Learning and Change - Roger Martin

It is Tuesday, September 14, during the first week of school at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Roger Martin stands at a white board leading a group of 125 first-year students through their very first exercise as aspiring MBAs. They're playing a business-simulation game, and Martin is trying to cajole the members of each team into explaining how they arrived at their results. What information did they use to make their decisions? What were they thinking at the time?

If you were to happen upon this scene in the soaring atrium of the school's new building, it might not seem extraordinary -- more like business as usual in the life of a business school. But Roger Martin is not interested in business as usual -- or in business school as usual. Just two years ago, Martin was living in Wellesley, Massachusetts, enjoying the perks and benefits that befit a cofounder and partner at Monitor Co., a premier strategy-consulting firm. He was pulling down a seven-figure salary, including bonuses, and spending his days in the company of some of the most powerful CEOs in the corporate world. Last year, at the age of 42, he took a 90% pay cut to move to Toronto with his wife and three children. There, he became the dean of Rotman -- which wasn't considered the best business school in Canada, and was never mentioned among the top 25 business schools in the world. It was not a move that suggested enhanced prestige, position, or power. So what is Roger Martin doing teaching a business-simulation exercise?

The answer: reinventing business education. It turns out that Martin has arrived at Rotman at a crucial moment in the history of management education. For as long as schools have given out MBAs, they have generally used the big multinational corporation as their unit of analysis. Managers' actions are studied in the context of how they affect "the firm." Economics and finance are also situated in the context of big-firm decision making. What you plan to do in your career is largely immaterial, says the classic business- school script. MBAs are in training to become "general managers," and the skills of a general manager are, by definition, transferable.

But the way Martin sees it, that old business-school mantra is beginning to look a little anachronistic. After all, some of the most successful people in business today never attended college, let alone business school. And they're the kind of people who assiduously avoid letting old-style MBAs come anywhere near their companies. While the world's top business schools are in no immediate danger of becoming obsolete, they do face the prospect of becoming increasingly irrelevant. So it stands to reason: In an age when most businesses are fundamentally being reinvented, why isn't anyone bothering to reinvent the business school?

That's exactly the question that Roger Martin asked himself when he decided to take the dean's job in 1998, and he answered it in a couple of ways. First, he declared that Rotman and all other business schools had been using the wrong unit of analysis. The firm was not at the center of things anymore. He declared his intention to rebuild the school around something he calls "the value of one," which acknowledges the rapidly increasing economic power of free-agent knowledge workers. Second, he wanted the school to produce what he calls "integrative thinkers." All business schools claim to do this, assuming that if they stuff enough finance, marketing, operations, and strategy into students' heads, then when those students graduate, they will be able to put it all together on their own. But, says Martin, business schools are not doing their jobs if they don't explicitly promote interdisciplinary thinking while students are still within the walls of the classroom.

On the surface, that's a relatively simple mind flip. But this is a business school after all, and academic institutions, with their tenured professors and hoary traditions, are notoriously slow to change. Martin's goal is to propel Rotman onto the list of the world's top 10 business schools within seven years. Currently, the Financial Times ranks the school at 36 -- which Martin concedes is about right.

What's so interesting about his prescription for change is that while the challenge of change for a business school is every bit as compelling as that for any business, the metrics are much less clear: Success for Martin can't be defined by an exploding stock price or by a doubling of revenue. And failure can't be measured by the school's being acquired or going out of business. If Martin fails slowly and slinks quietly back into consulting in a few years, it will simply be because Rotman has stayed the same. If in seven years Rotman still looks too much like every other second-tier business school, Roger Martin will know that he simply hasn't done enough.