CHENNAI: Saïd Business School (SBS) of UK-based University of Oxford, arguably one of the best B-Schools of the world (occupied 24th position in Financial Times rankings and sixth in Forbes) is revamping its one-year MBA programme for 2014/15. More on it from Dana Brown, MBA Programme Director, SBS.
Why the need for a revamp?
We wanted to future-proof the MBA and to ensure that the programme really does fulfil the needs of today’s students working in a challenging and evolving business environment. To achieve this, we have introduced a series of important innovations to the MBA programme. Like all business schools, at Oxford, we make ongoing adjustments to our programmes to keep in step with changes in the external business environment. But a year ago we began a thorough review of the MBA programme to ensure it was the best and most relevant programme it could possibly be, and would best equip our students — who will be our future leaders — for the challenging careers they will experience around the world.
What exactly do you propose to do?
We have introduced three cross-cutting themes related to the world scale challenges shaping today’s business environment.
Global rules of the game: Encouraging our MBAs to challenge the rules of the game and to rethink those rules. We want them to understand what are the institutions that structure capitalism — the unwritten rules, norms and laws that shape the global economy; the international institutions, agreements, differences and disputes across borders and how do they constrain or enhance business opportunities. Once they understand this context, our MBAs should be questioning the status quo.
Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurs are not just those who start companies, but those who effectively deploy resources to devise business solutions. Entrepreneurship is a mindset from which all organisations — established and new — can benefit.
Responsible leadership: We are taking an interdisciplinary view of the role of the corporation in society and the related ethical and governance challenges that confront business leaders. This will be a challenging module which will move from the systems and societal levels to the individual and also will examine students’ own values, career goals and responsibilities as leaders.
We believe that future business leaders will be confronted with complex global issues, and companies will require people who have a wide range of skills and abilities to navigate the challenging landscape of global business. Knowledge in these areas is relevant whatever size business, sector or location you are working in.
What else is in the offing?
We also took the opportunity to extend and strengthen the courses in core business disciplines, providing our MBAs with a solid grounding in the fundamentals which can be followed up with more advanced examination of core business areas in our elective courses; development of further pre-arrival materials and ongoing support classes; an enhanced talent development initiative and the opportunity to work with an executive coach and expand the range of electives, including those that bring in the voices and views of other departments in the University.
We hear that students are going to have a personal coach…
Our students will have the opportunity to have one-to-one coaching sessions with a professional coach from among the School’s coaching community. The coaching is offered as part of a wider programme of talent development to support students in gaining the personal skills needed for professional success. It is intended to help students increase their self-awareness, teamwork skills, communication and networking skills.
This is executive coaching, not careers coaching. Students have free choice to identify topics for discussion with their coach that they want to work on. We see coaching as a way to help students get the most out of the year they spend on the MBA.
Entrepreneurship is an integral part of an MBA nowadays. Have you renewed the focus on the same?
Entrepreneurship has always been an important part of the Oxford MBA. It runs throughout the programme with a mix of theoretical perspectives, technical and practical approaches in order to help students develop their entrepreneurship mindset. We have kept our popular and very valuable Entrepreneurship Project, where students develop a business model around an idea of their choosing which they present to a panel of investors and entrepreneurs.
We are now strengthening and formalising the entrepreneurship context in which this sits, giving a strong conceptual and theoretical base from which to work. We are also discussing entrepreneurship skills explicitly. We wanted to cover entrepreneurial thinking in the widest sense, so we are thinking along the lines of deploying resources to develop business solutions to challenges; how entrepreneurial thinking can help us address global challenges; innovations which simultaneously address social issues and make profits; technological entrepreneurship; to encompass innovation which occurs within the firm and stimulates new business opportunities and draw upon the practical expertise within the School located in the Entrepreneurship Centre and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs are invaluable for growth: they disrupt established models and norms and reset them in new and often better ways — to our advantage. They are typically good relationship builders who create value through combining exiting resources in fresh ways to create opportunities and address problems. We want to develop these skills in all of our students.
Your MBA review aims to create responsible business leaders — what are the key aspects you’ll be teaching to achieve this?
Responsible leadership is something we take seriously at Oxford and so we have put it at the heart of the MBA programme. It has permeated our teaching in recent years but now we have pulled together the various facets into a dedicated integrative module. The new course will look at two things — the design and purpose of the corporation itself and the ethical decision-making of business leaders, and how business leaders can recognise and respond to issue with a moral dimension.
Our MBA students are tomorrow’s business leaders — the people who will run our energy companies, manufacturing firms, financial institutions. Rather than accepting the established norms and values that have let us to the brink of financial and environmental disaster, we need to question the status quo and discuss what constitutes responsible leadership in the 21st Century. We want our students to establish the valuable habits of critical thinking and reflection now at the beginning of their careers which they will carry forward.
Details at www.sbs.ox.ac.uk.
— shilpa.vasudevan@newindianexpress.com