"Those of us teaching in business schools are really the marketing front line for management science and operations research," Bell says. "If we can't persuade our business graduates that MS/OR has value to corporations, then the battle is over and MS/OR is done."
The winds of war are blowing. Former TIMS President Gary Lilien reported in these pages last year (OR/MS Today, June 1994) that 19 of 21 business schools contacted in a telephone survey indicated a lesser role for MS/OR in their undergraduate or MBA programs compared to previous years.
The usual suspects
The B-school folks cite the usual suspects for the decline of MS/OR in the curriculum: too much theory, not enough practice - an especially deadly combination when dealing with business students. With stiff competition from the marketing and finance departments, and the statistics gurus claiming a serious slice of the already crowded MBA curriculum, management science finds itself fighting for survival in one business school after another.
The problem becomes a crisis when you consider that today's MBA students figure to be tomorrow's business leaders. If MBAs won't carry the MS/OR banner into battle, who will? Ironically, the devaluation of management science in business schools is happening at a time when world events dictate that just the opposite should occur. Management might have once been considered an art form when companies faced limited, localized competition, but in an era of stiff, global competition, it's becoming more of a science.
"Young students coming into business school have this Captain Kirk view of management," Bell says. "They see themselves sitting on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, getting input from different people, and then making the right decision - snap, snap, snap. In 1995, if you face global competition, or if you don't have some kind of serious local competitive advantage, you can no longer manage that way.
"Look at American Airlines. You can't run a competitive airline by the seat of your pants anymore. You can't even understand what the competition is doing unless you resort to management science. Look at the large trucking companies. Many of them are using MS/OR techniques as competition increases. Flying empty airplane seats around or driving empty trucks is incredibly expensive. There are immediate bucks to be had if you can figure out how to best fill your capacity.
"USAir is hiring 40 management science people. I think that they're doing this because they don't know what the hell American Airlines is up to and they need to hire folks who can figure it out."
World's worst marketers
Unfortunately, says Bell, many MS/OR departments and professors haven't converted the perceived opportunity for their discipline into reality at the business school level. "I'm very bullish on the future of management science," Bell says. "I see nothing but good things ahead for the discipline. But we are the world's worst marketers. We haven't done a good job teaching our material.
"The new executive MBA programs should be a godsend for management science because these folks are in the decision-making mode already. They have budgets, they have money, but they have to be persuaded that MS/OR really works. They don't have to understand this stuff; they just need to know that it can help their company survive another 10 years or whatever.
"It's the same with undergraduates. We see plenty of statistics courses in business schools, but business students don't need statistics. They need an understanding of how to use data to make better decisions and become better managers. The people teaching MS/OR are in a position to do just that, but they want to teach the details, the theory. And business students just aren't interested. What my students want to know is, How do we use this stuff to make money?"
Bell, the management science bull, puts a positive spin on the business school cutbacks. "Sure they're cutting back, but they're going from perhaps too much MS/OR material to a reasonable amount. There is a lot of ground to cover in a business degree. The question is, How big is your share? The individual skill building and the team building skill areas have all demanded time in the program. The good news is, all the major schools, by my standards, still have loads of management science and operations research."
If management science professors are going to maintain their beachhead in business schools, they're going to need a viable weapon to assert the discipline's relevance and value. Bell says those in the MS/OR teaching ranks would be wise to arm themselves with a caisson of case studies.
"You can't teach business students without using real examples," Bell says. "The question isn't, Should I use cases?; the question is, How should I introduce them? As readings? Many management science instructors have their students read Interfaces articles, and that's fine, but the case method of teaching is an extraordinary way to get students involved.
"I used to teach management science using a standard lecture and I never had more than a few hands in the air. With case studies, students read them, get excited and talk about the cases among themselves before class. When I walk in, there's 30 hands up in the air of people who want to start the discussion. They're all anxious to make their point, and half of them want to play devil's advocate. So you get this discussion going. Does this management science stuff have value? That's what they want to know. With real cases, you can show them."
The case of the missing cases
If cases are such wonderful tools for teaching management science in business schools, why don't more professors employ them? First of all, good cases are hard to find. Second, MS/OR case textbooks are almost nonexistent, and the ones that do exist are either dated or don't present management science as an opportunity for corporations to make money. Third, most academics don't get research brownie points for authoring cases, so they don't pursue them. Finally, Harvard, a traditional source of MS/OR cases, has moved away from management science in favor of risk management, further reducing the available "case" library.
The Western Business School at the University of Western Ontario (where Bell teaches) solved the problem by placing a premium on developing cases. "It's part of my job description," says Bell. "I look for case studies every where I go. I get leads from my consulting work, from conferences, from students, from former students. All of our Ph.D. students are required to write cases, which they do under my supervision. Writing a case study only takes a day or so. The hard part is finding a good one to write up. To do that, you have to set up a lifestyle that generates case leads."
Bell knows all too well the dilemma faced by his colleagues at other universities where research often conflicts with, rather than complements, classroom teaching. "Business academia forces you into two lives," he says. "Your research life and your teaching life, and it's difficult to bring the two together. If you think of your students as your customer and you try to deliver what your customer really wants, they probably don't want to hear too much about your current research in management science or operations research."
Bell went so far as to change his research area in order to complement his teaching. He's now researching ways to help senior managers understand complex problems through visual and interactive models, work he finds no trouble bringing into the classroom. In the same synergistic vein, Bell's consulting work bolsters both his research ("Almost everything I've published in the last five years has come out of consulting.") and his teaching (by keeping him current and supplying case leads).
Cases come in a variety of forms, but the best are simply a description of a real problem that a real person faced in a real organization. A case describes the problem and environment, complete with clutter, at a point in time when the real problem was faced. Data is generally available upon request.
Value-added technique
When searching for a case for class, Bell offers the following tips: 1. look for a recognizable company, 2. use an interesting situation students can relate to, and 3. make sure there is a clear value to using management science.
"All of my students are business students, so cases in finance and marketing work well for me. I have a very good case involving an LP for portfolio selection for a major Canadian broker. The students get excited by stuff like that.
"The case should provoke discussion. You want a case to give the students something they can argue about before they come up with a sensible solution. You want a case where the students can say, `If only the company had done this rather than that, look how much money they would have saved.' Look for examples where the management science techniques you're trying to impress upon the students really add value to the corporation. We have to get across that that's the way for companies to compete in 1995, and that it will be even more so in 2000. If companies aren't doing this stuff, they're just throwing money away."
Finding a good case is hard, writing it up is relatively easy, claims Bell.
"It's like writing a play," he says. "Introduce the decision problem and the actors in the first paragraph. Then set the scene and make it come alive as much as possible. Balance the amount of data you provide. In any real situation, you can throw in all kinds of superfluous data. You might want to include only relevant data in a case you use early in the course. Later on, you can have a case with all kinds of clutter and let the students wade through it." How do you know if you've presented a good case?
"You know you've presented a good case when the students do all the talking, and then they give you a standing ovation at the end of class."