Integrative Learning

The MBA for Executives program is a 19-month program that emphasizes identifying and resolving business problems by drawing on the Business Administration disciplines of Leadership and Organizational Development, Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Economics, Communications, Systems, Decisions and Data Analysis, Operations Management, Entrepreneurship and Strategic Planning. The complex issues that today challenge executives demand an integrative approach that cuts across a more traditionally-structured, narrowly-defined, and functionally-focused undertaking.

This curriculum therefore makes extensive use of interdisciplinary cases and experiential exercises conducted by groups of faculty from different disciplines during both the course modules and separate Integrated Business Problem (IBP) sessions held periodically throughout the program. These IBPs and other intensive learning experiences provide the MBA for Executives students with opportunities to apply their learning through active role-playing in carefully planned simulations. Thus, students acquire the capacity to view management problems through multiple lenses. A theme of integrative learning emerges.

The program faculty believes that significant integrative learning takes place when students have the opportunity to discuss and analyze the dynamics from a given simulation as they relate to different functional areas.  Picture a Finance professor, Marketing professor and Organizational Behavior professor pointing out issues that require reconciling multiple priorities and asking questions that call for students to see how each decision must contribute to achieving a larger goal. This leads to the realization that effective decision making requires that executives understand and reconcile the often competing influences of multiple organizational goals and stakeholder interests.

Examples of such exercises include PressTime and Paper Planes. These simulations  require you to demonstrate your abilities (in many  cases with newly-developed skill sets) to use the tools of multiple business disciplines such as Accounting, Applied Economics, Information Systems, Finance and Marketing to deal with multifaceted problems. A discussion in the Decisions and Data Analysis module, for example, informs the behavioral choices they make in setting priorities for the PressTime Simulation. During the debriefs these exercises, students give feedback to one another both individually and in small groups. In doing so, they use the language from different disciplines in helping each other see where they made good decisions and where they could improve.