During their two years in the Part-time MBA Program at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, weekend format students have learned core business disciplines and examined complex problems through multiple lenses. But have they channeled their inner CEO?
C-Level Thinking is a unique capstone course that asks MBAs to take all they’ve learned and apply it from a new perspective.
“The goal is to make our students think like C-level executives,” says Puneet Manchanda, the Isadore and Leon Winkelman Professor of Marketing and chair of marketing.
Michigan Ross faculty designed the class to target the skills companies most desire in their leaders.
“We’ve repeatedly heard firms say they want MBA graduates who can think on their feet, collaborate well, and communicate effectively with peers, superiors, direct-reports and customers, “ says Paul Clyde, academic director of the Part-time MBA Program. “So we created the course specifically with these goals in mind.”
To kick off the semester, the heads of two Ann Arbor-based organizations — Domino’s Pizza and St. Joseph Mercy Health System — presented some of their most vexing challenges to the class. Students then divided into groups, with six teams examining each company. Each team honed in on an issue they viewed as especially important, preparing recommendations to present to a panel of faculty, fellow students and, most importantly, the CEO.
“As far as I know, nobody else offers this class in any kind of MBA program,” Manchanda says. “The amount of time and effort that the CEOs and their leadership teams are putting in is unprecedented. This makes the class comes alive and lends it a very high degree of credibility.”
At the conclusion of the presentations, student teams will collaborate across lines to come to a consensus on a final set of recommendations for their respective CEOs.
“The students are remarkably positive and mutually supportive in their interactions,” says Frank Yates, professor of marketing. “Yet at the same time, they routinely challenge one another’s claims.”
That support, in part, stems from nearly two years of working side by side.
“This experience is a culmination of what we’ve learned about everybody’s specific strengths and weaknesses through all the different teams we have been on at Ross,” says MBA student Jackson Buell. “The trick is pulling it all together to create a ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ outcome.”
Having student teams develop solutions for real issues faced by real companies may sound like the school’s signature Multidisciplinary Action Projects course, an immersive, action-based learning experience that places Weekend students inside firms to act as consultants.
But the professors say C-Level Thinking provokes students to think and act from a totally different vantage point.
“In MAP, students work on well-defined problems,” says Martin Zimmerman, the Ford Motor Company Clinical Professor of Business Administration. “This course takes a new step in action-based learning by asking students to identify broad developments affecting a firm and make recommendations on how the firm should respond.”
“The course requires students to think in a non-formulaic way,” Clyde says. “There’s no answer book that students can reference because there is no right answer.”
That ambiguity can be frustrating for students.
“The challenges with which we’ve become accustomed have been more structured in nature,” MBA student Andy Jones says. “This class requires that we brainstorm, debate and perform research just to understand what the true challenges and underlying forces are before we can even begin to think about proposing recommendations.”
But the class isn’t done once students submit the final recommendations. The last portion centers on meta-thinking, having students reflect on their processes throughout the course.
“As managers, we spend very little time thinking about thinking,” Manchanda says. “We want students to turn the lens back on themselves in order to learn important lessons about their thinking patterns — both positive and negative — that will help them be more supple in their thinking going forward.”
