Class is now in session. It's being held in Bangalore and Shanghai, Minneapolis and St. Petersburg, Morocco and Serbia, Redmond and Manhattan, Ireland and Brazil, Ann Arbor and Troy, if you'd like to join.
It's about business plan development and financial modeling, human resource planning and logistics, marketing and mergers, process improvement and strategies for growth, and much, much more.
It's alternative energy, automotive, business process outsourcing, consumer products, computers, electronics, financial services & security analysis, healthcare, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, retail, software, telecommunications, tsunami relief, and - yes - much more.
It's 430 students and 35 students and 84 projects.
It's all about students, faculty, and managers working together to navigate through real projects in real time - and to come up with solutions that organizations will really implement, that may or may not succeed, and, in some cases, can even determine whether the company itself does or does not succeed.
It's MAP and it's back and it's bigger and better than ever.
This year's MAP features a host of changes in how projects are sourced, staffed, scoped, scheduled, supported, and conceptualized-all implemented in a MAP-like spirit of innovation and continuous improvement based on feedback from students, faculty, and sponsoring organizations over the last year.
But that's not what's on the minds of 84 project teams at the moment.
What they're thinking is:
* Just what the heck is my project really about?
* Why doesn't somebody just tell me?
* 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?
* Are we doing everything we need to or are we missing something important?
* 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?
One that wants to increase their confidence to lead-and have a broader skill set with which to do so.
Leaders don't just solve problems that are handed to them and then hand them off to someone else. A leader knows how to identify and define a problem in the first place (and often is the first to do so), how to assemble and build a team to tackle it, how to determine what facts need to be collected and how to bring them together, how to arrive at a careful and reasonable judgment, and, once the action plan is determined, how to make it so.
MAP gets us all outside of the case method and addresses these important components of business leadership better than anything else I know.
It doesn't really matter whether it's Grand Rapids or Bangalore, working with entrepreneurs or corporate managers, or if the project is supply chain or market entry. The central benefits of action learning are the same, no matter the project or location.
And we know how to do it better than anyone else.
We pioneered the use of field projects as part of our core all the way back 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 country and around the world that make it all possible. It will be a real advantage for our School as we work towards our goal of being the world's best business school. And, in Marketing 101 terms, one that will be 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. There's never enough time to collect all the data, analyze it, or even be certain about many of the facts. And, at the end of the day 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 better than any other alternative we know about.
MAP is inherently unpredictable. Will the team collaborate well together? Will they get good cooperation from the company? Will the team be able to get the right set of interviews or access to the right datasets? Will a flight cancellation keep them from making some of their most important appointments?
In any given year, it is inevitable that several projects will not go quite as planned. Yet even these situations present important learning opportunities. Learning from a difficult team experience, for example, can pay off later in your career. MAP really is one of those cases where a bad experience can be more than just a bad experience.
In short, MAP is not really a good short-term student satisfaction maximization strategy. If our only goal was to increase student satisfaction, we could shy away from challenging and uncomfortable situations. However, we believe that the long-term benefits of experience like MAP are worth the cost.
We do work hard to make sure that the MAP experience is a great one for as many of our students as possible and continually review what we're doing with an eye towards how to improve it.
Some highlights of the changes for this year include:
* More focused learning objectives
* New learning process (a 'how to' framework for MAP)
* Streamlined set of course milestones and deliverables
* New workshops, resources, and templates
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