Undergraduate Programmes

The undergraduate program was a jolly good undergraduate program. And what I was pleased about when I got here is, I mean one way of describing it in a simplistic form is it was a modification of Wharton's 4-year undergraduate program. The one advantage of the Wharton program, and a lot of the American programs cause I've been a dean in the United States and taught in United States, is that a 4-year program gives the kids a chance, for 2 years, to figure out what they really want to do before they start looking at specialization and so on. And if you compare that to a British undergraduate degree, there are 3 years, but you know, if you want to do a degree in accounting, you do a degree in accounting; if you want to do a degree in finance, you do a degree in finance. So if you start in it, then you wanted to move over, you had to start all over again. This, to me, provides the opportunity for people to start all over again, point one, but point two, to give them a broad training to start. And I've always believed in broader programs. So when I came in, I was pleased to see that. I pioneered an introductory course Managing Volatility Uncertainty Complexity and Ambiguity. I designed it. It was intended to be somewhat like what I had in Warwick but different in the sense that, it exposes students to management before they get exposed to other subjects so they think about the problem with management. Without having somebody teaching finance and accounting, they immediately say it isn't a management problem, it's a finance problem, it's a marketing problem. Management problems cut across functional areas, cut across disciplines. So this is an attempt to do that. And I think largely, the feedback is good and, obviously we will be changing things and I've monitoring, I've been coordinating the teaching this year. And I reengineered that one and it's very much now a course on business models and business model generation. It isn't a strategy course, it's a course on what I call strategy realization. It's getting people to understand how to operationalize the strategy in practice. So the students have to do projects, they have to bring projects in. Lots of them bring in projects like opening a restaurant, or opening a swimming it doesn't matter what the project is. Getting them to think through the problem in a hands-on way and a project-based way is what we wanted to do there. And I think we've done it. And we have an alternative to that capstone course which we call the Great Books course. So we get students to read eight or ten books, which in different ways can be woven together to give a course on the philosophy of management. If I taught that course and I gave people a set of books, I would pick things like To kill a mocking bird, The grapes of wrath, 1984, and 1984 predicted much of what you see in terms of surveillance now and so on and so forth. And I would go through those. I mean there's some brilliant books out there and I read a lot, Grapes of wrath for example, from Steinbeck would be an example of the death of unions. Catcher in the rye by J.D Salinger, which is again an American novel, but a terrific novel. It's about growing up fundamentally so you could go down the list. And we have a list. I'm averse to too much of Plato's Republican and all the rest of it because you can get that in an ethics course. What I think you need to get to is persuading people, and the other thing which I put a lot of effort into is the redesign of our Ethics and Social Responsibility courses because we took the course over ourselves rather than have half the course taught by, I think it was probably the Law school, and the other half they had designed cases which cut across the whole university.