Orienting Instructors
Teacher Orientation
A cost-effective proposal to prepare new faculty for effective MBA teaching
By Anuj Mehrotra and Sridhar Tayur
The requirements for a successful academic career are similar across the universe of universities. The importance of effective teaching has received much attention in recent years. A good classroom experience for both the students and the faculty, often judged by student evaluations, is unfortunately not as prevalent as one might expect. Many articles have questioned the validity of such evaluations. Valid or not, when combined with our own personal experience and the experiences of several colleagues at many institutions in interviewing candidates for faculty positions, we are led to believe that some actions are definitely warranted to achieve the high standards of teaching that most business schools demand.
Many good (research) candidates are frequently rejected for faculty positions because of the perception that they will not be well received by the MBA students. Schools have focused on addressing this issue in several ways. For example, many teaching workshops offered to faculty concentrate on important aspects such as organization, presentation style, use of teaching tools and aids, etc. More specialized teaching workshops (targeted, e.g., at operations management or operations research) often focus on creating an understanding of relevance of the specialized fields for the MBA. While all these efforts are useful and address important issues, we focus here on a low-cost, easy-to-implement solution that we believe can enrich the MBA experience for both the students as well as the faculty.
Here is some self-disclosure: We joined the faculty of business schools with no prior work experience in business settings. Our undergraduate degrees are in engineering, and we obtained our Ph.D. degrees in OR/IE. While our respective schools are very different in focus and student bodies, the commonality of what helped us successfully transition to becoming effective MBA educators is very high and is the basis of this article.
We believe that the following issues merit attention.
1. Connect with MBAs as well as with academic colleagues from other disciplines. It is not uncommon that top Ph.D.s considered for open faculty positions are domain experts from disciplines outside of business schools. Hence, an OM faculty member may not really have an understanding of what the students are learning, for example, in finance. From the OR/OM perspective, the goal should be to develop an understanding of how what we do fits with the other disciplines.
2. Understand the MBA students and their values/goals, and differentiate from Ph.D. students and their ambitions. Ph.D. candidates often do not have industrial or more specifically managerial experience. It is important to realize that a typical student in the MBA classroom, while impressed with the credentials and specific knowledge of the instructor, is not looking to become a specialist in that field.
3. Develop a suitable style for delivery of content. Ph.D. candidates often emulate the teaching style of their own favorite professors but forget to fine-tune their presentation to be effective for educating MBA students.
While a young faculty member does not usually have a clear understanding of the above issues, most senior colleagues have learned what an MBA student wants through a "baptism by fire." Wouldn't it be nice to make it easier for the next generation of teachers? Schools have focused on orientation for students. We propose that a similar orientation for the new faculty would enhance the learning environment.
What should comprise such an orientation? Ideally, each faculty member should have knowledge of not only how an MBA graduate will use the knowledge in, say, a specialized field of OM in the industry, but also how he or she will address an issue through the knowledge acquired in all the fields. While faculty internships in companies and leave of absences for faculty to spend time in the corporate world have been proposed in schools, such approaches have largely been unsuccessful. They either require a substantial investment of time and money, or the faculty member is just not interested in something that takes him or her away from the specialized research that is most comfortable. On the other hand, an approach in which senior faculty members from across disciplines provide a two- or three-day workshop to incoming junior faculty is an easy-to-implement, low-cost solution.
While the orientation could include their personal experiences and can be ambitious, we believe that merely reviewing the basic objectives and topics in each core course that an MBA student takes will enable any incoming faculty to get a good idea of where their own material fits in. This will provide a broader understanding of the MBA curriculum to all who are expected to deliver it. Indeed, such an experience may provide a head start to potential cross-disciplinary research which otherwise may take years to develop.
For example, a faculty orientation that focuses on the following issues would probably be sufficient to provide such a head start.
Goal 1: To answer the question of how one fits into the MBA curriculum, it would be good to review the following common body of knowledge assumed prerequisite to MBA study:
- Key principles from each discipline. For example:
- Corporate Finance: Miller-Modigliani result, Black Scholes result.
- Accounting: Balance sheet, income statement, incentive design.
- Marketing: 4P/5C, branding, advertising.
- Strategy: Porter's 5 forces.
- IS/IT: Mainframe-client/server-Internet, evolution of technology.
- Macroeconomics: Interest rate dynamics (the role of the Fed), global trade.
- Microeconomics: equilibrium, role of prices.
- Interesting war stories from various disciplines or a brief overview of the top 5 HBR cases in the core of other disciplines such as Cat vs. Komatsu in the 80s and Coke vs. Pepsi would form a good supplement. An orientation could also include a brief discussion of some key books/HBR articles from industry such as "The Machine that Changed the World" (Womack, Jones and Roos), "My Life with GM" (Sloan), "Dynamic Manufacturing" (Wheelwright, Hayes and Clark) and "Re-Engineering the Corporation" (Hammer and Champy).
- Top 15 business accomplishments since 1900.
- Important current trends in industry and a contrarian view.
- Facts and figures: CEO salaries, major market indices, best performing sectors, famous CEOs, well-known scandals, etc.
• Doing vs. Thinking: to stress the importance of execution versus planning to help understand that MBA students must avoid falling into "analysis-paralysis."
• Manager vs. Analyst: to understand that MBA students are preparing to eventually become excellent managers and not necessarily excellent analysts.
• Project Management vs. Executing a Single Task Perfectly: to recognize that juggling many balls at once calmly is an important trait to cultivate in future business leaders.
• Strategic View vs. Tactical Execution: Future CEOs would benefit from developing a vision and ability to think strategically.
• Perspective/Pragmatism vs. Focus: While faculty research demands a lot of focus, an MBA student is looking to develop an ability to "look above" the weeds, and to see the forest from the trees.
• Having a High-Net worth vs. Being Considered Very Mathematically Sophisticated: MBA students are more likely to admire and aspire to be business people who have created wealth as compared to those (business) people who are gifted in mathematical modeling and analysis but are not wealthy.
Watching some senior faculty provide the above information and discussion will also provide an opportunity for a young faculty to observe different teaching styles. This should help satisfy the final goal of choosing a content delivery style. In summary, such an orientation is a low-cost and potentially effective experiment.
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Anuj Mehrotra is chairman and an associate professor with the Department of Management Science, School of Business Administration, University of Miami. Sridhar Tayur is a professor at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University.
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