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R MBAeconsidered The Three business schools make radical departures from traditional MBA formats. by Tricia Bisoux The French have a concept called "savoir se relier." In English, the phrase means "to know how to connect," explains Valérie Gauthier, associate dean of the MBA program at HEC Paris. It's a concept that emphasizes the complex connections between people and cultures, between skill sets, and across disciplines, says Gauthier. And at HEC Paris, it forms a principal component of the school's newly redesigned MBA curriculum that it implemented last September. HEC Paris is among a growing number of business schools that are abandoning traditional approaches to the MBA, adopting instead new models that emphasize disciplinary integration, student self-assessment, and experiential learning. BizEd spoke to three administrators who are spearheading radical redesigns of their MBA programs: Gauthier of HEC Paris; Joel Podolny, dean of the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut; and Garth Saloner, professor of eco- nomics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California and leader of its curricular reform task force. In the process of adopting new frameworks for their MBA programs, each of these schools has adopted a different set of core courses and has followed different educational philosophies. But they share very similar objectives: to graduate students who are stronger leaders, better communicators, more nimble problem solvers, and more effective "connectors" who understand the rapidly moving parts of business. 'Reacting Is Not Enough' As these institutions implement their new MBA programs, one of their most impor- tant objectives may be the most difficult to achieve—to develop an anticipatory, rather than reactionary, approach to developing the business curriculum. When corporate scandals made ethics imperative, business schools added ethics courses to their curricula; when leaders began discussing corporate social responsibility, CSR courses proliferated. In this way, business schools have merely reacted to these changes in the busi- ness climate, notes Gauthier. If business schools want to design the best curricula to serve business, "reacting is not enough," she says. "As educators, we need to anticipate as much as possible. We need to stay ahead and address what the world needs in terms of human resources and capacities and develop those capacities early on. We need to examine the critical political, social, and economic factors the world faces. We must consider today what the world will need from us tomorrow." Architects of the latest MBA redesigns hope that their programs will be inher- ently flexible. Their new curricula are designed to anticipate the solutions business needs and change to provide these solutions as quickly as possible. "This is a discrete shift for us," says Saloner of Stanford. "We will learn to adapt and change." Podolny hopes that Yale's new program will be so adaptable that it won't require another complete overhaul for some time. "Now that we've got the structure in place, we will continue to tweak and refine it," says Podolny. "From the enthusiasm of our faculty and students, we do know that we're going in the right direction." 44 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2007