The new role for business school integration

Citation

Myers, M.B. (2015), "The new role for business school integration", American Journal of Business, Vol. 30 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJB-03-2015-0005

The new role for business school integration

Article Type: Dean's forum From: American Journal of Business, Volume 30, Issue 1

Recent actions by governors and legislators in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere have brought home the public’s frustration with the current state of higher education (New York Times). Increasing costs, decreasing relevance, and a noticeable disconnect between what universities are offering and markets are demanding has led to a rash of audits of our public institutions and their curricula. Even private liberal arts institutions, rarely under the microscope of state oversight, are coming under increased scrutiny for far too many students graduating without employable skills in today’s economy. The result has been a largely binary argument between the need to preserve liberal education at all costs, and the importance of graduating with trade skills that make students employable. This argument has received considerable traction in the popular press, and has caused many in academia, including in business schools, to become defensive of the status quo.

In reality, the answer to the current problem on many campuses is likely in a better blend between liberal education and the business curricula. Employers are indeed experiencing a significant gap between the skills their employees need to be successful and the skills possessed by new college graduates, and as a result every year millions of jobs go unfilled (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2014). But the reason universities aren’t delivering in the minds of employers isn’t because they lack the necessary expertise and resources. It’s because they aren’t thinking creatively enough about how to share them across silos, across disciplines and across the entire university. All this should tell us that the role of business schools at universities should be redefined.

In recent years, strategic relationships with multinational firms and Miami University have shown that the need for employees with non-business degrees and skills has increased substantially. Many firms are looking for a wider scope of hires at select universities. These firms desire graduates who possess a variety of skill sets beyond a functional knowledge of a business sub-discipline, including the ability to think creatively, to solve problems, and to communicate effectively. Employers have ranked teamwork, communication, problem solving and critical thinking in the top five most desirable skills and traits they look for in new hires – above technical competencies of the job (National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2014). In addition, firms are looking for graduates from non-business related disciplines to possess at least some amount of business acumen. Some institutions recognize this important blend of skills and have built programs accordingly, such as the Bridge Program at Dartmouth. But these efforts are few and far between. Campuses need to understand that employers are looking for graduates at the new intersection where market innovators meet market leaders.

Related to the growing disconnect between the talent needs of firms and the university curricula is the gap between the needs of organizations’ for relevant solutions to modern, cross-disciplinary business problems and business scholars failing to produce these solutions. As members of professional schools, business faculty will need to adjust their research to reflect this new normal of market needs. Currently, research methodologies and outcomes are too often detached from the realities of managing enterprises and the integrated problems they face, and researchers often lack the motivation, as well as all too often the ability, to credibly surpass Andrew Pettigrew’s double hurdle of generating academically meaningful as well as practically relevant knowledge (EFMD, 2014; Pettigrew, 2014). It is the responsibility of business schools, their campuses, and their associated academies to support a significant restructuring of the research agenda, this to increase our focus on relevant outcomes addressing the integrated business problems that managers face.

In summary, business schools face two major challenges today. First, to build programs that create better linkages across campus, and to produce graduates who have both the business acumen and critical thinking skills that meet all needs of the organization. Second, business schools must change their perspectives toward the value of cross-disciplinary research and market-relevant research, this before the schools themselves fall victims to more modern research approaches by non-academic entities. These modern challenges call for innovative solutions, and we should practice what we teach as we take our own institutions into the future.

Matthew B. Myers - Farmer School of Business, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA

References

EFMD Press (2014), “What does the future hold for academic research?”, available at: www.efmd.org/blog/view/197-what-does-the-future-hold-for-academic-research (accessed February 28, 2015).

National Association of Colleges and Employers (2014), Job Outlook Survey, Bethlehem, PA.

New York Times, “2016 ambitions seen in Walker’s push for university cuts in Wisconsin”, New York Times, available at: www.nytimes.com/2015/02/17/us/politics/scott-walker-university-wisconsin.html?_r=0 (accessed February 16, 2015).

Pettigrew, A. (2014), Scholarly Impact and the Co-Production Hypotheses, EFMG Press, Brussels, Belgium

About the author

Dr Matthew B. Myers is Dean & Mitchell P. Rales Chair of Business Leadership at the Farmer School of Business, Miami University. Dr Matthew B. Myers can be contacted at: mailto:myersmb3@miamioh.edu