Learning and Change - Roger Martin

Healthy Systems Don't Need to Be Changed

Plenty of other business-school deans are aware of this problem, and several of the best ones have added programs that attempt to solve it. Martin, however, seems to be shouting about it the loudest, because he and his institution have the most at stake. He is also the first to admit that business school changed his life, and for that he is grateful. Through a classmate, he met the woman who later became his wife. The small group of friends who later formed Monitor first met in a class they had together. "I should probably be more positive about the experience," Martin admits. "I could not have met such a great group of people in any one place anywhere else."

For most of the best students at the best business schools, this is still true. They gladly put up the $100,000 or more in tuition and living expenses and forego even more in salary for the opportunity to meet other people just like them and to build their human network of high achievers. And that's why many of the best business schools will never go out of business -- because no one has invented a better way to network. "I honestly don't think people care a whit about what they're actually learning in business school," Martin says. "Not one bit. They're there to get a job and to make contacts."

Martin insists that recruiters also care just as little about the learning that is going on. "Harvard Business School creates value through its ability to find great people, extract them from their companies, turn them into free agents, assemble them in one place in Boston, and then spit them out on an extremely predictable schedule in a manner that is user-friendly to people who want to hire them," he says. "It's not the faculty members who are doing the most useful work at these institutions. It's the admissions staff and the placement office that create the real value." He only wishes that he could have recruited from HBS's list of admitted students when he was still hiring consultants for Monitor. "Those students' egos would have been a lot smaller," he says. "Plus, it would have been a lot cheaper to hire students."

Business School 2.0

Martin plans to change none of this at Rotman, and he speaks with excitement about the fact that such top-notch consulting firms as Bain & Co. and the Boston Consulting Group intend to recruit more of his students this year. But he does think that it's pathetic that the best thing about most business schools is their ability to put résumé books together.

The challenge for Rotman, Martin says, is to stand for something. Today, he is advancing several ideas to build the Rotman brand. First, there's his notion of integrative thinking. Theoretically, the case-study method that Harvard popularized and that many other business schools employ should help students use interdisciplinary thinking. "The case-study method has inherent promise," Martin says. "But the cases tend to be written by academics who teach in only one discipline, so the cases tend to focus around that discipline."

What could business schools use to replace that method? No one is quite sure -- there's no proven theory of how to teach integration. Martin readily admits that he doesn't have another method waiting in the wings. The temptation, then, is for schools to throw up their hands and to insist that it's enough that they manage to teach several complicated disciplines in just two years. To Martin, that's lazy. "Most students will tell you that the second year is filled with a random assortment of special-interest courses," he says, "forgettable stuff that could be replaced with something important."

Like what? This spring, Martin is introducing two new interdisciplinary courses into the curriculum: one that will examine how companies divide responsibilities among employees and reward employees, and another that will look into "learning how to learn," or developing skills that will enable students to learn faster and more efficiently. He also dreams of building a class for which he would create a library of taped interviews with great integrative business thinkers. He would walk students through the tapes, analyzing each subject's decision making, and then allow students to grill each subject live in the classroom.

"It will be a slow migration," Martin concedes. "When you're building Business School 2.0, you don't start from scratch. You build on version 1.0. So step one is to overlay some integrative elements onto what is now a nonintegrative curriculum. Building a holistic integrative program will take a good five years."

Second, Martin wants everyone at Rotman to understand that it's the individual who sits at the epicenter of the new economy, rather than the corporation. "It's an elemental force, it's inexorable, and anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn't get it," he says. "No recession will change the fact that our economy has moved from one in which physical assets mattered most to one in which human assets predominate."