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RETHINKING THE MODEL… BY REPOSITIONING In September, Audencia Nantes School of Management in France will relaunch its one-year full-time MBA as an MBA in Responsible Management. The new program—which is still the school's general MBA program, not a specialized offering—will better differentiate the school from competitors, says Rhona Johnsen, Audencia's director of MBA programs. "We were finding that students tended to view all MBAs as the same. They would ask us, 'What do you do differently?' That question pushed us to think more deeply about what our strengths and competencies are," Johnsen says. The school's repositioning was finalized after a two-year analysis of the global MBA market. "We found that business schools were increasingly launching specialized master's programs and differentiating their programs based on their expertise," says Johnsen. "The classical model of the MBA appeared to be changing." The school chose to focus on responsible management after it realized how much of its activity already was related to the topic, from its corporate consultancy projects and faculty research to its Research Institute for Global Responsibility and Entrepreneurship. The repositioned MBA will be further supported by student exchanges with the University of Exeter's One Planet MBA, based in the U.K., which is "a flagship example of how an MBA can relate more to responsible management," says Johnsen. As part of this transition, Audencia's MBA curriculum has undergone a significant overhaul, now incorporating courses such as "Responsible Finance and Accounting" and "Sustainable Operations Management." Rather than assign professors to teach certain courses, the school invited them to submit ideas for courses they'd like to teach that would support the new regime. That flexibility "has opened up a range of creative possibilities for our faculty," says Johnsen. Most important, says Johnsen, the school now has an answer for students who ask how Audencia's program differs from others in the market. The candidates who have applied so far, she says, "are already convinced that ours is the type of MBA they want." responsible for the costs of building maintenance, security, and employee health insurance and retirement plans. "Once deans add up the total cost of ownership, many realize that business schools reap significant benefits from being part of a university campus," says Jessup. Rather than going private, Jessup strongly advocates that public universities adopt responsibilitycentered management, or RCM, the financial model that the University of Arizona is in the process of implementing. In the U.S., the 22 July/August 2013 BizEd RCM model was pioneered by schools such as Indiana University and the University of Michigan in the mid-1970s, when they converted from a centralized administration overseeing the entire university to a decentralized system that allowed individual departments to retain control over their own tuition dollars. In return, each department pays a tax back to the university to support central services—the taxes from financially stronger programs subsidize less lucrative but strategically sig- nificant disciplines. For a business school, that tax often ranges from 30 percent to 50 percent of its tuition revenues. Under RCM, a business school can really spread its wings, says Jessup. But even though more large public universities are adopting some form of RCM, Jessup realizes that not all university presidents are ready to jump on the RCM bandwagon. Some are concerned that their universities will become more focused on generating revenue than on providing education as a public good. Others fear that less profitable departments might struggle—or even face closure. To persuade university leaders of the benefits of RCM, business school deans can fall back on their training in organizational behavior and change management, says Jessup. "There's strength in numbers. If you're arguing for RCM or a similar large-scale shift in mindset, bring other key decision makers— other deans—to the table," he says. "Have benchmarking data to show how and why others have done it. Most important, help university leaders understand that the school might not survive unless it shifts to some form of an RCM model." He points to Indiana University as one example deans can use to make their case. For instance, although IU's music school cannot sustain itself on its own tuition dollars, it's still ranked No. 3 in the nation. In fact, IU boasts 90 programs ranked in the top 25 in the country because RCM allows larger profit centers such as the business and law schools to remain entrepreneurial and generate more revenue. Those programs not only sustain themselves but also support