Staying in business: business schools strive to keep ahead of industry's needs.

• Author: Mayer, Kathy

Re-engineering, continuous process improvement and outcomes assessment are changing more than the business world.

Indiana's top business-education programs, too, are embracing these principles as they adapt course work to meet continually changing needs of the work world. Ivory-tower premises and theorems are giving way to practical processes as academe's hallowed halls ring with practicality.

"We must constantly restructure ourselves to keep up with the speed of today's changes," says Dennis Weidenaar, dean of the Purdue University Krannert School of Management.

Indiana University saw the handwriting on the wall well before the current "rush to redesign curriculum," says Joe Pica, MBA program director.

"We had a two-year study in place before changing the curriculum became popular," he says. That allowed IU to implement curriculum changes two years ago. The revised curriculum focuses on internationalism, integration and teamwork.

"We don't just give lip service to 'global,'" Pica says. "It's not just a class where you talk about internationalism. It's not an add-on. It's infused throughout the functions. Every class has internationalism. It's truly integrated."

Teamwork is another critical aspect, he says. "We work on teams. We understand their role. And our students are involved in teams where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

Right from the first, IU's MBA students participate in teams, he explains. "They begin to recognize early on the different aspects of team work, what teams are, how they work and how best to play their individual roles."

Students stay in the same teams the entire semester, working on cases that involve cross functions, rather than a single focus, such as finance.

Graduates can no longer be trained just functionally, Pica says. "Our students must be able to integrate all aspects, to integrate finance and marketing with all other interests. If the marketing department succeeds and the business fails, everyone fails.

"Skills are not enough. We teach them how to think," he says. "It's the understanding and insight we provide that helps them go out and become good business leaders. We don't train people. We educate them."

Indiana's business programs currently are facing drastically revised accreditation standards, causing the schools to examine themselves as closely as many industries have had to.

"The key points now are assurance that you have quality, and that you are going to maintain quality," says...