Stories
Stories
Why were 253 people from all walks of life and parts of the globe pursuing academic work in teams in the Shad Hall fitness center in the middle of January? They were members of the HBS Class of 1997 January cohort. Arriving in the midst of one of the worst New England snowstorms on record, the group set its own record of sorts as the first set of MBA matriculants to enter the School in January as part of the new year-round MBA calendar. They were even setting records before they arrived at Soldiers Field as the first group to complete "Essential Skills" - a program of self-assessment, development, and review in quantitative reasoning, accounting, computer skills, and business writing and logical expression. From January 8 to January 30, they became the first group to encounter "Foundations" - the "sequel" to Essential Skills that builds on and extends those concepts to provide a comprehensive program designed to ensure a basic level of competency throughout the cohort.
By all accounts from the students, faculty members, and staff involved in the initial Foundations module, the experience was a huge success. Following a five-minute standing ovation by students to faculty and staff at the end of the intensive three-week module, one student compared the experience to running a marathon. "First we stretched, then we warmed up, and then we ran," is how Dwayne Romero (HBS '97) described his nine-and-a-half-hour days filled with classes, cases, problem sets, lectures, and team-based projects in the areas of Business History (The Dynamics of Capitalist Revolutions); Leadership, Values, and Decision Making (LVDM); Quantitative Methods (Lectures and Problems); Applied Personal Skills; Career Development; and Project Management.
According to Foundations architect and chairman HBS professor Leonard A. Schlesinger, several goals in addition to providing students with a common "foundation" for entering the MBA Program were sought and achieved by the module's planners.
"We tried to build a sense of community among the 253 students by providing opportunities for everyone to have classes with everyone else"
"First," Schlesinger says, "we tried to build a sense of community among the 253 students by providing opportunities for everyone to have classes with everyone else." To accomplish this, the cluster - a group of sixteen students - became the organizing block for Foundations. "We made a conscious effort to change the student mix constantly in order to provide many opportunities for experimentation before students were assigned to the permanent sections that will carry them through the required curriculum," Schlesinger notes. "Through exercises in teamwork, applied personal skills, and project management, we provided both the process and project expertise that students will need in order to manage projects in the required curriculum."
Unlike the MBA curriculum, class sizes and length varied considerably throughout the Foundations module. Students met in groups ranging from 32 to 128 students, and Foun-dations instructors determined the length of time they thought would be needed for a particular course. "The flexibility afforded by a smaller community with dedicated facilities (September entry MBA students didn't return to campus until mid-January) allowed us to experiment," Schlesinger says. Students were also exposed to a broader array of pedagogy than ever before - from business simulations, cases, lectures, and teaching assistant-led problem sessions to multiple team projects and classic problem sets.
Crimson Greetings
One of the more memorable aspects of Foun-dations may have been Crimson Greetings, a large-scale behavioral simulation involving all 253 students simultaneously that kicked off the module. In keeping with Foundations' goals to build a sense of community and to set the stage for some of the educational themes in the MBA Program, Crimson Greetings evolved out of extensive external research that paired the community- and trust-building components of an Outward Bound-type experience with a business simulation having practical application for HBS students.
Working in twelve-member student groups, each team, or "company," inherited a bankrupt greeting card company - complete with all the rules, procedures, and work practices that had brought it into insolvency. Each student was assigned a function in production, research and development, sales and marketing, or administration. In a day-and-a-half of real time - comprising twenty-minute action rounds, planning rounds, and instruction on specific topics such as mapping process flows, determining customer requirements, managing team meetings, and giving and receiving feedback - students had to figure out how to restore vitality to their flagging operation.
"Crimson Greetings was a great opener," comments one MBA student. "It helped to get me in the right business-oriented frame of mind while having fun. This was an extraordinary start to my time at HBS. I can't imagine not having had the experience; it's a perfect fit with Foundations." Faculty, MBA Program staff, and other HBS employees all played active roles as facilitators, coordinators, and even customers of the greeting card companies - an added benefit for both students and staff. "Any opportunity for our MBA Program staff to get to know students in an educational setting that is different from the administrative context they usually have is a real plus," notes Schlesinger.
Perhaps the biggest drama of Foundations was that which unfolded behind the scenes - virtually an HBS case study itself in logistics management. According to one planner, Foundations core design team member Stever Robbins (MBA '91), coordinating 253 individual schedules and the needs of six sets of faculty members while locating space appropriate to the various group sizes (the Crimson Greetings simulation, for example, made use of Shad's squash and racquetball courts and a huge basement room equipped with vast tents) was like "solving one of those puzzles whose squares you slide around to create a picture - only with one hundred squares, and blindfolded."
Commenting on the School's first experience with its new Foundations module, Professor Steven C. Wheelwright, MBA Program chair and chair of the January cohort, notes, "Foundations is the first of many changes being incorporated into the MBA Program as a result of the School's Leadership and Learning effort. Len Schlesinger and his team did a great job in delivering a first-rate kickoff to these initiatives. The entire community will benefit as other changes achieve similar acceptance and success."
To get to the: MBA program
"Foundations" Factoids
From Foundations' behind-the-scenes logistical managers come these vital statistics:
° Foundations employed a broad array of teaching methods: case studies, behavioral simulations, small group discussions, problem sets, lectures, and project labs.
° Every student attended class with more than two-thirds of the rest of the cohort and knew between 110 and 130 students by name by the time the required curriculum began.
° Snow depth during the first two days of Foundations set an all-time record of 30 inches at Logan Airport, breaking the 29-inch record set by the blizzard of '78.
° Orientation Day and Foundations were led by faculty from every required course.
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