Foreword
BABSON COLLEGE’S CURRENT CURRICULUM IS ROOTED IN AN intellectual journey that started more than three decades ago. At that time most schools relied heavily on the scientific method to train general and functional managers for jobs in a vibrant and growing corporate sector in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The entrepreneur as an economic actor was largely ignored. Recognizing this gap, Babson was the first to focus on the study of entrepreneurship as a discipline.
We introduced an entrepreneurship program, held business plan competitions, created an entrepreneurship center, hosted the first research conference in entrepreneurship, and began the systematic development of entrepreneurship faculty and intellectual capital, such as the Symposia for Entrepreneurship Educators and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. These were all innovations in management education that helped make Babson the recognized leader in the academics of entrepreneurship.
Introducing the entrepreneurship program allowed us to look systematically at the entrepreneurial experience. An important insight was that that experience, which spans new venture from cradle to grave, could be a powerful educational means of training business professionals regardless of whether they started a new venture. We also learned that entrepreneurs see business problems in a more holistic way than do managers, who often see issues in terms of functional domains.
These insights gave birth to two important curricular innovations. The first was a new undergraduate course in which students had to start and close a business during their freshman year, donating the profits to a charity of their choice. At the graduate level, the master’s in business administration (MBA) program was reorganized around the life cycle of a business. The second innovation was an integrated curriculum in which disciplines were not only introduced to match the venture life cycle but also focused on interdisciplinary problem solving. Many of the classes and the programs developed during this phase are referenced in this book.
The third stage of our intellectual journey began in the past few years with the recognition that entrepreneurs think and act differently; that is, entrepreneurship most fundamentally is a method and a mindset of leadership that could and should be used when leading all types of organizations. This fresh focus on the method and the mindset of entrepreneurial leaders is precisely what the book’s authors imply by developing “the new entrepreneurial leader.” Of course, much of the credit for recognizing the power of this conceptualization of leadership belongs to our students and alumni, who report the benefits of entrepreneurial thinking and methods in their decision-making and leadership approach. Although many of our graduates choose to work for large corporations, they tell us how being exposed to entrepreneurial thinking and methods informed their decisions and career paths.
This 30-plus-year evolution of Babson’s programs coincides with great changes in the world in which we live. These changes have given rise to serious doubts about the efficacy of the traditional model of business education as well as an increasing realization that the answer may lie in entrepreneurship of all kinds. Consider some of the changes that have taken place recently.
We live in an increasingly crowded world in which the divide between the haves and the have-nots is growing. This divide requires job creation at rates that are not possible for most businesses and governments. The result is high youth unemployment, which poses a challenge to the stability of “have-not” countries and is a national security issue for the “have” countries. Moreover, this economic gap is generating significant national security issues across all continents. For example, Businessweek described the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East as the result of the “youth unemployment bomb” (Coy 2011).
The magnitude of unemployment challenges one of the basic assumptions of business education—that graduates will find work in the corporate sector. But if the need of the day is to turn out employment creators and not employment consumers, we need more entrepreneurial leaders. This is becoming increasingly apparent to public- and private-sector leaders. President Barack Obama convened an entrepreneurship summit in 2010 as a symbol of positive engagement across the world, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made entrepreneurship a key element of US foreign policy, and Goldman Sachs has invested $500 million for a “10,000 Small Businesses” initiative in 2011.
In more-affluent countries, significant change is under way as well. The underlying structures that once ensured some stability in our jobs and corporate careers are giving way to “a gig economy,” where short-term project-based work is becoming the norm. In this situation workers need to continuously network to create opportunities across organizations and industries. Perhaps most significantly, they will pursue these opportunities across geographies as well, as the so-called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries become new hubs of global business activity and innovation.
Often the business challenges arising from these shifts are not neatly packaged or amenable to the rational and analytical skills that business schools are so good at developing in students. We must be motivated to change management education to develop leaders who are not paralyzed by the emerging or unknowable facets of the world, where reliable and relevant data are not yet available. We must develop leaders who can also create social and economic opportunity.
Our message is that students can learn to become cognitively ambidextrous. On one hand they apply an entrepreneurial mindset and methodology to experiment with new ideas and act in new environments; on the other they apply deep functional knowledge and detailed analysis to plan future actions. Students can learn to act creatively within unknowable portions of the world while learning more-traditional competencies for cases in which information is relevant and accessible. Future leaders must discern the knowable from the unknowable, understand the approach that works in each case, and adapt their actions and analyses accordingly.
As management educators we too can become practitioners of this approach, especially as we try to answer fundamentally unfamiliar or messy questions: How do we infuse social and environmental responsibility into the curriculum? How do we globalize education? How do we prepare students to lead in a complex and ever-changing world?
This book offers an integrated way to look at these questions, encouraging you to think about social and environmental sustainability alongside analytics and profits, to consider multiple ways of making decisions and leading organizations, and to examine the importance of self- and social awareness. We are still in the early stages of integrating these themes into our own curriculum, so the following pages do not offer the final word. Instead we hope this is the beginning of a conversation.
Shahid Ansari, Provost of Babson College
Leonard Schlesinger, President of Babson College
Reference
Coy, P. 2011. “The Youth Unemployment Bomb.” Businessweek, February 2. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_07/b4215058743638.htm.