New Dean Sees Balance In UA?s Business School

Have business schools become too academic? Are they producing graduates who are prepared for the real world?

Those are questions raised by Warren G. Bennis and James O’Toole in “How Business Schools Lost Their Way,” an essay in the May issue of the Harvard Business Review.

The two professors at the University of Southern California have rekindled the debate over the relevance of business schools.

“[The] scientific model, as we call it, is predicated on the faulty assumption that business is an academic discipline like chemistry or geology,” they wrote. “In fact, business is a profession, akin to medicine and the law, and business schools are professional schools — or should be.”

“The things the authors call for in their article the Walton College has been and is currently engaged in,” said Dan Worrell, who took over in late August as dean of the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business.

“The type of discussion brought up in this article is not new,” Dean Worrell said. “People have been talking about the relevance of business education [since I was working on my doctorate in the 1970s]. There’s always been this debate about practice versus theory, and a good answer to that is nothing is as practical as a good theory.”

Worrell believes the Walton College is thoroughly grounded in real-world business training.

“Our structure lends itself to injecting a strong dose of practicality in our business education,” he said. “But we don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. We are a doctoral-granting business school. We have world-class faculty that are engaged in discovery, not just dissemination, of knowledge.

“That is the great thing about the Walton College. We do have a great balance.”

For the past 12 years, Doyle Z. Williams served as dean, shepherding the school through a metamorphosis of fundraising and national recognition. Under Williams, the college strengthened its ties to the local business community, which because of geography includes Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the largest retailer in the world.

In 1998, the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation gave $50 million to the business school, which was subsequently named for Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. It was the largest gift at the time to a public business school. Since then, the college has climbed steadily in national rankings. U.S. News & World Report recently ranked the Walton College as the No. 24 undergraduate business college in the nation.

Williams now serves as dean emeritus and professor in the Walton College.

’50s Foundations

According to the HBR essay, during the first half of the 20th century, business schools were more akin to trade schools.

“Most professors were good ole boys dispensing war stories, cracker-barrel wisdom and the occasional practical pointer,” Bennis and O’Toole wrote. “We remember when MIT’s Sloan School of Management was known as MIT School of Industrial Management and its production class was taught by the manager of a nearby General Motors assembly plant. That was a useful, but hardly comprehensive and professional education.”

Then the Ford and Carnegie foundations issued reports in 1959 saying business schools needed “respectable academic underpinnings.” Since then, Bennis and O’Toole claim, universities have gone overboard with what some call “physics envy,” an overemphasis on research and theory.

One reason this is a problem, they argue, is that academics tend to be comfortable researching only things that can be measured. And unmeasurable human factors — such as judgment, ethics and morality — make the difference between good and bad business decisions.

“When applied to business — essentially a human activity in which judgments are made with messy, incomplete and incoherent data — statistical and methodological wizardry can blind rather than illuminate,” Bennis and O’Toole wrote. “What looks like a straightforward financial decision — say, to cut costs by relocating a service center — often has implications for marketing, sales, manufacturing and morale that can’t be shoehorned into an equation.”

“Management is both art and science,” Worrell said. “That’s never been denied by anyone in the academy that I know of. We believe you can be a much better manager by practicing. That’s the art component. The science part on the front end has prepared you to be ready for those challenges in a generic, non-specific sort of sense.”

The bottom line, according to Bennis and O’Toole, is that business schools across the country “chiefly serve the faculty’s research interests and career goals.”

Fernandes Rebuttal

John J. Fernandes, president and CEO of the American Assembly of Collegiate Business Schools, believes the Bennis-O’Toole essay is based on an outdated premise. In a letter published in the September issue of the HBR, he wrote that Bennis and O’Toole ignored “the significant changes sweeping through today’s modern business schools, which no longer run on the old-news scientific model.”

AACBS International requires the more than 500 schools it accredits to develop programs with corporate leaders and managers “to make their curricula relevant to today’s business environment,” Fernandes wrote.

“Some schools have actually opened small businesses — from mini brokerage houses to full-blown consulting firms — where students gain hands-on experience,” he wrote. “Retired CEOs teach classes. Corporate executives sit on B-school advisory boards and committees. Success breeds success. Companies know that if they invest in B-schools, they will encourage many bright, new employees to join their ranks.”

But Jeffrey E. Garten, who is stepping down after 10 years as dean of the Yale School of Management, seems to agree with Bennis and O’Toole.

In a June 19 article in The New York Times, Garten replied to a question about how students are taught at the Yale business school:

“I think the current model of business school education needs to change dramatically. I think there should be different criteria for tenuring faculty. Right now, a professor would get tenure on the same qualifications as he or she would if they were in the department of economics or a department of history. What business schools need to do is add some criteria for promotion. One of them should be real-world experience, in the same way that a doctor teaching at a medical school would have to see patients.”

Garten went on to say that the percentage of business school professors nationwide who have had real-world experience is “miniscule.”

“Business schools need to have a two-track faculty, with the second track being a clinical faculty, that is, people who may not have the academic qualifications to get tenure or even do real academic research, but who would bring into the classroom the world of practice and experience,” he was quoted as saying.

Bennis and O’Toole point out that the physics envy seems to be at its worse at upper echelon schools like those of the Ivy League.

Walton College Way

Worrell agrees with the med school analogy, saying the Walton College already resembles a teaching hospital where physicians are on the “cutting edge.”

“It’s a comprehensive mission here,” he said. “At the same time that we have this thrust if you will, also like the physicians, we’re engaged in direct dialogue and contact with the practitioners. We have direct dialogue with practicing business people at all times. It brings immediate relevancy to our programs. We are very active boundary spanners.”

The Walton College has executives in residence, such as Andy Murray, president of Saatchi & Saatchi X of Fayetteville, in the Center for Retailing Excellence this fall. Last year, Don Bland, former vice president of specialty merchandising in Wal-Mart’s international division, was the Center’s executive in residence. Before that, it was Bob Connolly, Wal-Mart’s executive vice president of marketing and consumer communications.

This year, Bland is on the Walton College faculty teaching Principles of Marketing, a junior level class. And Don Bechtel, retried Procter & Gamble logistics and supply-chain manager, has been hired to teach two junior-level classes, Principles of Transportation and Business Logistics.

“The natural advantage we have is in part our location,” Worrell said, referring to Wal-Mart, its suppliers and other area companies. “We do have these major corporations here, and they do have a ripple effect … We are well aware of that, and we reach out to those external constituents. We have a much higher degree of investment than your average bear.”

Worrell previously served as dean of the College of Business Administration at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.