ANEDUCATIONINCOMPLEXITYAt Cambridge Judge Business School,scientists and engineers, philosophers and politicians are helping to shape businesseducation.

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Words William Ham BevanPhotographs Charlie Troman

What should we be teaching businesspeople in the 21st century? Joelle duLac, Cambridge Judge Business

School’s Director of External Affairs, believesthe future has to be about managing greatercomplexity – whether that complexity comesin the form of access to huge amounts ofinformation, a banking catastrophe or anintricate legal framework.

“There has to be a question about theabilities of business schools to face up to the more complex concepts and systems thatpeople in business have to deal with,” she says. “At the same time, business schools are really just incubators for cultivating business talent – it’s not so much what is taught but thelearning environment they can provide.Clearly, a multidisciplinary, diverse approachis critical to both these issues.”

Nowhere is the inter-disciplinary approachmore apparent than in the Cambridge MBA.Students customise their degree with a widechoice of electives, bringing them into contactwith a cross-section of Cambridge talent andlocal and global companies. Colin Lizeri,Grosvenor Professor of Real Estate Finance,explains: “This year, I contributed a casestudy looking at the dynamics of the City ofLondon office market to the Real EstateFinance elective.”

With the ethics of the corporate worldunder heightened scrutiny, the Philosophy inBusiness elective has flourished, and is taughtby Hallvard Lillehammer and Alex Oliver ofthe Philosophy Faculty.

“I don’t think there could have been a better time for us to start this course,” says Dr Lillehammer. “We cover a range of areasthat connect work to traditional philosophy:issues that come up in the business world,which we hope that students will have thoughtabout in their own lives before they started theMBA.” The elective tackles corporate socialresponsibility and ethics, trust, truthfulness

Above Joelle du LacRight Dr Hallvard LillehammerFar right Professor Colin Lizeri

and the generation of demand. All are taughtusing a ‘bottom-up’ approach, beginning with a practical problem pertinent to business, and identifying the philosophicaltools that may be used to address it. Dr Lillehammer says: “On truth, for example,we might identify a number of conceptions of truthfulness: what their implications are, and how they would apply in certain business scenarios. The students often bringus wonderful anecdotes from their ownexperience.”

The Services Innovation course, run jointly by faculty from Cambridge andexecutives from IBM, offers an even morehands-on experience, as vice-president KevinBishop (Emmanuel 1981) explains. “As partof the course, we put together a kind of‘Dragons’ Den’ initiative, where we invite thestudents to present their ideas for improve-ments to a service that doesn’t work for them.I understand that with one of the ideas thatcame out of the course, the students arefollowing it up and setting up a company totake it into practice.”

This interdisciplinary ethos is a guiding principle for the school – and, according to du Lac, essential if the School is to compete on the international stage. “The realcompetition for us is coming from newschools in the East and big, establishedschools in the West. We rank ourselves amongthe leading business schools in the world, butit’s very, very tough,” she says. “One of theissues we have is scale – we’re not as large asmost of our competitors. And now three of the top business schools in China are starting toaggressively recruit in the US.”

Collaboration does not take place just informal tuition and research: connections can be made via more informal channels.Among the current students on the Executive MBA programme is Michael Salama, Senior Tax Counsel and Vice President, Tax

Administration, at the Walt Disney Company.“The interdisciplinary benefits I’ve enjoyedwhile studying at Cambridge arise naturallyfrom the structure of the EMBA programme,”he says. He cites a management scienceassignment, which his group were asked totailor to their own industry experiences.“That assignment gave me the opportunity to model a prime-time television network’s show selection as a portfolio. I examinedvarious show line-up combinations, lookingat the implications for risk and management.The same weekend Lord Eatwell hosted a dinner for us at Queens’. An impromptuconversation about regional content andtrends in funding for foreign film projects tied a lot of the study together and providedpractical and local insight.”

The School’s Executive Educationprogramme – short courses for seniormanagers – draws on the experience

of the University’s most prominent figures. On recent programmes, Sir Richard Dearlove,ex-chief of MI6 and Master of Pembroke, hasspoken about geopolitics and business; formerCabinet Secretary Lord Wilson of Dinton,Master of Emmanuel, lectured on ‘Copingwith the unforeseen: strategies for recovery’.

Building upon this, the new AdvancedLeadership Programme accepts its first intake this term. The concentrated three-weekprogramme, aimed at board-level seniormanagers, has enlisted the help of localenterprises, the University boat crew and the Britten Sinfonia. “Nevertheless, these programmes are very focused,” says Joelle du Lac. “We took the angle very early on that these were not luxury executive holidays: we wanted them to be relevant andrigorous.”

With competition from institutions in India and East Asia set to intensify overcoming years, Joelle du Lac believes that the School’s integration with a world-classresearch university will increasingly be seen as a factor to differentiate it from its rivals.

She says: “A lot of business schools arevery separate from their universities and in the past it was even seen as an advantage to be a stand-alone institution. But Cambridgeacademic excellence, across a range ofdisciplines, and applied to real businessproblems, is a very powerful proposition.

“I don’t know of any other majoruniversity engaged quite so intimately with its business school, to the extent thatCambridge is. It is the way of the future.”

Could education have a role in preventing thenext major financial crisis? At Cambridge JudgeBusiness School, bankers with around fouryears’ experience compete for places on theCambridge Master of Finance, a one-yeardegree programme.

The course combines core financial theorywith courses such as fixed income analysis,derivatives, mergers and acquisitions, andhedge funds. Students also examine the role ofregulation and the broader role of financeoutside the City. But perhaps most importantly,the City Speakers seminar series enablesstudents to examine issues as they happen, andin the company of industry insiders.

However, for students following theManagement Studies Tripos, the introductionto the realities of the business world beginsbefore they finish their undergraduate studies.Open to third and fourth year undergraduates, as well as providing a solid grounding in thefundamentals of management, the courseenables students to develop an understandingof the responsibilities of managers in economic,social, and environmental contexts.

To find out more about the work of Cambridge JudgeBusiness School visit www.jbs.cam.ac.uk

© Neil G

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