BizEd

MarchApril2009

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Your Turn Cross Trainers In today's business environment, cross-functionality isn't a buzzword; it's a requirement. In a 2006 senior management survey on innova- tion, BusinessWeek and the Boston Consulting Group named the lack of coordination across functions as the second-biggest barrier to inno- vation. In her BusinessWeek article, "The World's Most Innovative Companies," author Jena McGregor noted that "collaboration requires much more than paying lip service to breaking down silos. The best innovators reroute reporting lines and create physical spaces for col- laboration. They team up people from across the org chart and link rewards to innovation." Her point was that successful companies foster innovation specifically because they promote cross-functionality. Most business school deans will claim that their schools recognize the need for interdisciplinary training. If asked how cross-functionality is built into their curricula, they'll probably say that the issue is covered in an introductory class and the capstone strategy course. Yet anyone who reviews textbooks and course mate- rial for these classes will have a hard time determining how the schools approach cross-functional teaching and learning—particularly for under- graduates. In fact, I recently conduct- ed a study that showed that business schools have made efforts to integrate disciplines across functions in their MBA programs, but they have done little along these lines for BBAs. Could it be that—even armed with the knowledge that busi- nesses are run horizontally—business schools still educate undergraduate 62 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2009 by Victoria L. Crittenden students vertically? Does that mean our students will be unprepared to adapt to the changing needs of organizations? Does that mean our graduates will not have the interdis- ciplinary skills that will allow them to recognize and pursue innovation in the workplace? Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 1984, Jack Behrman and Richard Levin suggested that real- world business problems "do not yield to a single-discipline solution." More than 20 years later, have our business schools gotten any better at designing cross-functionality into the curriculum? Or have they just gotten better at making excuses for why they haven't? Through various teaching-related projects, informal discussions, and intensive reviews of cross-functional scholarship, I have identified what I call "The Top Five Excuses for Acknowledging the Need for Cross- Functional Education But Not Actu- ally Doing It." Excuse No. 5: Business schools are organized functionally. Organizational structure has long been blamed for the lack of inter- disciplinary integration. This func- tional division of labor dates back to the late 1700s and has common- sense appeal. That is, functional experts tackle vertical activities for which they are trained as specialists. Because the program is organized around academic departments, the curriculum tends to be segregated by function instead of integrated across disciplines. This excuse is actu- ally reinforced by numerous external organizations that not only rank graduate and undergraduate pro- grams, but also rank the top depart- ments within specific functions. Excuse No. 4: Faculty lack cross-functional training. In 2002, AACSB's Management Education Task Force put together a report called "Management Edu- cation at Risk," which acknowl- edged that business schools face real challenges when they try to blur the boundaries between edu- cational disciplines. Even so, the report emphasized the need for "doctoral graduates from programs outside the traditional advanced theoretical research category." Yet anyone who's ever recruited faculty knows that candidates are rarely reviewed with respect to their cross- functional expertise. Some educators believe that cross- functional initiatives will be launched only by teams of clinical professors and experienced lecturers working in tandem. If that's true, are business schools acknowledging the impor- tance of these teaching teams? Or do tenure-track faculty regard co-taught courses as insignificant? Excuse No. 3: The curriculum has always been functionally specialized. Historically, most business school curricula have encouraged special- ization by discipline, and it hasn't proved easy to revamp them. Department chairs say that they try to keep their functional courses up-to-date, but many of them do not report intriguing new cross- functional courses or benchmark- ing studies that examine educa- tion efforts that reach across silos. Some faculty members feel they've achieved cross-functional integra- tion merely because they encourage students to take concentrations in multiple disciplines. However, that leaves it to students to discover the

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