I had dinner last week with a group of Darden alums who work for General Mills. Whenever I do these, I hear encouragement for the school to continue the momentum of excellence. And I often hear ideas about what to do. This evening was no different. Betsy Frost (D’05) runs the “Old El Paso” food brand for General Mills (note that she is three years out of Darden and is running a business with $600 million in revenues). She said that outsiders tend to view brand management as some kind of technical specialty, when it is not. She spends 30% of her time on technical marketing, and the rest on issues of manufacturing, supply chain management, finance, and organization. Betsy’s job is not that of a narrow technician—by any stretch of imagination, she is a general manager. She said, “the power is in the interconnectivity and the bigger picture.” She and the other alums at dinner that evening urged Darden to deepen the integrative nature of its teaching so as to build the capacity of its graduates for general management.
Historically, Darden has been no slouch in this area. Last January, Financial Times ranked Darden’s MBA full-time program #3 in the world in the field of general management. Our executive education business gets very high rankings in the area of leadership. A team led by Darden’s Professor John Colley has published a leading textbook in general management. Something like a sixth of our alumni holds the title, “chief executive officer”—and this ignores folks like Betsy whose executive responsibilities would surely qualify as general management. Maybe two-thirds of our graduates either are or have been general managers.
Betsy has a point. General management in business is like “dark matter” in physics: it is the invisible force that binds everything else together. One easily loses sight of its importance—and its difficulty. It is easy to suppose that once you have dipped into all of the functional specialties, you can be a general manager simply by practicing the functions well. I doubt that. General management requires an enhanced awareness of the connectivity among the functions, an ability to anticipate how the functions can interact. These interactions can be virtuous where the functions pull together in a way to create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts—or the interactions can be pernicious, dragging the enterprise down. The general manager must have wide-angle vision—an enhanced sensibility—with which to parse the virtuous from the pernicious and have a bias for action with which to do something about the interactions he or she sees. I don’t think you are born with these qualities; you must learn them.
We get it. The design of the first year of our MBA programs promotes integrative thinking through the case method, as intrinsically integrative, and through Darden’s unique faculty, who are by choice and in practice intentionally holistic and cross-disciplinary in approach. This year, we are introducing new program classes incorporated into individual courses but intentionally focused on integration. We are also introducing a new course configuration in the first year that should build this integration further. It is called, “Leadership Experience At Darden” (LEAD, for short) and entails enhanced coordination and team-teaching among a number of courses. This summer and fall, faculty committees are taking a fresh look at the integration within our curriculum. A team of students is helping us think about fresh opportunities. We will find a way to broaden the general management reach of our graduates while continuing to deliver great depth of functional mastery—our model is the so-called “T-shaped” manager who is both broad and deep.
To be great, a school must constantly innovate in the design of its programs—and do so in a way that serves its constituents. We hear the appeal for greater development for the integrative, general management point of view. We will continue to reach for the higher level.