Class is now in session. It's being held in Ann Arbor and Chicago, Bangalore and Shanghai, Minneapolis and Middlebury, Mozambique and Sao Paulo, Grand Rapids and Manhattan, Hong Kong and Peru, if you'd like to join.
The class is about business plan development and financial services, leadership development and logistics, marketing and mergers, process improvement and strategies for growth, and much, much more. It covers alternative energy, automotive, business process outsourcing, consumer products, computers, electronics, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, real estate, retail, software, telecommunications, sustainability, wish-making and - yes - much more.
There are 400 students, 30 faculty, and individuals from 80 organizations working together to navigate through real projects in real time and to come up with solutions that can actually be implemented. Solutions that may or may not succeed, and, in some cases, solutions that can even determine whether the company itself does or does not succeed. This year's MAP features a host of changes in how projects are sourced, staffed, supported, and kicked off - all implemented in a MAP-like spirit of innovation and continuous improvement based on feedback from students, faculty, and sponsors over the last year.
But that's not what's on the minds of our 80+ project teams at the moment. What they're thinking is:
- Just what the heck is my project really about?
- What kinds of questions am I supposed to be asking?
- What does this manager really think of my questions?
- What am I going to be doing next week?
- Where will I be working?
- How do I design a questionnaire?
- Does my team think I'm doing a good job?
- What do I really think the company should do?
- What if they actually try to do what we are recommending?
What kind of a school does this to its students? A school that wants to provide the kind of leadership development opportunity that only practical experience and real stakes can provide. Traditional business education has focused for decades on developing deep functional knowledge and skills so that students secure entry-level positions in particular areas such as finance, marketing, or operations, and succeed on a career path through that part of the organization. The world has changed.
Business is different. Organizational and international boundaries are increasingly blurry. Everything moves at a faster pace. Clear and complete facts are rarely available. Decisions must be made on judgment, confidence, and courage, rather than purely analytical or deductive skills. Getting things done means leading and working collaboratively within teams. Students are different too. Graduates with 5-7 years of previous work experience are categorically different from those students with only 2 years of work experience or less. Graduate students start in higher-level positions and the opportunities to move up (or out) come faster. Most starting positions come with broader responsibility and greater accountability. Goals may be given, but the path forward needs to be discovered. Teams have to be formed and led. All new graduates, it seems, must quickly become leaders and generalists.
Successful leaders must be able to:
- Discover and frame the right problems and opportunities to work on.
- Assemble and work effectively in high-performance, cross-disciplinary teams.
- Gather the best possible set of facts given the time and resources available.
- Identify and navigate connections across boundaries - whether organizational, cultural, disciplinary, or international.
- Make fact-based decisions despite uncertainty and incomplete information.
- Persuade others to take actions that make a difference.
Action-based learning (ABL) courses such as MAP address these fundamentals of business leadership better than anything else we know - developing critical thinking, teamwork, and communication skills in ways that traditional classroom-based course can never do. Our goal is for Ross graduates to achieve a mastery of these skills, which allows them to start on a higher level and progress faster, succeeding in ways that make a difference for organizations and communities worldwide. And we at Ross know how to do it better than anyone else.
We pioneered the use of field projects as part of our core program in 1991. No other school offers such a course or addresses these issues as part of their core. We run more projects each year than any other school - more than the next five schools combined. We're building a unique store of knowledge about how to do it, unique capabilities in our faculty and staff to support it, and a unique set of relationships around the world that make it all possible. It is a real advantage for our School as we work towards our goal of being one of the world's premier business schools. And, in Marketing 101 terms, a competitive advantage that is difficult to imitate or trump.
Of course, this is not to say that MAP is perfect. In fact, by its very nature, MAP is anything but perfect. MAP is ambiguous from beginning to end. No one really knows what a project will involve into until it actually happens. Project scopes change. Key people can suddenly become unavailable. Companies may experience major 'shocks' such as mergers or even bankruptcy. Safety threats such as wars or disease can change travel plans. There's never enough time, enough data, or even certainty about the data we can obtain. And when we make our recommendations, we never know whether we have the 'right' answer - although, hopefully, we know the answer we have given the company is more 'right' than any other alternative we know about.
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