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To keep up with the competitive business world, Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management on Drescher campus must constantly adjust to new ideas and develop innovative programs.
One idea that came to fruition for GSBM’s full-time MBA program during the 2004/2005 school year was to integrate classes.
The school is slowly shifting from a curriculum of separate classes into one flowing business sequence, in hopes of better preparing students for what they will face in the market.
“We’d like students to leave, not with a feeling of having taken a multitude of courses but to learn one large business integration,” said Charles McPeak, chair of the Full-Time MBA Program Committee.
Director of Full-Time Programs Mark Mallinger agreed.
“We need to do a better job in our school of integrating classes so that it flows more like a business rather than a school,” Mallinger said.
This change started last year under the guidance of McPeak, who has been teaching at Pepperdine for 15 years. After listening to recruiters who said courses should fit together more smoothly, McPeak decided it was better to integrate small pieces or “nuggets” at a time rather than integrating the entire curriculum all at once.
Last year, by encouraging faculty in each discipline to collaborate and to find common ground, Pepperdine’s nationally acclaimed business school experienced two particular successes.
In a new entrepreneurship program, faculty integrated exercises and case studies into the financing new ventures, the business plan writing and the marketing new ventures classes.
Professors worked to make sure that subject matter flowed in a logical sequence from one class to another, according to McPeak.
They collaborated to make sure what students needed to know in one class had been taught in their other classes.The second success, according to McPeak, was in the multinational accounting class.
“On the day we covered the accounting for derivatives to hedge against currency fluctuations, a professor who teaches the risk management course visited the class to explain the structure and use of derivatives,” McPeak said.
“On the day we covered financial reporting in highly inflationary countries, an economics professor visited the class to discuss the concept of runaway inflation and the overall impact of high inflation.”
McPeak argued that it is not enough in today’s business world to be good at one area or even to be well versed in the integration of all areas. A successful business person must also be a strong team player.
That is why GSBM’s MBA program has started to put a greater emphasis on team work. Instead of just rating the final team-project, teachers asked students to rate their teammates on how well they worked in groups.
The feedback to last year’s two main curriculum changes was positive.
“I got incredible feedback,” McPeak said. “I asked, ‘Should we keep doing this?’ And they said, ‘yes.’”
They were not just being nice, he said.
“Students here are very candid and open,” McPeak said. “If they don’t like it, they would tell us.”
Second-year MBA student Jessica Buell, who took multinational accounting with McPeak last year, said she enjoyed the integration she experienced in his class.
“Integration makes sense logically,” Buell said. “As managers, we won’t be focused only on one aspect of the business. Integration is the way the real world works.”
Integration between classes was not an everyday occurrence, she said.
“Most classes were solely focused on accounting, with a few discussions on other disciplines interwoven throughout the semester,” Buell said.
She remembered, for example, a finance professor and an economics professor came in to lecture for about a half an hour on how accounting affects finance and economics particularly in countries that have high inflation rates.
“I love seeing patterns in the world, and integration makes this more readily available and meaningful from a macro level,” Buell said. She said she wishes integration were in more of her classes.
Responses like that of Buell’s have encouraged the business school to continue pockets of integration again this year by expanding within the areas of team-work evaluations and class integration.
At its monthly collegial exchang meeting Sept. 29, the GSBM full-time MBA program hosted a lunch for 14 faculty member, who worked toward expanding course integration.
The school helped faculty identify areas where they could integrate their classes. It will be up to the faculty to follow through.
“We will be asking faculty, ‘How does the knowledge of one area help us understand the other?’” Mallinger said. “It is the one time per month that we can talk about what is going on so that other faculty can get excited about it.”
Mallinger said it is important to include the faculty in this decision because “you can’t force faculty to do anything.”
“We hope the faculty will realize the benefits,” he said.
Collaboration is important to McPeak and his colleague’s aims.
For example, McPeak said the committee wants a finance professor to partner with an accounting professor, the professor teaching organizational behavior to work with the professor teaching organizational theory and the professor teaching economics to collaborate with the professor teaching finance.
More specifically, McPeak wants to integrate financial accounting with financial management. With this integration, students will receive an assignment to do a financial analysis on a public company. At the end of the trimester, a finance faculty member will come and remind students that they have only completed the first step and that additional analysis will be done in the finance class in January.
Emphasis on developing team players by taking evaluations to the next step will be expanded.
Evaluations will follow them throughout their stay at the MBA business school.
Incoming students have already been introduced to the concept at the new student orientation workshop is a new twist on evaluating team projects.
Previously, team projects concentrated solely on content and on the final product presented before the class.
Now teachers are looking for more than content. They are asking students to rate their teammates as to how well they work on the team.
“Now if it is an accounting project, they have to concentrate on accounting and on being a strong team player,” Mallinger said.
“The students will leave not just as smart marketeers or financial people but as smart marketeer team players.”
“Before graduation, they will have to satisfy faculty that they have learned to be a good team member and apply it to multiple classes,” McPeak said.
The business school is in its fourth week of the fall semester, and it hopes to continue the success stories.
“Our goal is to continue the nuggets of integration that have started so far,” McPeak said.
Submitted 10-06-2005
MALIBU, CA
