Yale debuts new MBA curriculum — with newer, better jargon:
The heart of the new first-year curriculum is a series of eight multidisciplinary courses, called Organizational Perspectives, structured around the organizational roles a manager must engage, motivate and lead in order to solve problems — or make progress — within organizations. These roles are both internal — the Innovator, the Operations Engine, the Employee, and Sourcing and Managing Funds (or CFO) — and external — the Investor, the Customer, the Competitor, and State and Society. Each course — titled to reflect these roles — draws on topics and insights from a variety of functional management disciplines to study the managerial challenges each role presents.“No executive wakes up in the morning and thinks, ‘I’m going to do finance today,’ so it doesn’t make sense for students to sit in a finance class and learn to crunch numbers absent of any context,” says Sharon Oster, the Frederick D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, who is one of a number of senior faculty who worked on developing the new curriculum and led the design of the “Competitor” course. “We are teaching them in a way that’s relevant in the real world.”