Part of this pressure is the general pressure faced by our colleagues in the functional areas of marketing, accounting, finance, etc.: Students are increasingly demanding more customization and flexibility in their studies. This has led to strong pressure to reduce the overall size of "the Core," the required curriculum, in order to create degrees of freedom for electives. The total number of seats at the Core table is not going up, and at many schools it is going down.

This trend is not completely without merit, although I'm sure many readers would agree it should be the other departments' material that should be trimmed first. That is not going to happen, and indeed part of the pressure we feel is aimed specifically at us. For reasons that INFORMS and its members have discussed extensively in the past decade, the types of courses that we have traditionally offered have been struggling — on average, relative to other disciplines — in terms of stature, enrollment, recognition and perceived effectiveness. So we are too-often the first area scrutinized when it's time to remove another chair.

In addition, to the extent that our material is properly understood to have great fundamental value in supplying analytical foundations that can be applied to many other courses and functions, we face the positive pressure of being needed early in an MBA program. In fact, many programs seem to want to get all the conceivable analytical toolkit items done as early as possible, so that everything else can build upon them. This impatience includes our traditional material as well as that which is usually packaged in a "statistics" course.

The "Quant Course" Dilemma


Overall, these pressures have led many MBA programs to consider a one-semester "Quant course" model in their Core. In addition to being an overly compact vehicle for conveying the large amount of intellectual cargo that our fields have to offer, the "quant" framing of this model itself tends to be unhelpful, in terms of both student and faculty acceptance.

Leading with the quantitative dimension is misdirection, and not only because rigorous courses in finance, marketing, accounting and strategy also make good use of quantitative argument and data. Defining our material by its numerical aspects also obscures the primary value it delivers: sharp reasoning and solid application of factual evidence to complex real-world problems. Business students and faculty would be rightly skeptical of a course about numbers per se: "Sure, it has positive value, but does it meet the high hurdle rate required for a place at Core table?"

In a sense, the "Quant course" model is a potential trap for us, if we merely accept it as a concession from the rest of the faculty or our deans, a playground that we own and are free to roam as we see fit. If we treat this course as a land grant to which we're entitled merely for being part of the MBA faculty, it inevitably begs the question of why we're part of that faculty to begin with. We don't want to go any further down that road.

No, we need to treat our Core slot as a precious allocation of a rare resource, and find ways to be extraordinarily efficient in how we use it. Because the "Quant" course is often left up to us to define (by those who know little and care less), let us actively deliberate and choose to define it in ways that maximizes the mileage we get in return: Let us serve other courses by delivering foundations that students recognize are essential, but also establish in the minds of those students (hence, indirectly, our faculty colleagues) the universality, indeed centrality, of the modes of thought, argument and communication that are characteristic of what we do. In terms of the practice of management, we are at the hub, not the rim, of the intellectual and professional development wheel; we must assert that in our sole required course.

That is, rather than settling in for a protracted defense of a single Core slot, we should use the opportunity to address some of those persistent challenges we face in establishing our worth with the rest of the B-school stakeholders.

The Hybrid Challenge


In order to go further with less, consider a hybrid. A hybrid course is a fusion of the essences of what could be, under other circumstances, two or more separate courses. The resulting course derives its power from the ideas and techniques of all the constituent courses, but with the ability —the necessity, in fact — of switching back and forth seamlessly.

There are many issues to address in making any hybrid work. The primary concern is whether there is a conceptual coherence in the course, or whether it is more a marriage of convenience (two disciplines in a loveless sharing of intimate quarters) or even a freakish jackalope (a taxidermist's Frankenstein monster, two unrelated species stitched together for shock value). Even if there is a good content story to tell, there are important practical considerations, including how to weave the content into a course outline, where to find good materials and how to tweak the pedagogy for maximum benefit.

In future columns, we'll consider some of the conceptual, content and operational issues of such a course.



Patrick S. Noonan (patrick_noonan@bus.emory.edu) is an associate professor (clinical) at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

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