美国即时聊天软件:哈佛商学院独立创造它的 工商管理课程

理想的实地工作

Harvard Business School reinvents its MBA course

哈佛商学院独立创造它的 工商管理课程

YOUNG mums shopping in the Copley Mall in downtown Boston last month found themselves being questioned about their use of soap by students from Harvard Business School. The students were not doing odd jobs to earn beer money. They were preparing to help a firm in Brazil launch an antibacterial cleanser.

上个月年轻的妈妈们在波士顿市区Copley商场购物时，发现哈佛商学院的学生们会问她们使用香皂的问题。学生们并不是在打零工挣点啤酒钱。他们正准备帮助一家巴西公司投放一种抗菌清洁剂。

Fieldwork—ie, going out and talking to people—is a big change for HBS. Its students used to sit in a classroom and discuss case studies written by professors. Now they may also work in a developing country and launch a start-up. “Learning by doing” will become the norm, if a radical overhaul of the MBA curriculum succeeds.

例如走出课堂和人们交流这样的实地考察工作是哈佛商学院的一个巨大变化。过去哈佛商学院的学生坐在教室里讨论教授写的个案分析。现在他们也可以去发展中国家工作或者创办一个公司。如果对MBA课程成功与否来个彻底检查，那么“通过实践来学习”将成为标准。

The 900 students arriving in Boston this summer for their two-year course were told they would be guinea pigs. The new practical addition to HBS’s curriculum is known as “FIELD” (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development). Not all the staff and students are overjoyed to be experimented on. But the man responsible, Nitin Nohria, who became dean of HBS in July 2010, says that “if it works, the FIELD method could become an equal partner to the case method.”

这个夏天900名学生来到波士顿开始他们为期两年的学习，被告知他们将成为这项尝试的“小白鼠”。新添加在哈佛商学院课程里的实践被称为“FIELD”(领导力培养的实地浸入体验)。并不是所有的教员和学生都对这项实验表示欢迎。但是这个项目的负责人，也就是2010年当选哈佛商学院院长的Nitin Nohria说，如果这项实验成功，那么FIELD将成为与个案研究同等重要的学习。

Long before he became dean, Mr Nohria lamented the failure of business schools to fulfil their mission of turning management into a profession similar to law or medicine. Asked what should be expected from someone with an MBA, he replies that “obviously, they should master a body of knowledge. But we should also expect them to apply that knowledge with some measure of judgment.” MBA students have long been sent on summer internships with prospective employers, but HBS, like most business schools, did little else to help them with the practical application of management studies.

早在成为院长之前，Nohria对商学院没有完成将管理转变为类似法律或医学成为一门职业而痛心。当被问到对一个获得MBA学位的人有什么期望时，他回答说“很明显，他们要掌握很多方面的知识。但我们也应该期待他们通过判断力来运用那些知识”MBA学生长期被送去潜在雇主那进行夏天实习，除此之外，和大多数商学院一样，哈佛商学院没给学生其他帮助实践管理学的学习。

What happens in the second year of the new course is still being worked out. But the first year has three elements. First, team-building exercises. Students take turns to lead a group engaged in a project such as designing an “eco-friendly sculpture”. They learn to collaborate and to give and take feedback. These exercises are loosely based on ones used in the US army.

新课程的第二学年课程还没确定。但是第一学年的课程有三部分。第一部分：训练团队建设。学生轮流领导团队参加到项目中比如设计一个“生态友好的雕塑”。他们学着合作，提出采纳反馈。这些练习都基于用在美国军队的训练。

Second, students will be sent to work for a week with one of more than 140 firms in 11 countries. Already the new intake have had conference calls with these companies, ranging from the Brazilian soapmaker to a Chinese property firm, and gone off-campus to conduct product-development “dashes” like the one in Copley Mall. This sort of structured learning-by-doing is a world away from HBS’s traditional encouragement of students to “go on an adventure” outside of classes.

第二部分，学生将被送到11个国家超过140家公司之一去工作。新生已经与这些公司进行电话会议，范围包括巴西的的香皂加工厂和中国的房地产公司，然后走出校园，指导产品研发，像到在Copley商场里面访。这样的实践学习是不同于哈佛商学院传统的鼓励学生走出课堂“去外面探险”。

In the third novel part of the course, students will be given eight weeks, and seed money of $3,000 each, to launch a small company. The most successful, as voted by their fellow students, will get more funding. It remains to be seen if this amounts to much more than a souped-up business-plan competition, though Mr Nohria says he hopes some real businesses will be created. (If only HBS had thought of this when Bill Gates was thinking of starting Microsoft, or Mark Zuckerberg was creating Facebook—perhaps the school would have received shares in those firms.)

课程的第三部分，学生将有8周时间，每人用3000美元创业基金创办一家小公司。由学生投票选出最成功的那位将获得更多的基金。这是不是仅是个更大的商业计划大赛还有待观察，尽管Nohria说他希望看到真正的企业会被创造出来。（如果哈佛商学院在比尔·盖茨创办微软或者马克·扎克伯格创办脸谱网站时想到这种方式，也许商学院会从这些公司中得到股份了）

It is unclear how much the one-week working assignments will achieve. Pankaj Ghemawat, a management guru, says “the literature suggests that an immersion experience needs to be at least 2-3 weeks and be backed up with time in the classroom.” The HBS students’ classroom preparation will have to be pretty thorough, then, to make up for the brevity of their field trips. Moreover, some of the HBS alumni who have agreed to offer work experience at their firms say they are unsure what meaningful work they can offer the students.

现在还不清楚一星期的工作任务有多少。一位管理学大师的Pankaj Ghemawat说，“研究资料建议一个浸入式体验学习需要至少2到3周，还需要辅以课堂教学”哈佛商学院学生的课堂学习准备将会做的充分，来补偿他们短暂的实地学习。并且一些哈佛商学院校友已经同意在他们的公司提供职位，但他们并不确定提供给学生的工作会有多大的意思。

Privately, some faculty members are sceptical that all this change will be worthwhile. In January, the vote in favour of trying the field method was “as enthusiastic as you could get from a faculty,” says Mr Nohria, wryly. He wisely ensured that ownership of the idea was widely spread by delegating design of the new curriculum to several faculty committees. The vote gave the go-ahead to run a “delicate experiment for 3-5 years to see if we can move the needle”, he says, compared with the 13 years it took to develop the case method into more or less what it is today.

私下里，一些教员怀疑这些改变是否有价值。一月份，投票支持实地教学方法是“你能从教员里能得到的热情”，Nohria讽刺的说。他明智地保证这个课程创新想法的所有权将通过一些教员委员会被大范围的传播。他说投票同意“进行3到5年实验，要看下是否有效果”，而个案研究方法用了13年才发展成型。

The experiment does not come cheap, adding 10-15% to the course’s cost (students pay at least $84,000 a year), which HBS will bear while it figures out what works. A lot is at stake. For where Harvard leads, other universities may follow.