Faculty Interviews
Recently, Gary Lindblad, Assistant Dean and Director of the
MBA Program, spoke with three Merage School professors, Robin Keller, Rajeev
Tyagi, and Phil Bromiley, regarding the Merage School difference.
Gary: What are the various approaches to MBA education,
and what is the approach taken at the Merage School?
Rajeev: There are basically two types. There are schools which
are mostly case-based and other schools which are more lecture-based with some
combination of cases and exercises. I think we have a balanced approach, using
a combination of methodologies depending on the learning objectives.
Phil: In addition, some schools are mainly practitioner-based
and some are research-based. We are a research-based school, but I think we
strike a good balance. That is, faculty use both cases and lectures. They introduce
students to the solid content and then practice on cases.
At a top research–based business school like the Merage School you get
an understanding of the current business literature. Top business techniques
change continuously. Some things people took as gospel 20 years ago, we now
know are wrong. People in the research schools are way ahead regarding new original
knowledge- compared to those in teaching schools who don’t catch on until
it comes out in a textbook.
Practitioners tend to over interpret their experience. They may believe things
that agree with their experience, but they haven’t been in that many companies
and that many situations. They may be completely wrong in other situations.
Alternatively, things that work for somebody individually don’t necessarily
work for most people.
If you wanted to learn how to play basketball, you don’t look at Shaq
O’Neil. What works for him does not work for the average player. Research
and teaching focus on improving the normal player. People’s experience,
even if they’re really smart or particularly if they are really smart,
may not apply to the general population.
Robin: As research professors, we are specialists in our field
and we know the other specialists throughout the world. In our Decision Analysis
course, students gain skills that aren’t in the current textbooks, but
that are based on new trends in the field that haven’t even been published
yet. So in our field one of the trends is to look at resource allocation decisions
using a multiple objective decision analysis approach. Because I do research
in this area and know the other top people in the field I am able to introduce
my students to this network. For instance, recently I invited a colleague as
a guest speaker. He is a researcher who started his own company putting capital
budgeting software into hospitals using multiple objective decision analysis
tools utilizing the Excel Solver.
This isn’t in the textbooks yet. And I had one of my students apply
it to an aerospace firm for his decision analysis project. At graduation, when
he was in his graduation robe as we walked by he said, “Oh, Professor
Keller, I got the job.” Somebody had left the job in his firm that was
doing capital budgeting, and he was able to walk right into the boss’s
office and show the term paper that he had done. He wasn’t in charge of
capital budgeting when he was a student. He just said, “I could apply
that in my domain.” So he used the previous year’s data, and he
was able to get that new job.
So it’s not that research is just kept in the ivory tower. It’s
that we have the connections, we know what’s going on throughout the world,
and we can introduce our students to that world.
Gary: Why is it that just studying industry best
practices is not sufficient for the MBA student?
Phil: Sometimes best practices aren’t that good. No
one gets better just by doing what we do today. Managers also need to understand
why something works. If you don’t understand why something works, you’re
very likely to misapply it. The world is too complex to just copy someone else
and have it work. We need to understand why something works.
Robin: And that’s why when I teach my Decision Analysis
elective course, I put something about research into every class. And the reason
I do is partly because one of the goals for my MBA students is to build their
networks. So I feel that it’s good for me to let them know what kind of
research is being done here, and what kind of advances we’re making in
knowledge. So when I present an example I always give them the actual journal
article references, the working papers, or a website link.
Also, when the Nobel Prize is announced every year, I always say, you know,
“Here’s the news today. This person got the Nobel Prize in economics”
and describe a little bit about their research. Our faculty may know the person
that got the Nobel Prize, and may have a story about what was going on. They
may be able to link it to the course material. I think that’s something
unique with a research-oriented school.
Gary: In your fields of study where are you seeing
new knowledge and new perspectives come into the classroom?
Rajeev: Advances in econometrics are changing marketing.
Because of this new ability to collect data at the point of purchase we now
have so much data about consumer behavior and purchase patterns that we need
new methodologies to analyze those data.
Phil: Another is the area of risk
assessment. One of my students and I looked at risk assessment in commercial
lending. We studied how bankers assessed risk for small commercial borrowers,
and the bank hired us back to give them a model to assess risk at mid-market
levels. The bank launched a business using the model. This was before people
had commercial risk rating systems -- it came about because we had a research
question.
Rajeev: I think one of the biggest contributions of a research
orientation is the framing of problems. Recently, I went to a software pricing
conference in San Jose, California. There were all these industry people talking
about current issues. If you just went through the sessions, you felt as though
all these problems were different. But there is really a very simple framework
that allows us to see and study the commonalities among these problems.
So, for example, in my Marketing Strategy class, I do a session that allows
students to understand the framework behind pricing of software products. Then
it’s very easy to see that these are all similar applications. It’s
just that many managers do not have a framework for understanding the issues
that they face.
Phil: With many problems, you have so much noise – whether
it’s really data or just things happening- that half the game is figuring
out what’s relevant and what’s not. In fact, if you just get the
variables and direction of their influence right, it often doesn’t matter
precisely what parameters you have. We help managers find the right variables
and understand what to look at. I’ve seen strategic plans with dozens
of objectives – no one can pay attention to 30 objectives. We can help
students learn frameworks that narrow that world down a bit, and let them focus
on the important things.
Gary: Where else does the experience of faculty
come into play in what students gain in the Merage classroom?
Phil: Probably the best example in my field is mergers and
acquisitions. Very few managers participate in more than a handful of mergers,
and to figure out what worked, you need a much larger sample. If the mergers
differ in eight different ways, you cannot identify what matters from three
mergers. Academics examine larger systematic samples to understand what actually
matters.
In fact, there’s a literature on what we call superstitious learning
– coming to believe things that are simply not true. If I’m learning
from a sample of three or four, it’s quite easy to find strong associations
that simply reflect random variation. Few things are more dangerous than people
strongly believing things that are just plain wrong.
Rajeev: We help students and managers identify how to ask
the right questions, and in new and different situations, what are the right
questions to ask. What are the key parameters or variables to look at? People
are very industry focused or focused on success stories that they pick up in
the business news. But we challenge them to step back and ask the right questions
in any situation.
Phil: People have difficulty translating knowledge from one
area to another. For example if you teach people a technique in an accounting
context, they often will not recognize it applies elsewhere in the business.
So faculty have to teach students the fundamentals but also give them practice
applying it in various settings so they’ll remember that it could apply.
That’s why you need a balance between cases, field work, and theory
-- otherwise students will not see where a technique can apply. Because we know
people can know a technique in a given context but won’t remember it when
they get a problem that’s identical framed a little differently.
Robin: And with our MBA field projects with the faculty serving
as advisors, I think that’s an opportunity for us to bring in research
knowledge, and remind students or prompt them to apply something from their
other learning.
Another real advantage at Merage is that we’re a world-class research
institution- yet we’re small enough that people know each other. Students
get to know the faculty; they understand their research. They know all the students;
they get to meet alumni who are out in the field. So we have very tight interconnections
among our whole Merage family that allows you to see new research and best practices
firsthand. And I think that’s a big advantage you sometimes lose in a
larger school.
Phil: True. You’ve got a first rate intellectual group
in the faculty. You’ve got a small academic community where you get student-faculty
interactions you can’t get in a bigger school. And the school is closely
tied to this dynamic business community. Those are incredible advantages.
* * * *
Faculty Information:
Robin
Keller
Professor & Associate Dean-FTMBA, Operations and Decision Technologies
Ph.D., UCLA
MBA, UCLA
BA (Mathematics), UCLA
Rajeev
Tyagi
Professor, Marketing
Ph.D., The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
MBA, Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
Phil
Bromiley
Professor, Organization & Strategy
Ph.D., Carnegie-Mellon University
BA. The Johns Hopkins University