The Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley has reshaped its curriculum to better emphasize the school’s distinctive culture and help students develop into innovative leaders, Dean Rich Lyons announced earlier this week.
Beginning this fall, both the full-time MBA program and the evening and weekend MBA program will undergo curricular changes designed to teach students to drive growth within organizations by employing new ideas at every level and by doing so responsibly.
“We want to prepare leaders who define what’s next for our markets and our societies,” Lyons said in a statement. “This kind of path-bending leader is more critical than ever to our collective future because our world is on so many unsustainable paths, in areas such as education, healthcare, demographics, safe water and energy,” he added.
The new curriculum, which has been in development for the past 18 months, is called Berkeley Innovative Leadership Development (BILD) and features an overarching theme connecting both core and elective course offerings. The Haas faculty voted overwhelmingly in support of the changes, which include a greater emphasis on developing innovative leadership skills such as problem solving and problem finding.
The school reviewed its existing core courses to ensure that they develop essential leadership capabilities such as being able to think critically and flexibly and recognize and foster creative ideas. Some courses were restructured, and a range of new curricular requirements were added, though business fundamentals such as accounting, finance, marketing and strategy will continue to serve as the MBA program’s foundation.
As part of its new approach, the school also codified its culture into four defining principles in an effort to better emphasize what makes Haas Haas:
• Question the Status Quo
• Confidence without Attitude
• Students Always
• Beyond Yourself
“These principles have always been the Haas heartbeat, but we have never articulated them until now and have never used them so deliberately to shape our students and graduates,” Lyons said. Going forward, they will be used as part of the selection process for MBA students and be incorporated into the curriculum in a range of ways.
To learn more about the Haas School’s new curriculum, click here.
Read the full article: UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business Revamps Core Curriculum to Focus on Innovative Leadership