What Business Schools Can Learn from the Medical Profession

A few years ago, a family member visiting from India became ill. Soon he was sitting on a hospital gurney, surrounded by people in lab coats—people who were, for the most part, incredibly inexperienced.

This is common in Boston. Many of our wonderful hospitals are affiliated with medical schools, so they’re full of students training to be doctors. It can be disconcerting or even frightening to put your health in the hands of individuals who are still learning their profession. But whenever I’m in this situation, I remember that we have an obligation as patients to help train the next generation of doctors. I also keep in mind how well the medical profession supervises its trainees, giving them enough autonomy to learn while minimizing the chance that they might harm patients. The clinical experience gained by fledgling doctors is an ideal example of how professional schools address the “knowing-doing gap.”

Generally speaking, medical schools are much better at this than business schools, but they have an advantage: Every hospital has a constant influx of patients to whom it can expose students. Inserting business students into real-world managerial situations is much more challenging. Still, business schools need to work harder to close the knowing-doing gap.

Harvard Business School has long used case studies—a method it adapted from Harvard Law School and introduced to business education—to project students into the role of managers solving business problems. Analyzing 400 cases in two years gives our MBA students a lot of practice at this. Case studies are a very effective tool, but they’re also limited: Business students can only imagine how they’d tackle a managerial problem, whereas medical residents are facing real-life health concerns.

We’re reinventing our MBA curriculum to try to narrow the knowing-doing gap.

To give MBA students a dose of real-world experience, HBS is introducing its biggest curriculum change in nearly 90 years. Students in our Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development program will engage in practice-oriented activities throughout the year. This work has begun on campus, where students have been taking product development workshops and crafting investment pitches. But the program’s most ambitious aspect starts in January 2012, when HBS will send the entire first-year class—more than 900 students—abroad to developing markets, where they will work in teams of six with a multinational or a local company to develop a new product or service offering.

In Istanbul, Cape Town, São Paulo, Mumbai, Shanghai, and elsewhere, the students might be interviewing customers, meeting people in the supply chain, or visiting competitors. At the end of each day, much like hospital residents after rounds, they will gather with faculty members to discuss what they are learning. (It is this daily faculty interaction that greatly distinguishes the experience from a summer internship.) They’ll gain contextual humility, realizing that the plans they conceived back on campus will meet unanticipated obstacles in the field.

Our goal is not only to enhance the experience of our students but to improve management pedagogy. That is what HBS did with the case study method, which is now used universally. It’s time to do the same with managerial field training. Our commitment is to learn how the experience should be structured, what role the faculty should play, and what company support is required, in order to develop a method that other institutions can embrace.

We don’t have all the answers, and we’ll be improvising as we go. Nor will the businesses that host our students acquire the expertise they’d get from actual consultants. Like hospital patients being treated by a new resident, everyone involved will experience some nervousness and discomfort. But in a global economy that will put heavy demands on the next generation of managers and leaders, that’s a small price to pay for knowledge and experience



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