Robert Dolan Innovates Michigan's MBA Program | Big Think

Robert Dolan Innovates Michigan's MBA Program

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The dean explains how he shaped the Ross School of Business.

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Robert J. Dolan:

Robert J. Dolan is the dean of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

A professor of marketing, he was a chaired faculty member and administrator at Harvard Business School for 21 years. His major research interests are product policy and pricing. He has published widely on these topics in such journals as the Bell Journal of Economics, European Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, and Sales and Marketing Management

Dean Dolan earned a Ph.D. and an M.S. in management at the University of Rochester and a B.A. magna cum laude in mathematics from Boston College.

Dolan is author or co-author of eight books and numerous case studies. His Managing the New Product Development Process (Addison-Wesley), based on research to develop the New Product Development course in the MBA Program at Harvard, has been adopted at a number of leading business schools. A recent book, Power Pricing: How Managing Price Transforms the Bottom Line (Free Press), was developed for practitioners. Drawing on research and consulting experiences with firms worldwide, the book sets out a program for proactive management of prices for superior profitability. His case studies and notes, published by Harvard Business School, address a wide range of companies and issues, including Black and Decker, BMW, Henkel Corporation, L’Oreal, and Eastman Kodak. More than one million copies of these materials have been sold to date.

A frequent lecturer and consultant, he assists a wide variety of clients on issues of product policy and pricing. He has testified on marketing issues in a number of major litigations and has served on the boards of directors of several publicly traded companies including Knoll Inc., a leading office furniture manufacturer and Precise Software Inc.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How does the Ross School integrate real world business problems in the classroom?

Robert Dolan: Well, there’s a number of ways. I guess I’ll start out by talking about the way that we do it is maybe as a little bit distinctive among business schools. I think the signature element of our school, our MBA program in particular, compared to others, is what we call action based learning.

So right now, for example, all of our 425 first year MBA students would not be found in Ann Arbor. They would be scattered around the globe in about 90 teams, working on real world problems. So what we’ve done to try to differentiate our students and really provide value added was probably about 10 years ago, slightly before I got to the school, we instituted what we called, this map project, which we call multidisciplinary action projects. So we, since, built that up and really invested in it as our point of differentiation.

And so, we source about a 120 projects a year from around the world of three different types. We have corporate ones, which would be like the Fortune 500 company, entrepreneurial, and nonprofit ones. And then, after the students take the required curriculum from August through the end of February, in March and April the only thing they do is one of these projects. So right now, we have, as I was saying, we have all of our first year MBAs out working on these real world projects around the globe so about half of them are outside the United States. And our thinking on that has been that, clearly, business schools have to be close to the world of practice. And you can get there a couple of ways.

One is, one way is to try to import the business world into your school via, for example, case studies or, as we have done recreating a trading floor that you’d find here in New York or another finance center in the world and bring that into the school.

The other way is you can take your students and your faculty and put them out in the world of practice. And so, that’s what we’ve done, really, to try to distinguish our program. And it’s a really great way of educating students and also a great way for us, as the school, to see what the interesting problems are out there in the world. Because in the course of having the students do these projects, we probably visit about a 150 companies a year to ask them if we could do a project with them, of something that’s really salient for them today.

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