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PUTTING BUSINESS BACK IN THE MBA

PUBLIC NEXT GENERATION GLOBAL STUDIO

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“There is considerable opportunity for future business leaders to grasp the power of place, combined with new virtual technologies and behaviours...”

Every educated educator is aware of the two-way dialogue that exists between educational institutions and industry sectors. This dialogue provides a self-perpetuating source of innovation, where educational institutions learn of the most contemporary techniques and trends in professional practice; while industry professionals benefit from the time-intensive research and new knowledge created by universities.

This dialogue is, however, often overlooked when it comes to workplace innovation. Let’s face facts: the university workplace model hasn’t changed for around a millennium. It is outdated, outmoded and under performing.

An institution that takes precedent from the financial and professional service sectors would see a global workplace in the midst of rapid change. Most obviously, workplaces are physically changing as we move from the industrial age to the information age.

Consolidated portfolios are expanding to include ‘touch-down’ spaces closer to where people live. Enclosed offices are giving way to openness and transparency. Assigned desks are being replaced by workpoints that are designed to encourage specific activities such as collaborative group projects, quiet individual tasks, or meetings for both physical and virtual teams.

These changes are being catalysed by two agents: customers and employees. Customer-driven real estate strategies must focus on the business aspirations and needs of clientele; while employee-driven decisions must be based on strategies that improve employee wellbeing, efficiency and creativity.

The most successful companies use property-based solutions that address these two agents together, dovetailing client-based strategies with employee-based strategies instead of providing mutually-exclusive solutions.

Furthermore, much past research and focus has been placed on the individual, whereas creating spaces for people to work collaboratively as teams is now much more important as knowledge becomes more specialised.

03 Putting business back in the MBAby James Calder

Macquarie Group’s One Shelley Street, Sydney, Australia

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One could argue the only purpose of the workplace is to bring people together, as flexible work practices and technology are allowing people to work individually in a range of workplaces of their choice. The ‘9 to 5’ day is dead.

Using client-and-employee-based decisions, the most contemporary workplace concepts support three emerging workplace trends: parallel tasks and processing; synchronicity between physical and virtual environments; and collaboration.

These trends will continue to strengthen as new technologies are created that provide the necessary vehicle through which client-and-employee-based strategies can be most effectively met.

There is considerable opportunity for future business leaders to grasp the power of place, combined with new virtual technologies and behaviours to drive significant increases in business performance and new organisational models. Organisations such as Google and Macquarie Group understand this and use it to their competitive advantage.

Parallel processing

Originally designed for product development in the form of concurrent engineering, parallel processing is a work methodology based on the parallelisation of tasks. This is unlike the ‘waterfall’ model of sequential processing, where tasks are performed in succession, one after the other.

Instead, parallel processing relies on tasks being performed concurrently, thereby increasing productivity and quality and decreasing speed to market.

A number of the most progressive and successful companies, including NASA and Boeing, now use parallel processes to develop products and to perform services.

These companies use parallel processing to simultaneously integrate the design of products with other tasks that would usually be performed successively. The iterative and integrated procedures undertaken in parallel processing look at all aspects of the project’s lifecycle at the same time. Errors can, thereby, be discovered early in the process and redesigns can be conducted quickly and with minimal cost.

Within the virtual realm, cloud technology is enabling concurrent engineering on a prevalent scale. Work can be conducted on a single project in real time from any location around the globe.

In the physical workplace, parallel processing is enabled by working environments designed for specific functions. Instead of an employee taking ownership of a single desk and a computer, employees are offered the mobility and freedom to select a workspace that is most appropriate for their current workload.

For example, Macquarie Group Sydney employees based at the recently implemented groundscraper building with interiors designed by Woods Bagot and Clive Wilkinson Architects may choose from a laboratory environment, a library, a cafe, a meeting room and many other work settings that the employee deems will provide the most appropriate environment in which they can conduct their current task.

The most forward-looking business management education institutions will look to harness and progress this trend toward simultaneous task processing. Such institutions can also look toward NASA’s Integrated Design Centre or the Concurrent Design Facility at the European Space Agency for guidance on how best to enable parallel processing that has been specifically implemented within an educational environment.

These environments contain an array of design workstations (each of which are dedicated to a specific technical discipline), advanced technologies (including a multimedia wall with free-hand drawing capabilities) and sophisticated video conferencing facilities.

Parallel processing can also be integrated into the broad structure of business schools to enable a whole-of-life approach that ties recruitment to curriculum, which in turn can be tied to alumni, research and faculty. Instead of business schools undertaking a yearly process of refining their processes, their people and their curriculum, a concurrent approach can enable an iterative design process that is always dynamic, contemporary and relevant.

The current opportunity for business is to break down conventional silos and refocus on new customer segments. Parallel processing is timely for many organisational restructures.

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Synchronicity

The boundary between the physical and virtual worlds within professional environments are being abstracted and blurred. In time, this boundary will cease to become a boundary at all – it will cease to act as an inhibitor between crossing these mediums. Technologies are being developed that allow for the seamless integration between virtual and physical realms.

This means that teams will no longer need to arrive 10 minutes early to set up for a video conference, wait 20 minutes for a file transfer from an offshore office, or have data-streamed voice calls drop out mid-conversation. Just as computer technology once became the most capable enabler of efficiency and productivity, so will IT-based integration solutions become the most capable enabler of collaboration, creativity and connectivity.

As such, the selection of teams will become less dependent on their physical location and increasingly based on their qualifications for a particular project. The result is an increased focus on customer needs – teams will be able to deliver increasingly effective results with greater efficiency.

Collaboration

The industries in which business school alumni will eventually operate have, since the beginning of this century, been intently focused on increasing operational efficiencies, enhancing organisational competitiveness and maximising operating profits through various mechanisms and techniques.

Over the past decade, collaboration has been the most favoured technique because of its ability to increase performance: organisations have realised that team-based performance is superior to the sum of individual performance.

However, within the past five years, collaboration has also become globally recognised as the most powerful mechanism to foster innovation and simulate creativity within the workplace. The current iteration of collaborative work processes is sharply focused on a cross-departmental approach, where teams are being formed from several siloed business units. This supports innovation, fosters creativity and is responsible for outside-the-square solutions.

Perhaps this horizontal integration was most profoundly explained by renowned academic Professor Peter Medaware over 30 years ago. Professor Medaware spoke of creating new knowledge through the seemingly banal task of reorganising his library. When he felt the need to refresh his mind or to break the bind of his present mindset, he would reorganise his library of books, placing previously unrelated books next to each other.

He described this realignment of previously unrelated fields of knowledge as a form of paradigm shift that released the previously unrealised potential of cross-sector knowledge. It was as if the ideas, theories and manifestos of one book would somehow seep through the binding and permeate the conceptual field of the adjacent book, thereby creating an engagement of ideas through theoretical osmosis.

This is the same concept used by business management schools at Yale and Columbia Universities, which aspire to unlock previously unrealised potential by exploring the fertile spaces in between vertical silos.

In 2006, Yale University eliminated its academic silos, opting instead for a curriculum that is industry-driven, not faculty-driven. The curriculum has been restructured from a perspective of accounting, marketing, operations and finance to the perspective of investors, shareholders, employees and customers.Macquarie Group’s One Shelley Street,

Sydney, Australia

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Columbia University has also cross-pollinated its MBA program with its other schools in an attempt to increase educational value through collaborative learning techniques. Students undertaking an MBA can, for example, study a dual program that is coordinated with the Master of Urban Planning Program at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Instead of undertaking an MBA with a speciality in a particular subject area, students gain exposure to the full realm of both schools – their faculties, their alumni, their resources and their students.

Dan LeClair, Vice President at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, agrees that integration, collaboration and cross-silo fertilisation are critical to the success of future business schools. He said that most schools “for the longest time would teach the individual silos and try to pull it all together with a capstone course at the end of the program”.

“What we’ve come to realise is that integration is also a mind-set. You don’t want to reinforce the silo mind-set throughout the program and try to change it at the end.”

This approach extends the ability of the school to produce alumni that are successful in the fields of finance and marketing. Students exposed to this horizontal arrangement of education are better prepared to take on challenging management roles in an increasingly varied field of choice.

Research work that Pfizer is doing measuring actual interaction is telling in our understanding of how collaboration actually works. It shows that, in many ways, the only purpose for the existence of the workplace is to facilitate collaboration.

Education professionals – particularly those responsible for property-based decisions – would be well-advised to look toward the professional sector for inspiration and guidance. They would see a profession that is using innovations in design and planning to catalyse changes, to enable enhanced productivity, to increase knowledge, and to create environments that are simultaneously high performing and highly comfortable.

Image © Pfizer

References

– http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/world/europe/27iht-educLede27.html – http://www.heraldsun.com/view/full_story/3817239/article-Russian-MBA-program-tackles-real-world-hassles – http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/stories/2010/03/08/focus1.html – http://www.economist.com/node/16208000 – http://www.coydavidson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/110727_GIST_The_Mobile_Worker4.png – http://www.futureofcities.ox.ac.uk – http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/25a79a4e-a252-11e0-bb06-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a9543bac-edcc-11db-8584-000b5df10621.html#axzz1VtoKsYtQ – http://www.mydigitalfc.com/news/gateway-riches-324 – http://english.eastday.com/e/110825/u1a6071375.html – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_simulation – http://www.economist.com/whichmba?page=1 – http://mbaoath.org – http://universityfinancelab.com/photo-gallery – http://www.economist.com/node/18802722 – http://english.eastday.com/e/110825/u1a6071375.html – http://www.capitalvue.com/home/CE-news/inset/@10063/post/3158313 – http://www.mbaworld.com/blr-archive/mba-market/6/index.htm – http://www.economist.com/whichmba/mba-diary-was-it-worth-it – http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2011/05/higher-education_bubble – http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/05/the_business_school_tuition_bubble.html

James CalderDirector of Research

James is a practitioner, facilitator, author and part-time educatorinterested in all facets of the strategy, design and use of theworkplace. He has extensive experience in Europe and the AsiaPacific with the world’s pre-eminent organisations across mostbusiness sectors. James has developed workplace strategies forlawyers, professional services firms, investment banks, retail banks,universities and the public sector.His work at the highest levels of management gives him a uniqueperspective on the opportunities for the future workplace of users,organisations and suppliers, and in the issues associated with theplanning and design of accommodation resources. He speaksregularly at conferences around the region and has conductedstudy tours locally and overseas. He is regularly called on by themedia for expert opinions on issues of architecture in the workplace.

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