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By Scott D. Johnson, on November 28th, 2011
I recently had the opportunity to meet with one of our successful graduates in Chicago who is running a major software company. It is knowledge worker environment with demanding customers all over the world. It is an industry that is helping to make sense of the terabytes of data generated in the normal process of doing business in the 2011 and beyond. We were later joined by five other recent hires (also ISU College of Business alumni) for lunch in the boardroom and had a wonderful conversation about the general preparedness of students when they graduate and begin their careers.
There were observations of keen insight by all attending, both experienced and newly graduated managers. Some comments centered on the specific professors who helped a student find an internship or a job. Another individual mentioned that a departmental etiquette dinner helped identify some weaknesses. All agreed that major projects with real organizations as a capstone experience was extremely valuable in helping to frame a problem and in crafting alternatives that the managers could actually use.
These were all great ideas and it was useful feedback for me. However, then the conversation turned to the challenge of working with demanding customers. Customers were global and were working in a 24/7 environment that was intensely competitive and filled with extreme pressures to solve problems quickly and accurately. Our discussion also revealed that there were internal customers within the company itself who were requesting information in order to do their jobs effectively. Just as other units within the company were requesting help, the individuals around the table similarly recognized that they were customers of entities both internal and external to the organization.
To most of the people in the room, the demands of the customer was strikingly foreign. It was not something that they as students had thought seriously about in most of their coursework. The coursework often centered on problem solving, complex content assignments, critical thinking exercises, writing and oral presentation skill development, and building skills to work cooperatively in teams. To be sure, all of these skills can enhance effectiveness and productivity on the job. Yet, the central importance of the customer in the workplace was somehow not a primary part of their thinking while they were students.
What is a customer orientation? In a broad sense, a customer orientation is simply a way of recognizing that your organization exists to serve the wants and needs of another organization or individual. As a wise person once said, your organization does not exist to employ people; rather it exists to add value to your customers.
There is also some confusion about the notion of customers. Customers are known by different names within different industries. However, a customer by any other name is still a customer. Customers voluntarily enter into a transaction in which something of value is exchanged for something else of value. Value can be found, for example, in promises, ideas, cash, and tangible goods. Customers are sometimes called clients, patients, students, residents, or guests. However, one must recognize that calling a customer by some other name does not mean they are not customers.
There are some courses offered that help students understand a customer orientation. Professional sales courses, for example, tend to address this topic directly. However, my lunch meeting did raise an important question. Should a customer orientation be embedded in all business courses? For example, who is the customer and what of value is being offered in courses and topics related to auditing, risk managment, sales forecasting, estate planning, advanced financial accounting, industrial relations managment, organizational leadership, and integrated marketing communication?
What will the identified customers defined by such course topics demand? How will these customers evaluate the performance of your organization? How will your organization sustain a long term relationship with customers built on trust? How will your organization demonstrate that it is adding value to your customers? Such questions embedded in all business courses may serve as a useful context for helping to prepare students for the real world of demanding customers.
By Scott D. Johnson, on September 7th, 2011
Speculating about the future in our private thoughts comes without much inherent risk. However, speculating publicly has time and again shown the folly of humans trying to do something for which they have limited aptitude, namely, predicting the future. Businesses do try to predict the future, but there are more acceptable terms used such as predictive models, trending data, and decision analytics. All approaches use data to make judgments about the future. Data helps decision makers in predicting future patterns but we are left with the realization that the future is elusive.
In the College of Business we are continually looking at future trends to recognize what is important in our curriculum. A sampling of our current courses includes: Financial Futures, Options, and Swaps; Leadership: Teams and Team Development; IMC Creative Strategy and Design; and Electronic Business Management. Some of you may remember a time when swaps meant flea markets and team development meant the minor leagues. The business school curriculum is a reflection of the world we live in. A solid yet evolving framework of knowledge, skills, and learned behavior will prepare our students to be successful business leaders.
An emerging initiative among business leaders, which is confirmed by data, is that of sustainable business practices. The basic concept of sustainability is to meet current needs while not compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Many ideas within the general framework of sustainability are not new: reducing costs, increasing efficiencies, enhancing safety, embracing new technology, and identifying new and profitable markets. Yet evolving sustainability initiatives are taking on added importance for employers as they recognize growing customer and employee expectations for companies to embrace sustainability practices.
As we look to the future sustainability will become an increasingly important part of our curriculum and our intellectual contributions. We are a top ranked business school and our faculty, our staff, our graduates, and our programs are recognized for the excellence we embrace. We live by our Standards of Professional Behavior and Ethical Conduct. The College of Business also embraces Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME). Among these principles we strive to educate students about the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability that will add value to organizations. Now for a prediction… the most successful companies in the future will be recognized leaders in sustainability and will drive innovation, economic growth, and wealth creation in the U.S. and abroad.
By Scott D. Johnson, on August 28th, 2011
The faculty and staff of the College of Business at Illinois State University met on August 18, 2011 for a retreat to recognize achievements for teaching, research, and service. In addition, new faculty were welcomed and introduced. A planned discussion then took place to address the following question:
What knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors will be important for the success of our graduates in 2030; and how should our curriculum evolve to reflect these important areas?
There will be some constants in the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors needed for success in 2030, but even the constants will morph into new perspectives. The importance of respect for individuals and other cultures, for example, will remain important. However, individuals and cultures keep changing, so continuing study and a dedication to recognize these gradual changes is important. The ability to write effectively for various audiences will continue to be important. Ethics will continue to play an important role and students will need to recognize that they will be repeatedly tested throughout their careers with ethical decisions that will not always have easy answers.
Collaboration across working groups, divisions, and regional partners will play an increasingly important role in 2030. Students and faculty should be prepared to understand how to collaborate in various ways (face-to-face, Skype, texting, telephone, Google Docs, cloud storage, and so on) and be a positive force for accomplishing goals while working with and depending on others. Thin client mobile communication devices will become increasingly dominant and ubiquitous which implies a growing expectation of immediacy in communication.
Students now learn to cooperate in a team setting, but collaboration is a more productive orientation that assumes cooperation and getting along together as a work unit. Collaboration implies adding knowledge and perspectives to a group that helps move the task ahead and add value. Collaboration is more than just getting along together as cooperation may imply. Team skills will become even more important in the coming decades. Educating teams to become mini learning organizations will add significant value to collaborative team efforts. The old model of waiting for a team project to end and then having team members complain bitterly about other team members is not optimizing human resources effectively. Understanding non-verbal cues in communication will increase in importance as a means to enhance successful collaboration.
Relationships will be increasingly purposeful and focused on accomplishing tasks and reaching goals. Relationships that exist in a distributed environment where some groups of people are working in different time zones and speaking different languages will heighten the complexities of being a manager in 2030.
The evaluation of student knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behaviors will need to evolve beyond simplistic scoring rubrics. Checking boxes on a scoring rubric may not be providing the feedback necessary to ensure real human development and growth. Students will benefit tremendously in the future, as they do now, from active learning and experiential learning. International study opportunities, community service projects, and internships that challenge the student to look at the world with a fresh perspective will help develop valuable flexibility in cognitive and affective skills to creatively meet future challenges. Students coming into the curriculum with a variety of life experiences will be able to more fully take advantage of their formal educational experience. As a business school we need to become more nimble in changing the curriculum. This means that we need to make thoughtful and deliberate changes to the curriculum with a sense of urgency.
A question facing professors is how do we rethink what we are doing to meet the challenges of what will be important for success in 2030? Knowledge will still be knowledge, but what we do with knowledge and how we apply knowledge, will change. It will be increasing important to properly recognize and frame a problem, understand of what knowledge is needed solve the problem, and then make timely decisions. What is taught and how good teaching is recognized and evaluated will need to change. Faculty and students will need to adapt to new learning models. For example, what is an “internship?” We have something in our mind when we say internship. Are there other models for experiential learning that do not fit neatly into our credit hour model of the world? How do we take full advantage of new options for mobility while also optimizing the known advantages of high quality face to face communication?
Technology is very fluid and will continue to evolve in the coming decades. Technology in general and information technology in particular will change markets. Individuals who recognize these emerging trends and have the skill sets to respond accordingly to these demands will be rewarded. There will be less paper but more information. The ability to read and think critically will continue to be important, yet the context will change and evolve.
Just-in-time knowledge will become increasing important and workers in 2030 will likely read more but in streams of multiple and rapid JIT chunks. There is concern that deeper exposure to longer more detailed writing and argumentation will diminish in perceived importance. If there is less single topic reading and more seemingly unrelated bits of information being processed, will this perhaps diminish the ability to think logically about complicated problems? The need for analytical thinking will become increasingly important.
Encouraging innovation among students will become increasingly important as creativity and entrepreneurial energy becomes more centrally important for organizations in the race to stay competitive (or perhaps just stay in business). People who can identify a passion will make greater contributions to organizations and to society. A fundamental element of a genuine education will mean that professors need to help students find those ideas for which they have passion.
It will become increasingly important for business students to recognize the challenge of personal financial planning. It is incumbent upon students and faculty to encourage personal financial planning in the face of the trend toward defined contribution retirement plans and diminished support from private and public pension and assistance programs. Similarly, taking personal responsibility to understand and act on wellness decisions will ensure that the individual can be a sustaining contributor to organizations and to society. These issues are too important to be
relegated to the list of skills, attitudes, and behaviors that we sometimes suggest are not within the domain of our curriculum.
Organizations will continue to become more global in their offerings and will therefore embrace a growing global perspective within their organizations. An international perspective needs to become a dominant theme and be a fundamental part of all aspects of the curriculum. Professors and students today should recognize that globalization will increasingly become the norm in the context of markets, sourcing, certifications, and operating processes. The need for multiple languages will increase rather than decrease with English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese being the dominant languages. Language is more than communicating simple instructions and articulating spreadsheets. Language involves understanding how others think. As such, students should be encouraged to become fluent in these and other languages if they expect to compete globally for top managerial positions.
Ethical decision making and the demand based mandate to internalize sustainable business models in a global context should become central parts of an emerging curriculum if the intention is to prepare students for work in 2030. However, as the curriculum becomes more international, an internationalized faculty will be required to understand and teach a world view. This world view perspective should become evident in assignments, skills development, and in the broader view of curriculum development. The concept of international will also increasingly focus on understanding and recognizing the growing importance of regionalized trading partners.
The business school will need to continue building closer alliances with potential employers. Day to day interaction with companies coming to campus and students interacting with companies off campus should become more commonplace. In this context, it should be a smooth transition from college to working in a company. Alumni networks to help students and alumni succeed will become increasingly important. Alumni mentoring, recruiting, and private financial support will grow increasingly important. Finally, a strong brand will be increasingly important in the face of potential educational consolidations, growing competition, and emerging methods of delivery for educational services.
By Scott D. Johnson, on July 18th, 2011
In meeting with representatives from organizations, alumni, recruiters, and other business school administrators, a topic that is often at the forefront is the importance of ”soft skills” for students entering into new careers. Soft skills in the business curriculum may be broadly defined as those skill sets that support successful interpersonal communication, either in the form of face-to-face communication or electronic mediated communication. No one denies the importance of soft skills, but how, where, and when they are developed is always open for energetic debate.
While communication is at the heart of soft-skills, other ideas contribute to developing soft skills such as self-knowledge, critical thinking, empathy, an awareness of social issues, and of course how one’s special content knowledge in an area of expertise serves to integrate many ostensibly disparate ideas.
Soft skills might also be identified as the ability to work with other people to accomplish tasks, to meet constructively in teams, to connect with people both emotionally and intellectually, and to manage one’s career to maximize both aptitude and potential. Soft skills may also incorporate the ability to persuade and have the ability to hold opposing viewpoints in one’s mind which can be the basis for developing tolerance for differences of opinions and avoiding premature judgements.
The challenge to develop soft skills in students is immensely important. At a recent two day retreat, College of Business faculty, staff, and administrators discussed this soft skill challenge. There were many excellent ideas that emerged that will take shape during the coming academic year. There is no panacea for facilitating the development of such skills. However, there are plans to build on our current successes and shape a strategy for continuous improvement. Some common themes emerged.
What are these themes to improve soft skills? Writing is important regardless of the discipline. The ability to provide narrative to content expertise (hard skills) is essential. Interaction with practitioners to critique and provide models for behavior is critical. A global perspective acquired through direct experience is important in providing the necessary framework for thinking about modern commerce. Finally, the development of soft skills should not be solely course specific such as offering a business writing course or a business communication course and then concluding that the topic has been successfully covered; rather, soft skill development should be viewed as an essential part of all courses.
By Scott D. Johnson, on June 17th, 2011
I heard Euan Semple speak at a recent conference. http://www.euansemple.com/ He made some excellent points. 1) Blogging helps one organize thoughts. It requires more careful observation and listening throughout the day. 2) Job titles and salaries of bloggers tend to matter less than their contributions. 3) While it is difficult to know what is useful or interesting in a blog, the consumers of the information will make the ultimate determination as to whether it is useful or interesting.
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