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Schools move to deal with global nature of business

Published: 25 November 2010

Following the financial crisis, many business schools have taken a closer look at their curricula to ensure they are graduating responsible leaders who will make a difference, says Don Melville, director of MBA and masters programmes at the Desautels faculty of management at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ in Canada. And while courses around ethics and social responsibility are a recent addition to many programmes, these were already in place in several schools long before the crisis hit, he says. Melville says perhaps a more notable trend is a move away from the traditional functional approach to teaching towards integration. For instance, schools such as McGill and Yale will have professors from three or four different disciplines providing input during a single learning session. The goal, says Melville, is to bring learning as close to realworld experience as possible.

"All areas traditionally covered by an MBA degree are still covered, but instead of keeping them independent they're taught in a way that shows the linkage between them," he says. "Learning the foundations is the key, especially in a university like ours where about a third of our class switches careers.

Equally important, however, is understanding how everything comes together.

"For example, when the financial crisis happened we had an organisational behavior professor and a finance professor in the classroom at the same time - it showed students that the crisis wasn't just a finance problem or a people problem but a much bigger issue." 

-Business Day (South Africa's leading business paper), November 25, 2010

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