Betting The Future Of A B-School On The Future

‘PEOPLE FELT THE TIME WAS RIGHT FOR CHANGE’

But the greatest opportunity, realized Freeman, was to change the school’s very strategy. “I was warned when I got here that the curriculum was obsolete,” he says. “It was ten years old at the graduate level and 15 years old at undergraduate level.” So he got the school’s faculty to plunge into the work of a redesign.

Initially, in early 2012, he gained faculty approval for the changes to Boston’s large undergraduate program with 2,000 students. And in the spring, Freeman asked for change to the graduate program with 1,200 students. “Given that we had a dean change after 19 years, it was relatively easy,” says Venkatraman. “People felt the time was right to go through change in the curriculum. We can broaden the application of our domain expertise to one of these three sectors so that our research is conducted in a laboratory called the health care, energy or digital technology sector.”

Besides the novel economy focus, the curriculum changes also put more emphasis on ethics and social responsibility, entrepreneurship and innovation, and the addition of an experiential global leadership opportunity for students “that goes beyond a free class trip,” says Freeman. The changes will get implemented in the fall of 2013. “It’s about creating value for society, the community and for the world–where this world is going and not where it has been.”

ONLY FOUR PROFESSORS VOTED AGAINST THE MBA CHANGES

Shockingly perhaps, there was virtually no opposition. “We had one negative vote in undergrad and four negative votes for the MBA,” says Freeman. “Our faculty owns this change. There will never be a ‘my’ strategy. It will be our strategy.”

Clearly, that’s the only way it will stick and work. But it’s one thing to proclaim a new direction and quite another to successfully execute on the new vision.

“This was a commuter school 30 years ago,” reflects Freeman. “We are going through a transformation now and we are playing hardball. We have to catch up on the endowment, but there is a scrappiness, desire and willingness to change and work together. We are going to have to be the old Avis that tries harder. But when you think of Boston in the future, I want you to think there are three elite business schools here.”

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