Planning the Development of Builders, Leaders

and Managers for 21st-Century Business

Planning the Development of Builders, Leaders

and Managers for 21st-Century Business:

Curriculum Review at Columbia Business School

Noel Capon Graduate School of Business

Columbia University

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS Boston/Dordrecht/London

Distributors for North America: Kluwer Academic Publishers 10 1 Philip Drive Assinippi Park Norwell, Massachusetts 02061 USA

Distributors for all other countries: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group Distribution Centre Post Office Box 322 3300 AH Dordrecht, THE NETHERLANDS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Capon, Noel.

Planning the development of builders, leaders, and managers for 21st-century business: curriculum review at Columbia Business School 1 Noel Capon.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-94-010-7312-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-1822-1 DOl: 10.1 007/978-94-009-1822-1

1. Business education--United States--Curricula. 2. Management­-Study and teaching--United States. 3. Columbia University. Graduate School of Business--Curricula .. 4. Curriculum planning­-United States. I. Title. HF 1131.C395 1996 650' .071'17471--dc20 96-13809

Copyright ~ 1996 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996

CIP

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise,without the prior written permission of the publisher, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Assinippi Park, Norwell, Massachusetts 02061.

Printed on acid-free paper.

DEDICATION

To the faculty of Columbia Business School: past, present and future

CONTENTS

Prologue

Preface

Author's Note

About the Author

Section A: Introduction to the Study

Chapter 1: Purpose of the Study

Chapter 2: The Growth of Business Education

Chapter 3: Theoretical and Empirical Underpinnings

Page

IX

XI

xiii

Xv

3

15

39

Section B: Historical Development at Columbia Business School 57

Chapter 4: Curriculum Review at Columbia Business School in the 1950s and 1960s 59

Chapter 5: Initiating the Curriculum Review Process in the Early 1990s 85

Chapter 6: Curriculum Review and the Strategic Planning Process 99

Section C: Contemporary Curriculum Review at Columbia Business School 121

Chapter 7: Developing the Information Base for Curriculum Redesign 123

Chapter 8: Early Development of a New Curriculum Design 151

Chapter 9: The Process of Forging the Curriculum Review Proposal 179

Chapter 10: Key Issues in Designing Individual Courses 211

Chapter 11: Key Structural Issues Concerning the MBA Program as a Whole 241

Section D: Implementing and Executing the New Curriculum 253

Chapter 12: Implementing the New Curriculum 255

Chapter 13: Executing the New Curriculum 271

Section E: Conclusions 293

Chapter 14: Curriculum Change in Context-I: Historical Evolution of Columbia Business School 295

Chapter 15: Curriculum Change in Context-II: Models of Organizational Decision Making 309

Chapter 16: Comparing and Learning from the Two Curriculum Changes 337

Epilogue 359

Appendices

Appendix 1: Major Features of Curriculum Review at Leading Graduate School of Business 367

Appendix 2: Deans of the Columbia Business School 385

Appendix 3: Curriculum Review Committee Attendance 387

Appendix 4: Survey Questionnaires

Appendix 4A: Survey Questionnaire for Current Students and Recent Alumni 389

Appendix 4B: Survey Questionnaire for Mid-Career Alumni 395

Appendix 5: Topics Discussed in the Curriculum Review Process

Appendix 5A: Curriculum Review Committee Meetings 401

Appendix 5B: Curriculum Implementation Committee Meetings 407

Appendix 6: Documents Used by, Developed for and Resulting from the Curriculum Review Process 409

Appendix 7: First Unified Proposal, May 1991: Core Course Descriptions 431

Appendix 8: Final Proposal, October 1991: Core Course Descriptions 439

References 465

Index 479

PROLOGUE

A decisive incident concerning Columbia Business School's relationship with the University was the trigger that ultimately led to redesign of its curriculum in the early 1990s. President Michael Sovern accepted Provost Goldberger's recommendation that he reject the recommendation of the University ad hoc committee and deny tenure to Dominique Hanssens.

In the mid-1970s, when I was chair ofthe marketing area at the Graduate School of Management, UCLA, we were successful in hiring Hanssens, then a highly sought­after graduating doctoral student from Purdue University, to join the marketing faculty. In a very close decision, Hanssens chose to join UCLA rather than Columbia Business School. In 1988, Columbia again attempted to hire Hanssens, now with an established worldwide reputation in marketing. The Columbia Business School faculty, of which I was by then a tenured member, unanimously recommended appointing Hanssens to a tenured position, but, despite a four to one positive vote in the University ad hoc committee, Provost Goldberger recommended that the appointment be denied. President Sovern accepted his provost's recommendation. I

Unwilling to accept this affront to the Business School, Dean Sandy Burton resigned in protest.2 Some 18 months later, after an extensive search, Meyer Feldberg was hired as Columbia Business School's new dean. One of Feldberg's first priorities was to examine the MBA curriculum.

1 Within a year, Provost Goldberger had resigned and was replaced by Jonathan Cole. 2The Hanssens case was a cause celebre within the University. The issue also was featured prominently in the New York Times.

PREFACE

Business and management education has an important impact on business practice throughout the world. Thousands of MBAs, graduated each year from schools of business and management, enter industrial organizations. As a result, the world-wide stock of active MBAs working in industry exceeds one million persons. To a very large extent, possession of the MBA degree is a passport into the upper reaches of management, and CEOs of many major corporations have eamed an MBA. It is a reasonable inference that the education received by these leaders and managers during their MBA experience has an important impact on the way that businesses throughout the world are led and managed and that major corporate decisions are made.

The heart of the MBA education is the curriculum, and curriculum design is perhaps the most important strategic function for a business school faculty to undertake. Among the hundreds of business schools that offer the MBA degree, a small number act as a reference group from which the many other schools expect leadership in curriculum design. By any measure, Columbia Business School is one of these elite institutions; based in New York City, it has for many years been a worldwide leader in business education. From 1990 to 1992, Columbia Business School engaged in the process of redesigning its curriculum. The major purpose of this book is to describe and analyze that process.

However, in order to understand fully the many issues concerning this contemporary curriculum review we examine three related contextual domains. First, we detail the long-term growth of business and management education. Second, we examine the major theoretical and empirical literatures on organizational evolution and decision making, paying special attention to decision making in institutions of higher education. Finally, we describe the previous major curriculum review at Columbia Business School in the late 1950s and the subsequent changes that formed the status quo curriculum that was dethroned in 1992.

In focusing on the most recent curriculum review, we shall highlight the various forces that came together to precipitate the curriculum redesign, describe the curriculum redesign process per se, highlight the major issues that surfaced during the redesign, elaborate the new curriculum and discuss the first year's offering. We shall then relate the curriculum redesign process to major theoretical perspectives in

organizational evolution and managerial decision making and compare this contemporary curriculum review process with that conducted more than 30 years earlier by highlighting both the similarities and differences. Finally, the extent to which each of the two reviews proceeded in a manner congruent with normative prescriptions for successful collegiate innovation is analyzed, and some additional tentative normative prescriptions for major curriculum review that emerge from this study are presented.

By detailing the curriculum redesign process at Columbia Business School, we attempt to shed light on what is commonly acknowledged to be a very difficult organizational innovation. In addition, we extend a practice initiated more than 30 years ago of publishing comprehensive accounts of curriculum change at Columbia Business School.

The material in this book demonstrates to the student customers of graduate business schools what can be achieved by an institution that sets high standards for its business education, and assists key faculty and administrators in other schools of business and management as they contemplate revision of their curricula. In addition, we show the leaders and managers of business enterprises a prime example of curriculum design effort in one of the leading institutions worldwide that provide much of their management talent. We hope that they may learn from Columbia Business School's efforts and use their influence and resources to assist in upgrading business education throughout the world. Finally, we believe that this study will be of interest to scholars in several different fields, notably higher education curriculum review, organizational decision making and long-run organizational evolution.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I commenced writing this book in summer 1992, just prior to the fall 1992 introduction of the new curriculum. I was a member of the Curriculum Review Committee from the time of its formation in late December 1989 until it was disbanded following acceptance of its recommendations for a new curriculum by the Columbia Business School faculty in October 1991. I then served on the Curriculum Implementation Committee, on the design team to develop the new core course in marketing, as core course coordinator for the new marketing course and, in 1994, as a member of the committee to review the new curriculum.

The idea for writing this book came to me in January 1991 after the Curriculum Review Committee had been at work for approximately one year. I realized that by virtue of my appointment to the committee, I had access to detailed information on a major organizational innovation that might prove of interest to a wide variety of readers---educators, administrators, business school students, students of organizational decision making and organizational evolution, and corporate managers.) In addition, working on this book would dovetail with my research interests in strategic decision making.

Methodologically, therefore, this work makes heavy use of the participant observer technique. It has been supplemented by extensive interviews with present members of the Columbia Business School faculty, notably members of the Curriculum Review and Strategic Planning committees, and with faculty who were involved in the development and implementation of the previous curriculum review in the late 1950s. Of course, my developing interest in writing this book, in accord with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, no doubt also affected the nature of my participation in the process and, hence, its final outcome.

This book could not have been written without the exceptionally dedicated efforts of my colleagues on the Curriculum Review Committee: faculty-Enrique Arzac, Ann Bartel, Sandy Burton, John Donaldson, Frank Edwards, Linda Green, Donald Hambrick, Donald Kirk, Peter Kolesar, David Lewin, Rick Mishkin and Donald

) In publishing this detailed account of decision making at Columbia Business School, I am hopeful that my faculty colleagues will accept the spirit of scholarly enquiry that motivated this enterprise, and so avoid adopting a negative view such as that reportedly taken by Prime Minister Harold Wilson following publication of The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister by Richard Crossman in 1975.

Sexton-and students-Kerry Beck, Carol Henriques, Andy Kapit, Suzanne Shennan and Cindy Stone. They, together with members of the Strategic Planning Committee-Meyer Feldberg, Linda Green, Glenn Hubbard, Don Lehmann, Gerry Lewis, James Ohlson, Hugh Patrick, Jace Schindennan, Suresh Sundaresan, Mike Tushman and Bob Yavitz-and the Curriculum Implementation Committee-Pun am Anand, Schon Beechler, Mark Broadie, Sidney Browne, Ming-Jer Chen, John Donaldson, Awi Federgruen, Paolo Fulghieri, Jordi Gali, Alberto Giovannini, Linda Green, Bruce Greenwald, Trevor Harris, Kevin Hassett, Kathy Harrigan, Geoffrey Heal, Mac Hulbert, Casey Ichniowski, Dev Joneja, Frank Lichtenberg, Safwan Masri, Ram Ramakrishnan, Suresh Sundaresan, Michael Tushman and Paul Zipkin-labored long and hard to bring about many changes in Columbia Business School in the early 1990s, the centerpiece of which was a new curriculum for the MBA program. In addition, Committee on Instruction (COl) members and many faculty colleagues tested and challenged our efforts throughout the process. Finally, many students, administrators, alumni, recruiters, senior executives and friends of the School played important roles in the curriculum review process.

In addition to those efforts, many people assisted in writing this book by allowing me to interview them and/or reading portions of the manuscript. They include current Columbia Business School faculty: Enrique Arzac, Ann Bartel, David Beim, Linda Green, Donald Hambrick, Donald Kirk, James Kuhn, Donald Lehmann, Mike Tushman and Kirby Warren; fonner, retired and emeritus Columbia Business School faculty: Eli Ginzberg, John A. Howard, Donald Morrison, Roger Murray (fonner associate dean), William Newman, Chester Owens (fonner associate dean), Giulio Pontecorvo, Gordon Shillinglaw, Clarence Walton (fonner associate dean), Ernest Williams and Boris Yavitz (fonner dean); Columbia students and alumni: Kenneth C. Craddock, Karen Kurtzberg and Tracy Robinson; current and fonner Columbia Business School administrators: Gail Berson and Jace Schindennan; other interested professionals: Dr. Robert Dean Foster, Pennsylvania College of Technology; Professor James Howell, Stanford University; Professor Lyman W. Porter, University of California, Irvine; and Professor Emeritus William Toombs, The Pennsylvania State University; and several anonymous reviewers. I am grateful for their assistance and for that of those I have inadvertently omitted to thank.

This book was largely written while I was in residence at Columbia Business School in New York City or enjoying R&R on North Captiva Island, Florida; it was completed while I was a visiting professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Support for this work was provided by the Redward Foundation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Noel Capon is a tenured full professor at Columbia Business School. Professor Capon's initial university education comprised a B.Sc. and Ph.D. in chemistry from University College, London University. He worked for four years with the major British chemical company, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), before commencing his management studies at Manchester Business School. Further study at Harvard Business School (MBA) and Columbia Business School (Ph.D.) led to his first teaching appointment at the Graduate School of Management, UCLA. Subsequent to receiving tenure at UCLA, Professor Capon taught for two years at Harvard Business School before joining the Columbia facuIty in 1979; he was awarded tenure in 1986.

The recipient of teaching awards at both UCLA and Columbia, Professor Capon has also taught at the major European business school, INSEAD, Fontainbleau, France; University of Hawaii; Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. In addition, he regularly directs and teaches executive seminars at Columbia's executive training center, Arden House, and teaches and consults for major corporations throughout the world.

Professor Capon is widely published. His more than 40 articles have appeared in: Annals of Operations Research; Columbia Journal of World Business; Communication Research; Developmental Psychology; HaJvard Business Review; Industrial Marketing Management; Journal of Advertising Research; Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology; Journal of Applied Psychology; Journal of Business Administration; Journal of Consumer Research; Journal of Financial Services Research; Journal of International Business Studies; Journal of International Forecasting; Journal of Management Studies; Journal of Marketing; Journal of Marketing Research; Lending for the Commercial Banker; Management Decision; Management Science; Public Opinion Quarterly; and Strategic Management Journal. In addition, he has contributed to numerous edited books.

Professor Capon has published two books: Corporate Strategic Planning, a major study of the planning practices of major U.S. manufacturing corporations (Columbia University Press 1988) and The Marketing of Financial Services: A Book of Cases (Prentice-Hall 1992). A book on the underpinnings of superior corporate financial

perfonnance, Why Some Firms Perform Better than Others: Towards a More Integrative Explanation, will shortly be published (Kluwer 1996, in press). He is editor for sections on Marketing and Sales Management and Distribution in the AMA Management Handbook (1994) and is currently developing a book of Asian marketing cases.