Old Truths, New World, Today’s Managers

BY DEAN ROBERT JOSS

November, 2002

People often ask me, “What are you teaching at the Business School—what’s new?” More recently, they ask how our teaching has changed or will change in light of the highly publicized losses, inequities, leadership failures, and even outright fraud of the past few turbulent years. My answer has three parts.

First, and most important, we teach the old truths of business. To be successful, any company has to: (1) attract and retain customers (one at a time!) by offering products and services of superior value; (2) charge a price that represents good value but which also covers the cost of production and distribution (which means the business must become proficient at production and distribution) and still provides a satisfactory return for the owners of the business; (3) attract and retain committed, motivated employees who make delivery of these sustained returns possible; and (4) continually earn community respect and support for the company.

These old truths have not changed and have not been repealed by any notion of a new economy. I find our alums take comfort in knowing that the core of our MBA Program is aimed at instilling a deep understanding of these truths, on mastering the foundational material that makes them workable for practicing managers, and in pushing students to think critically about their implications for one’s career and job choices.

But while there may not be a new economy, each generation of students is in a new world when it comes to the nature of the business environment. So my second point is that we have worked hard to improve our curriculum to prepare students to apply the old truths to the new world they will be facing. In particular, we have seen globalization, technology, and human resource management as dominant business issues and as critical new core features of our teaching and learning over the past decade and into the next. This new world is fast paced, full of change, complex, highly competitive, and extremely challenging when it comes to executing business strategies and achieving superior performance by combining teams of people with sophisticated information systems. Because of this new world, there is a lot of new material in our curriculum that was not there 10 and 20 years ago—but the old truths are still the foundation for our core program.

My third point is that it is today’s managers who have to integrate the old truths of business with the new environment to build enterprises that perform well for all their stakeholders. People change and adapt more slowly than technology or the competitive environment, and they need to be helped along by those who occupy leadership roles in our institutions. By gaining their trust and confidence, leaders have to earn followers and have followers who do the right things. Leaders set good examples, and they accept full responsibility for accomplishing the right outcomes. To lead, it takes discipline, integrity, emotional strength, personal humility, and lots of practice. It is not just about being smart—but also about having strong character.

We want to do more in the area of leadership development for our students. There are a number of relevant courses already in our curriculum, and we plan to supplement these with experiences that allow students to practice and build skills that enhance one’s prospects for success as a leader.

It is particularly in this third area of today’s managers where new things are happening and where ethics will rise in importance and relevance. Our goal at the GSB is to prepare students for satisfying professional lives —lives that will generally involve lots of decision making. Students leave here with great frameworks and foundations for decision analysis. They also leave with an awareness that decision making is not just about whether or not the numbers look good—but more important, whether the decision is the right one. This is the focus in all our classes across all the disciplines. The intense media coverage of recent scandals has sharpened our focus on ethics and heightens the critical importance of looking beyond the numbers and the legal minimum to determine what is the right way forward. I can assure all of you that our faculty is bringing ethical questions and discussions to the front burner, so that students understand throughout their careers the importance of confronting these issues.

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