability
In 2007 Gloria Larson, Bentley’s seventh president, continued Bentley’s long-standing reputation for curricula innovation when she asked the university to establish a transformative MBA that would achieve three key goals:
- it should address the criticisms being expressed increasingly about the relevance of the degree and its culpability for lapses of ethics apparent across businesses globally
- it should capitalize on Bentley’s positioning in accounting and finance, business ethics, information technology, and the fusion of business with arts and sciences
- consideration should be given to designing a program with significant appeal for a wider range of talented individuals, including those with all the capabilities needed to succeed as leaders but for whom the traditional MBA may have limited appeal
The highly competitive management education landscape and Bentley’s location among some of the most recognized and envied MBA programs in the world made this a demanding call to action.
However, the call was answered by bringing together faculty from across the university – business and arts and sciences – and through seeking counsel from corporate connections and management education industry experts.
The eclectic group that developed the program remains fully involved. Today’s students still find themselves engaging with faculty and executives from diverse fields and backgrounds.
Program Design
The MBA program was constructed around four integrating themes– innovation, value, environments and leadership – and three field-based immersion experiences – one in the United States and two outside.
Each theme was designed to ensure that connections are made between self, others, context, thought and action.
Finally, the mandate given to the program design team emphasized that the learning environment should be collaborative, highly interactive and built on the business experiences of a class of students averaging over seven years of post-tertiary education experience.
The design team determined the program’s core learning objective to be preparing leaders capable of functioning effectively in times of rapid change, accelerated innovation, intense globalization and profound demographic shifts.
By the end of the program, graduates should have the capacity to identify and evaluate trends relatively quickly, adapt to different cultures, and craft creative approaches to stakeholders, products, services and social contexts.
The learning environment was also built from scratch.
Unlike traditional classrooms or horseshoe-shaped case-teaching classrooms, Bentley’s MBA Studio mirrors the layout historically employed by architecture and design students.
Students sit at technology-enabled team tables that are all connected to broader smart boards to maximize the interaction within small teams and among the entire class cohort. This ensures that faculty operate as facilitators rather than instructors.
Each student becomes a dynamic contributor to the discussion – standing up to debate with classmates, illustrating points on multimedia boards and continually engaging their smaller team to share perspectives based on collective experiences.
A comfortable lounge seating area and a kitchenette within the studio dedicated for the class 24 hours a day makes it the perfect location for delving deeper into the relevant issues and ideas after the more formal sessions.
Students also work informally with faculty in the studio – as colleagues and mentors – and use the space to prepare for the two-week field-based collaborations that follow the innovation, value and environments themes.
Thematic Structure of the Program
The Bentley MBA is totally thematic in its design. Traditional core material is embedded within each of the four themes that span the entire degree. These subjects are strengthened and debated at the points where the material – whether accounting, finance, marketing or whatever – is most relevant to the thematic element under investigation.
Furthermore, the glue that binds the themes and the foundation/discipline material is connections. As stated above, all four themes are examined and developed in the minds of the students with reference to self, others, context, thought and action.
The functional disciplines that constitute the core of most MBA programs are embedded in the value theme in a manner that achieves the interdisciplinary appreciation often said to be lacking in traditional MBA programs that rely on a capstone strategy course to achieve this level of multi-lens thinking.
- The Innovation Theme
During the first quarter of the program, students develop an appreciation of the value of innovation and creativity and devise new models for the role of business in society. They gain insight into how leaders must understand the environments in which they operate and how they need to act if they wish to build organizations where creativity can thrive and innovation follows.
Topics covered include: the psychology of innovation and how humans process information and generate creative ideas; theories of creativity and the conditions needed to sustain creative environments; design lifecycle; and how to develop and renew innovation through action that capitalizes its necessary relationship to strategy.
The Value Theme
Students develop a fuller understanding of value and its impact on business. Although value is at the heart of every business strategy, its meaning is both complex and subjective.
Appreciating how different interpretations and assessments of value can influence decisions, the theme is designed to ensure delegates:- reflect on what value means and appreciate how meanings vary among different stakeholders
- understand how organizations derive value and align processes and resources to help build it
- learn about different ways value is generated.
- develop measurement tools and analytical skills necessary to derive sources of value as well as sustain them.
- The Environments Theme
Recognizing that organizations and managers do not operate in isolation, students are exposed sequentially to the wider setting of the firm, community, country and world when making decisions.
Environments examined include:- social contexts and how they are formed and sustained within and across organizations, countries and world
- economic, including how to gauge the stability of the overall macroeconomic environment, and how market structures prevalent in an industry can affect the likelihood of innovation and adoption of new technologies
- the radical impact of technology and networks on organizations and how they control themselves and their value chains.
- The Leadership Theme
During the culminating theme of the program, students further integrate what they have learned and turn inwards to reflect upon their own leadership styles and to track their personal development. Their capabilities for communicating credibly with different groups to earn their trust are further enhanced during the theme.
The nature of leadership, the extent to which it can be taught, the role of emotional intelligence, and the range of challenges leaders confront are explored.
Faculty members and leadership experts serve as guides and mentors while students reflect on their preferred leadership styles, skills and capabilities as well as strengths and weaknesses. Regular reflection on their experiences is designed to facilitate their development as ethical and strategic leaders.
The theme also challenges them to examine the technical aspects of decision making amid uncertainty and when stakeholder engagement is present. Emphasis is placed on understanding agency theory and the dynamics of considering asymmetrical information, IT and strategy, and creating an effective control environment.
Field-Based Collaborative Experiences
Twelve-day field experiences follow each of the first three themes. Students join faculty and members of organizations at host sites to explore complex business topics that are designed to evolve out of the completed theme and introduce topics that are then covered in the subsequent theme.
The experiences provide an essential component of the “real-world” immersion built into the overall program design and Bentley faculty members’ roles are oriented to ensuring students apply key lessons and concepts gleaned from previous themes.
Each field-based collaborative experience involves multiple stakeholder groups or organizations and focuses on issues relevant to all business sectors. Students are not working to solve a problem, but to address an issue—generally one for which an actionable solution does not readily exist.
Last year, for example, students learned how a variety of consumer-oriented Greek businesses have adapted their strategies for survival in a post-financial crisis world, departing Athens on the eve of the recent elections that brought the Syriza party into power.
The goals of each immersion experience are to emphasize the proper approach for evaluating persistent issues and to illuminate the skills and limitations experienced by competent leaders in such circumstances.
International immersion experiences over the first four iterations of the program have involved visits to Chile, France, Ghana, Greece, South Africa and Turkey.
Conclusion
Thus far, Bentley has recruited four cohorts and 90 students into the program. While the intakes have yet to grow to the desired capacity (the dedicated MBA Studio has been designed deliberately for a maximum of 36 students sitting around six technology-enabled team tables), successes have been significant.
73 percent of the students come onto the program directly from overseas, 42 percent are women and the average work experience of each class is around 10 years. The diversity of backgrounds is also significant – on entry into the program over half already have one or more advanced degrees with, 10 percent having PhDs. Several have been Fulbright scholars.
Read about the current MBA class.
Career paths of entering students include academia, consulting, entrepreneurship, family business, financial markets, military, religion and theatre. Feedback from the students and employers has been extremely positive, with one graduate making a five-figure gift to the university within four months of graduating.
Learn more about how Bentley’s MBA program works and how it’s preparing graduates for career success.