Teaching
that transforms
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Entrepreneurial
approach yields distinction
The
Kellogg teaching culture drives that success. The school celebrates
its centennial in 2008, but the roots of its modern research
orientation date back 40 years to a time when Northwestern
University dismantled its undergraduate business curriculum
in favor of a graduate MBA program.
To
do so, the school recruited faculty who were young and promising,
but largely unknown (and therefore within the school's budget).
The school also recruited the best students possible, many
of them candidates that other schools had overlooked. That
meant taking what Dean Emeritus Donald
P. Jacobs called a "sideways approach" to recruiting,
looking for nontraditional talent and employing personal interviews
to get results.
"Since
we weren't a high-ranked school, the way we would get quality
students was by interviewing everybody, something nobody else
was doing," recalls Jacobs.
The
school also adopted a customer-focused approach, listening
to students and creating a partnership with them. Kellogg
established metrics to strengthen academics: Teacher course
evaluations (TCEs) and, later, the Dean's Exit Survey, provided
valuable short- and long-term feedback to enhance the overall
MBA experience. TCEs, which are ranked on a 10-point scale,
were made public, encouraging faculty to work harder. "Inevitably,
we started competing against one another," remembers
Mark
Satterthwaite, one of those young professors who joined
the school in 1972 and now is the A.C. Buehler Professor in
Hospital and Health Services Management. "It's been a
powerful thing; it's just remade the quality of teaching here."
Today, the average faculty TCE is 8.4, remarkably high.
Alongside
the friendly competition grew a collegial teaching culture,
with professors sharing their ideas about what and how they
taught. The school established a mentors program and workshops
where senior professors introduced new faculty to "the
Kellogg way" of achieving classroom excellence. Among
those credited by Dean Jain with reinvigorating the teaching
culture was Stuart Greenbaum, Kellogg associate dean
for academic affairs from 1988-1992.
The
school's genius, says Greenbaum, has been its ability to combine
theory and practice. "I never took the two to be separate.
We saw them as complementary." While other schools have
tried to emulate the approach, Greenbaum, who went on to serve
as dean of the Olin School of Business from 1995-2005, says
Kellogg was "an early innovator." Today, the school
honors top faculty with various annual teaching and research
awards, including the L. G. Lavengood Professor of the Year,
named after an exceptional and longtime Kellogg teacher. (For
a full list of awards and awardees, visit the Faculty
Teaching Awards Web site.)
Merging
research and teaching has become a Kellogg hallmark, and professors
like Linda
Vincent '94 see no contradiction in bringing the two together.
"The interaction between what I research and what I teach
has always been great," says Vincent, associate professor
of accounting, who tells her students that "financial
statements tell stories" and that accounting can be,
well, fun. Her research involves financial reporting
and capital markets. "If you don't have theory underlying
what you're doing, the world is chaos."
For
Sergio
Rebelo, the most important ingredient in teaching is mastery
of the material. "This is why teaching cannot be divorced
from research," says the Tokai Bank Distinguished Professor
of International Finance. "Great business schools have
to be research institutions, because the act of doing research,
of studying, debating, and developing new ideas, is what forces
us to have a deep understanding of the material and to keep
our knowledge current."
Kellogg
professors also have the ability to convey these insights
far beyond the school itself, says Sunil
Chopra, the IBM Distinguished Professor of Operations
Management and Information Systems and senior associate dean
for curriculum and teaching. "Our faculty has done a
great job converting their research into pedagogy, into textbooks
and paradigms," he says, indicating a range of examples
from finance and operations to marketing. "These are
texts used by other top business schools. As a result, they
have defined how courses are taught."
Kellogg
students gain leadership advantage
Victoria
Medvec creates a dynamic classroom experience by combining
resources and strategies. Medvec, the Adeline Barry Davee
Professor of Management and Organizations and director of
the Kellogg Center for Executive Women, says her students
all want to see a connection between theory and practice,
so she structures her classes to be highly interactive. "I
don't believe adults can learn just by listening to a lecture,"
says Medvec, who also values the close link between research
and teaching at Kellogg.
The
cutting-edge research that eventually appears in a Kellogg
professor's textbook first shows up in their classrooms, Medvec
says, so Kellogg students benefit from these ideas months
or years before students at other schools. "This is something
that really gives Kellogg students the advantage."
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| Doug
Cook '98 |
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Doug
Cook '98, president of Feldco, a Chicagoland replacement
window, siding and door specialist, knows this firsthand.
He considers his Kellogg education foundational for his career.
A graduate of the Kellogg part-time program, Cook recalls
the school's entrepreneurial and leadership strengths. He
says that, in addition to courses in marketing analysis, classes
that focused on managerial leadership, such as one taught
by Professor Robert Neuschel, a former McKinsey executive,
introduced Cook to key leadership models, including one later
promulgated by Neuschel in his 1998 book, The Servant Leader:
Unleashing the Power of Your People.
"He
was a wise gentleman who imparted the importance of leadership
in the overall package of a professional," says Cook
of Neuschel, who died in 2004. As an entrepreneur running
his own company, Cook needed "to learn how to lead, not
just manage, so having that taught to you at an early point
in your career is important. I draw on that all the time."
His
experiences in Steven
Rogers' Entrepreneurial Finance course are equally
memorable and valuable, says Cook, who refers to the class
as "jet fuel for an aspiring entrepreneur." Rogers,
the Gordon and Llura Gund Family Professor of Entrepreneurship,
has a dynamic teaching style that has earned him numerous
awards. It's an approach that Cooks says aligns perfectly
with the "electric and challenging" subject of entrepreneurship.
Next
page: 'Broad scope of management
and leadership classes'
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