By Philip A. Cola, PhD, Associate Director, Academic Affairs, DM Programs
As I write this DM Digest piece, I have just finished up with two days of Executive Doctor of Business Administration Council (EDBAC) board meetings. After these meetings it is always a time for me to reflect on how the EDBAC continues to try to build the global community of practitioner-scholars and the role that the Weatherhead DBA/DM/PhD Programs play in ensuring sustainability of this field of business management. The Weatherhead Programs are most often held in the highest regard in this international community of management practitioner-scholars and I am very proud to be an alumni and faculty member representing Case Western Reserve University in this way.
There continues to be a growing recognition in the broad management community of the profound need for integration of relevance and rigor toward the evidence that is contributed regarding “wicked” problems of practice that we face as management practitioners-scholars. There is also an increasing recognition of the never ending work of trying to keep our programs current, methodologically rigorous, and yet still ensure reasonable matriculation rates for students. The strong need for skilled practitioners in the field of management, who are well prepared to face the never ending stream of practice challenges with well-designed research and empirical evidence, is more important than ever before in global society. If we did not believe in such bold statements in the past, the global pandemic has solidified that there will always be new challenges for all types of managers to navigate toward solutions.
Our sudden shift to virtual learning that began now more than a year ago, in March 2020, came in the midst of tremendous efforts by the DBA/DM/PhD Program faculty, staff and students at the Weatherhead School of Management to continue to evolve and sometimes transcend our long history of proven and successful curriculum. It is very difficult to continue to pursue next level excellence through curricular innovations when a program has successfully produced more than 300 outstanding graduates over a 25-year period. This work calls for sustainable efforts at design and innovation in curriculum that set the tone for many programs and will influence similar programs for years to come. It is a big responsibility that we endeavor to execute.
As faculty, it is truly a complex adaptive system, which really has no end point, but is rather a continuous recursiveness that propels us forward for our students and their research interests or passions. The faculty, staff, alumni, and current students who contribute countless amounts of energy and attention to help make the programs better through curriculum revision and innovation inspire me. We want to maintain our position of prominence in this business management educational space and we eagerly want our students to experience a well thought out curriculum for their transformational experience at Weatherhead.
This results in many committees, many small projects, and a tremendous amount of effort to triangulate many inputs into what will in fact be the curriculum of the future that other institutions, practitioners, and scholars will learn from going forward. Our goal is to produce practitioner-scholars who are ready to be effective across disciplines. Program leadership and the faculty remain steadfast in that the most effective practitioner over time will have scholarly skills and who is multidisciplinary in focus. We hope that our students are prepared to think in analytical and sophisticated ways and as broadly as possible so that they can address any business management challenge.
To this end, and over just the past year, there have been five-separate committees working in areas that include: 1) the DBA curriculum; 2) the PhD curriculum; 3) integration of those curricula with other curricula in the Weatherhead School; 4) understanding market share and branding; and 5) staying current on the skills and competencies that are absolutely necessary to matriculate the practitioner scholars of the future. It is not easy to keep up with those committees or to build consensus among them, but it is also fascinating to see the commitment and creativity that emanates from their work.
I have begun to realize that no one model or programmatic approach will contain all of the proper solutions at once. We have to make very difficult decisions from time to time as to what is absolutely necessary in the curriculum versus what are good to have components of the curriculum. We have both content courses and method courses and finding the proper balance between those two types of courses is very difficult. It is even a challenge to balance just the methods courses among quantitative, qualitative and mixed method approaches.
Therefore, it is easy to see how complex and adaptive this system must be in order to ensure success. In the end the curriculum reflects a tremendous amount of caring, thought and effort with the ultimate intent to produce “research that matters” in disciplines as diverse as ethics, collective action, sustainability, leading change, complexity, social justice, medicine, higher education, information systems and digital innovation. It is important that alumni, students in the program, and prospective students understand the care and attention that the curriculum receives and that they are willing, in constructive ways, to partner with faculty and staff in this process of “continuous quality improvement” of the curriculum that drive the programs.
