Professor Fred Thompson
Grace and Elmer Goudy Professor of Public Management and Policy, Atkinson Graduate School of Management, Willamette University.USA

HIGH COMMITMENT PEDAGOGY

Top management schools are reorganizing their curricula and pedagogy in a variety of different ways to bring them into line with contemporary student needs. Our disciplinary stovepipes — strategy and policy, marketing, organization theory and behavior, human resources, finance, accounting, managerial economics and operations research, quantitative methods and statistics, and information technology and computer science — have always been dysfunctional insofar as they had more to do with faculty preparation than student needs. Nowadays, they are increasingly irrelevant. Organizations are no longer compartmentalized the way business schools once were. What we see emerging are smaller, flatter organizations, organized around a set of generic value-creating processes and specific competencies.

The control systems of these organizations, like those of centralized bureaucracies, collect a lot of information on every aspect of operations, including non-financial information, but unlike the control systems of stovepipe organizations, which were erected on the premise that the exercise of judgment should be passed up the managerial ranks, this information is used to push the exercise of judgment down into the organization, to wherever it is needed.

Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster refer to these new kinds of organizational arrangements as hyperarchies, after the hyperlinks of the World Wide Web. Evans and Wurster assert that, like the internet itself, these kinds of organizations have eliminated the need to channel information. This, they claim, challenges all hierarchies, whether of logic or of power, "with the possibility (or the threat) of random access and information symmetry."

Our pedagogy should, therefore, be oriented to helping our students learn how to work outward and upward, through the organization, and back across the entire supply chain to create value from knowledge. According to Peter Block this means restructuring the delivery of knowledge away from entrenched disciplines and organizing it around students "rather than requiring the student to integrate knowledge across disciplines," moving faculties out of their specialties to "learn enough about other fields to develop a truly integrated curriculum," and organizing them "around courses of study that they would design and teach together."

Many top management schools are committed to building precisely this kind of "service strategy for learning." At my school, for example, we have revised our curriculum with these ends in mind. We have reorganized our program's core around two year-long course sequences, each oriented to one of the key value creating processes: Managing Exchange and Managing Organizations.

There are two salient differences between what we used to do and what we do now. First, all the chunks having to do with one of the two value-creating processes are taught together. For example, Managing Exchange combines chunks from Marketing, Economics, Government, Business, and Society, and Organizational Policy and Strategy. Second, we have tried to make dramatic changes in the way we deliver instruction. Both course sequences are built around multi-disciplinary teams and experiential learning. The faculty are also cross-training each other. In theory, each should be qualified to teach and comfortable teaching every single chunk in the core, at least to the skill level needed by our graduates.

The next step in the development of a service strategy for learning should focus on reinventing the relationship between the members of the professional school community. Top management schools preach that high-commitment human-resource management techniques promote superior performance, especially in knowledge-based organizations. Unfortunately, our practices rarely match our sermons. Instead of high commitment HR practices, management schools typically treat their students like interchangeable parts — teachers teach, students listen and learn.

These practices are wrong in at least three ways. First, they are bad pedagogy; they don't motivate students to learn. Second, they pattern the wrong kind of behavior for current and future managers. Third, they won't elicit high commitment to our schools from our students and future alumni.

Based on Jeffrey Pfeffer's list of the HR practices of successful organizations, the following would appear to be especially relevant to relationships between the members of our community, some of which are already common practice in top management schools: 1. Careful recruitment of faculty and students based upon the right attitudes, values, and cultural fit; 2. Reliance on self-managed multidisciplinary instructional teams, made up of students as well as faculty, and decentralization of decision-making as basic principals of organizational practice; 3. Comparatively high grades contingent upon team and school performance; 4. Extensive, shared training involving everyone in the community; 5. Extensive sharing of performance and financial information throughout the community; 6. Reduced status distinctions throughout the community.