Conntact.com - CT Business News Journal

The Yale School of Management (SOM), which during its relatively brief history has seldom shied away from trying new approaches to business education, this semester has introduced some sweeping curriculum revisions to bring an international scope and interdisciplinary focus to its course offerings.The purpose of the changes, according to SOM Dean Joel Podolny, is to train managers who will be "able to identify and frame business problems and move across a variety of organizational a broader context, as business becomes increasingly global, so too must business education at the highest levels.

SOM also now requires a two-week study trip abroad to countries including China, Japan and Poland for students.

Globalization is by no means the sole theme of the new SOM curriculum. In a September 13 interview with Business Week magazine, Podolny discussed the need for a re-engineering approach to business education that broke down the functional "silos" represented by traditional disciplines such as marketing, accounting, organizational behavior and the like. "We now offer a course on the customer rather than a course in marketing, a course on the investor rather than a course in finance," Podolny said. "All of them are multidisciplinary in both their design and their delivery."

Nevertheless, the increasing global focus of the new SOM curriculum reflects the larger university-wide trend toward seeing itself as a global institution serving a potentially global student base. A generation or so, Yale's president would have identified his institution's mission as one of educating the best minds in the country. Today, he would say it's educating the best minds in the world.

That's a pretty significant change,