“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
This has been a very unusual year to us all that will be remembered for sure. We have encountered black swans that hit once in a century, such as the greatest pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918, the largest forest fires in the US ever, how the political and economic systems are globally now fully intertwined, a new aggressive push towards more stringent climate change measures (though we do not know if these come too little and too late), and an unprecedented wave of anti-scientific and evidence-ignoring policy and arguments in the public sphere. This all indicates that what originally formed the cornerstone of our practitioner-scholar approach to management and was invented over two decades ago to address such new global management challenges is now more acute than ever. It is a strong testimony for the great foresight of the creators of this program and how relevant our educational approach to the grand challenges of our time is to prepare new kinds of management thought leaders. As Professor Michael Tushman from Harvard pointed out in his September EMS 2020 conference keynote, that “practitioner-scholarship is needed more than ever”.
To address these challenges and position our program better with the emerging new environment, which comes with the abundance of data and fast paced change, we are now taking a hard look at our DBA and PhD curricula, its contents and delivery. This is the fourth time we are making significant revisions to the program curriculum. The first round was in 1995, the second one in 2005 when qualitative and quantitative requirements were added and the third revision in 2009-2011 when mixed method design and the PhD option were added. In the meanwhile, we have constantly changed and expanded both the qualitative and quantitative research method skills and approaches and added some new content courses around design or sustainability.
We will review and revise both the research and content area courses and associated pedagogical solutions. This is necessary as we need to expand the DBA and PhD student research skills and competencies to deal with varied types of data and how to use them as evidence for decision making. We need to enhance students’ skills to be able to find and synthesize varied and growing research evidence for actionable insights and we need to seek new ways to provide skills for lifelong learning and improvement. To this end, we have initiated a task force that will create a new competency and outcome based plan for the curriculum starting with specific profiles. Thereafter, we will develop new expanded course content and program deliverables and formulate an implementation/pedagogical plan that will reduce the number of physical residencies to six residencies per academic year. This will call for some adjustments with regard to how we manage our time during the residencies and how we better deploy also virtual environment in content delivery.
As part of this change we intend to separate PhD and DBA curricula from one another by admitting students directly into the PhD program in the first year. These changes seek to simultaneously improve the program’s relevance and rigor. We hope that this will also help graduates better address the grand managerial challenges of our time. I would like to thank all the DBA faculty and alumni who have provided valuable input to this process. It has been an exciting experience to participate in the diverse and insightful discussions of what it means to design and deliver the best executive DBA program on earth. We plan to have the new curriculum ready by next spring and share it with our students and alumni for comments and input. The new curriculum will be adopted in Spring 2021. The incoming 2024 DBA cohort will be the first one to follow it fully.
Stay safe and keep well.
