Update VI: Designing the Organizational Perspectives Courses

May 24, 2006

How do you develop an MBA course unlike any MBA course that’s been developed before? This is the question faced by Yale SOM senior faculty members currently designing the Organizational Perspectives courses for the new SOM core curriculum.

The eight Organizational Perspectives courses, which will occupy about twelve weeks in the middle of the first year of the new Yale MBA program, replace traditional functional management courses, such as Finance, Marketing, and Economics, with a multidisciplinary approach organized around eight stakeholders or constituencies a manager must engage and work with in order to solve problems – or make progress – within an organization. (See Update IV for information on the courses on the four external stakeholders and Update V for information on the four internal constituencies.)

In keeping with their multidisciplinary approach, the courses are being designed by multidisciplinary teams of Yale SOM faculty. The design teams are taking particular care to balance the influence of the preexisting functional management courses with the integration of a broad perspective. For example, the new Customer course will draw from the Marketing discipline and yet differ substantially from a traditional Marketing course because issues will be viewed from the perspective of the customer rather than the firm and the new course will integrate concepts from other relevant disciplines, such as Economics, Managerial Accounting, and Strategy.

These multidisciplinary teams will work closely with outside consultants, who include our adjunct faculty and well-known practicing managers who are often Yale SOM or Yale College alumni. The teams and consultants will use the opportunity to re-examine the relevance of content currently taught in the core as well as to consider introducing many topics that have traditionally not been included in the core curriculum, such as legal and tax issues.

The process of designing these innovative new courses is iterative, and the faculty designers expect that the Organizational Perspectives courses will develop over time, until they only hint at the functional management discipline courses from which they sprang. At the same time, SOM will build the pedagogical infrastructure—including innovative cases, notes, videos, and other teaching materials—to support its new curriculum.

Finally, each Organizational Perspectives course will link to the others in the eight-course series, providing (along with the final segment of the new core, Integrated Leadership Perspective) an integrated view of management practice that will afford Yale SOM graduates with the perspectives and insights necessary to be true leaders throughout their careers.