About David Montgomery
Admissions for SMU's first graduate programme
Appointment as dean of the business school
Appointment as deputy dean of the Business School
Attributes of the business school programme
Developing customised programmes
Executive programs and professional education
Getting LKCSB accredited
Postgraduate programmes
Rankings
Role as dean
Roles and responsibilities
Specialized masters programs
The School of Business
Undergraduate programmes
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About David Montgomery
David MONTGOMERY -
Admissions for SMU's first graduate programme
TSUI Kai Chong -
Appointment as dean of the business school
TSUI Kai Chong -
Appointment as deputy dean of the Business School
LOW Kee Yang -
Attributes of the business school programme
TSUI Kai Chong -
Developing customised programmes
Annie KOH -
Executive programs and professional education
Annie KOH -
Getting LKCSB accredited
Howard THOMAS -
Postgraduate programmes
Howard THOMAS -
Rankings
Howard THOMAS -
Role as dean
Howard THOMAS -
Roles and responsibilities
Annie KOH -
Specialized masters programs
Annie KOH -
The School of Business
David MONTGOMERY -
Undergraduate programmes
Howard THOMAS
We had going at MIT was, we really did a lot about starting marketing science. I had the idea, after I had been there about six months, to start an organisation within the Institute of the Management Sciences called the Marketing College which was for quantitative marketing people and managed to persuade a bunch of my colleagues to go on. And so we started that. That is the organisation now which is the predecessor of the one that owns the Marketing Science Conference, it owns the Marketing Science journal which is one of the four biggies within the marketing field.
In any case that was a very exciting time and in reflecting on it with some of the faculty who worry a lot about the fact that we at SMU don't have many senior faculty, when I went to MIT, there had never ever been a full professor of marketing in the history of MIT.
So, we really got started with doing marketing science. Then I moved to Stanford which was my home base, and three years after I'd arrived I became a full professor. And my objective had been always that within seven years of getting my PhD, I wanted to have, be a full professor at one of the top five business schools, and a miracle happened, (laughter) it actually happened. It's nice to have been born in the 30s when there weren't as many of us to crowd up the space. I wrote a bunch of books and articles and stuff and got my first chair in 78 at Stanford and then later got the most senior chair, which was the Kresge chair.
My first trip to Asia was in 1969. I was one of the last two MIT faculty members to be seconded for a bit to help found the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta. And so on the way out my wife and I and our three kids and another MIT faculty member and his wife and child; so we had four adults, four kids and sixteen pieces of luggage and we went through Japan and Hong Kong and Cambodia, Bangkok and India up to Kashmir. We spent a month in Kashmir and then the rest of the summer in Calcutta.
So that was the start. Actually, when I was an undergraduate, 1958, I went as a student and that's where I met my wife. Stanford exported sixty-three of us to a campus in South Germany and I became hooked on globalisation at a very tender age. And then in 68 while I was still at MIT with John Little, my boss at MIT and I did a program, at Orly airport in Paris, and the next year was my first trip to Asia. So I am not really a Johnny-come-lately; this has been a long-term passion.
It was around the same time that the very successful Masters of Applied Finance programme in NUS stopped. I do not know why NUS terminated that programme, it was very successful. So a group of us decided to start that programme in SMU.
In the group of Masters of Applied Finance we did the same thing as the undergraduate. We interviewed every one of them. So at least we’re comfortable with them. There’s something that we did in the selection process, we looked at four things: the ‘A’ levels, the SAT scores for the undergraduate, and for the postgraduate we look at the GMAT scores, we had the interview, we also had a written test.
It was sometime in 1999. The then president of SMU, Janice Bellace, asked me, over lunch, whether I would consider being dean, and I accepted the position.
My colleague Tsui Kai Chong was asked by Janice Bellace to be dean, and so he asked me to help out as deputy dean. So I, so I naturally said yes, I mean, you’re part of a core team to help and whatever is necessary. So I agreed to that. So I was assisting Kai Chong in the biz [business] school for the initial three years, I think.
There were broadly three ideas. The person must have a very global perspective. Second, the person must be extremely articulate, be able to communicate, not just among ourselves but with different races from different parts of the world. Third the person must be given some opportunity to contribute to society. So that’s why we have community service within our programme. As for the academic content of the programme, it’s pretty standard business programme with two distinctive features. We have a core group of business courses, then you have the various electives.
I am so glad you used the word government. Because even in 2001, 2002, we recognised that corporates will take a longer time to get buy-in, but Singapore Government do spend a lot of money on talent development, and we want a piece of that action. The other thing is we know which government agency we want to go after. We wanted to go after the EDB [Economic Development Board]. And why the EDB? Because the EDB are the talent which comes from overseas, so many of their scholars have American education, understood the interactive approach, loved the case study approach and therefore they will give us support, that's one. Two, they are the ones who will be attracting a lot of MNCs [multinational corporations] to come into Singapore. So if they have a great learning experience with us, when they talk to the MNCs, they will be hearing about us, so that became a strategic positioning.
There's a FIREfly Program which is a very critical piece of executive education partnership. FIREfly is the name that the EDB give to their high potentials, their fast-track talent within the company, within EDB but not just EDB, the whole of Ministry of Trade and Industry which consists of the seven sisters. EDB is the eldest sister and then you have SPRING, you have IE [International Enterprise Singapore], and you have the Energy Markets Authority, and some of the other smaller agencies. But they are all under the Ministry of Trade and Industry. So with the EDB behind us, we know that we will get wonderful feedback if we do a great job. So it's high risk, but that's exec ed. You need to have that high-risk component and then you can reap higher returns.
We pitched for the FIREfly Program, but we knew that on our own brand, we will never get it because EDB buy brands. So, in that first three years, EDB did not give us their mandate, they gave it to INSEAD. So, from 2001 to 2003, we knew that it went to INSEAD and that, you know, INSEAD professors had access to those talent for a period of close to about eight days on an international business program. And CCL [Centre for Creative Leadership] was the other partner to the INSEAD program and CCL was doing the Centre for Creative Leadership. They were the ones doing the soft skills.
So, we didn't get the deal, but we didn't give up because 2000 to 2003, we were already building our Wharton partnership in one or two open-enrollment programs and we were rapidly recruiting faculty. So our faculty was being honed with a lot of the small-style interactive pedagogy. So we all knew we will have a pipeline of at least five to six great faculty that we could field.
In 2002, second half, EDB actually put up another RFP [request for proposals] saying that they have tried the INSEAD model and they would like to see who else is willing because there's a contract up for renewal. It's a three-year program so there will be a contract for renewal. This time round, we knew that we have to really have a brand name to partner with us. So we went to Wharton who has already got this relationship with us and we say, Can we use your name to come up with a design so that we could pitch for this deal? Janice said, That shouldn't be a problem, you know, please go ahead. And so we sit down with counterparts in Wharton and do up a great proposal and send that in. Unfortunately, someone knew about this, mentioned to INSEAD, who is also in the running to try and get the program, and INSEAD told Wharton that, Hey guys, you have a strategic partnership with us, so you should not be partnering with SMU to put in this proposal. So, Pat, it was such a downer because it literally, we were told that we cannot put the Wharton name in there. We have to pull out, take it back and we won't get the deal. And it was a wake-up call because I then realised that even in executive education, you could get blocked, you could have a partnership, but the partner would tell you that you are the second partner, a lower partner, and their hands are tied. They cannot partner with you because they have their own strategic partnership with another entity.
So, once again, a second disappointment, we didn't get the deal, but we never gave up. 2005, RFP came out again and EDB told us that please submit a proposal because they actually had two contracts with INSEAD and they were not satisfied with it. INSEAD professors did not want to customise to the challenges faced by Singapore. So you cannot teach EDB like the way you were teaching corporates. EDB officers have to realise why are they doing an international business program, because they need to understand business and think strategically about how to entice those businesses to Singapore. So they cannot just do a one-size-fit-all program. We have no recourse to go back to Wharton because we don't even know if we are allowed to. We went with Chicago.
So, that was the start of a great relationship. We don't have an exclusive relationship only with Wharton, so we could partner with Chicago, just as we could partner with Carnegie Mellon. So we went to Chicago Booth and we ask them, �Would you like to submit a proposal with us? They worked very hard with us. Four days of training in SMU, four days in Chicago. We brand them as being the university in the city. We are already in the city, so EDB is very near us. They are at Raffles City, we are at Bras Basah, so it's a no-brainer. We brand our location, we brand the fact that our kids is already out in the market.
So in 2005, we won the contract in partnership with Chicago. And EDB officers started to know what it's like to have a program in SMU. We won the second contract another three years after that with Chicago. But three years after that, we bid for the program without the Chicago name and we got it. So, that was so satisfying because we went all the way up with our own brand name and we got the contract without having to leverage on another bigger brand. And I think that's the kind of journey, the satisfaction of building a brand, but it takes time and it takes very committed faculty and a very committed team. And that's how we do the customisation. So EDB was just one of the many. And then we have a very long relationship with IBM, so IBM is another very long-term client. They do about six runs a year in the early days. Up till today, we still have IBM as a client and IBM is now doing fifteen runs a year of one-week program with us.
I think even as early as 2001, which is eleven years ago, many corporates have been sending their talent to what is called open-enrolment executive programs. An open-enrolment executive program is one-size fits all. It's actually a two-week or one-week program, non-degree, no exams and you'll always get a certificate of attendance at the end of that program. It's a very good start-up kit for many of the talents in the companies because executives come from different disciplines and when you do an executive program with a management university or a business school, it's a little bit like a topping up. It's a quick MBA without the rigor of the MBA. It allows you to think about what management skills, the toolkit you need when you go up to a certain mid-level or senior-level executive position. So, many corporates are using this toolkit in order to quickly polish their talent to understand the challenges of being a business leader. And each layer of your talent will need different types of polishing so an executive program is exactly that. It is a fast-track, quickie, to get you thinking and aligning yourself to the challenges of being a leader or a manager.
We actually use the word professional education about six years after executive education came about, so I wouldn't lump them together. The professional education programs are a little bit deeper. So we actually, for example, have a current program with the SingHealth [Singapore Health Services Pte Ltd] talent. SingHealth is a hospital, so they have lots of talent, clinicians and non-clinician professionals. And to understand and align themselves to the management terminology in the SingHealth family, it cannot be taught like one-size fits all. So, it's a little bit deeper, it has modular, it may not lead to a degree, it has some form of assessment, but it cannot be done in a one-week, two-week executive-type environment. So, professional education is a little bit of a hybrid between an actual master's degree and a non-degree perspective, so somewhere in the middle.
The advantage I had was I had been Chair of the Board of AACSB in 2009-2010. I sat on the board on 2 separate occasions from 2002 to 2004, and then 2007 to 2011 so I knew how to do it and I knew all the people there. And I knew how to get reports written and I was able to tutor the people here. The other advantage for Equis was I was also Vice President for Business Schools, which is the senior Business school position at EFMD from 2000 to 2007, before I got co-opted onto the AACSB board. So I knew exactly how to do that. So we used all of my contacts, we did this in breakneck pace. We wrote the self-study reports in 2010 and early 2011, we got accreditation for both in 2011. And in Equis's case, we got 5-year accreditation which was totally unheard of for a young school. So I think we did really well. What we also did was; I was also chair of the board of GMAC which is the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which runs the GMAT test, which is the admissions test for business schools. I was on the board there from 1991-2000 but I was chair of the board from 1997-2000. So I wanted SMU to be a member of GMAC. It's a rank that's achieved by invitation. So I got them an invitation that immediately put them in the top 120 business schools worldwide. So by the end of 2011, we were in all 3. And so that was terrific because that gives you external credibility and it also makes the faculty, the faculty need to be persuaded why the heck they're doing this because they can't see the point. But once they were persuaded, they could see that that gave us external validity and external credibility, just like the University of Texas at Dallas ratings. Rankings gives us credibility on research and subsequently FT rankings, which we've also achieved. So faculty don't always get it, in those respects but you know, you are not only trying to build a terrific business school, you are trying to build a business school which is recognized, not just on this continent but globally. And I think the gain of accreditation is important from that point of view.
Over the period I was Dean, I launched PhD programs in every one of the other areas, going from the most strong, the second one was OB, the third one was marketing, the fourth one was strategy in organization, the fifth one was operations management. And we'd probably stop there. And we also in between launched the PhD in general management. You have to afford research. So I had to find ways to generate. So over the period, if you don't mind, I am going to consult my notes, but I listed down all of the post-graduate programs I launched since I was dean. First one was the executive MBA in 2011. That has now had 4 cohorts, and you would probably have seen the other day that we have entered into the Financial Times ranking. You have to have at least 3 sets of students through before you can go into the rankings. We came in as the highest entrant, 36th in the world. That's pretty good. And before launching that, which was in 2011, we did extensive focus groups across Asia. So we actually interviewed about 130 managers, and that's when we got the design of 9 modules, 6 of which were done in Singapore, the other 3 were done overseas. So we picked Wharton obviously because Wharton's relationship to our founding. And then we picked Peking in China, which is a really top research school, and ISB. In 2012, we launched the Master of Innovation. Surprisingly, that's done much better than I thought, and has managed to achieve the same heights of about 40 to 45 students. And I should perhaps point this out. I said that revamp the advisory board at the business school so changed it completely so it's much more representative, not just the finance but manufacturing and service industry and government. So one I revamped the advisory board and two I set up an alumni board of LKCSB and I took each one of these proposals in front of them. I used the advisory board to go through the strategy of the program. They kept asking the question, What's the job after the Master of Innovation? which is interesting question. And of course it is a jolly good question so we tried to answer that more and more. We understood that Entrepreneurship was the term that would, so there was a focus also in the program of entrepreneurship, which we have renewed in Gerry's tenure, well because he is the professor of entrepreneurship which is really hard to find. So Master of Innovation in 2012, and Master of Quantitative Finance, which was a relationship with Cass Business school in the city of London, which is probably, in Britain, the best finance school, LBS is probably the other one. And we launched that in 2012. 2014, we launched the Master of Management degree, which is, if you like, a management study degree for people who do not have an undergraduate degree in business studies or management studies, so tailored for people from the Humanities, from the Arts, from Social Sciences, from Technology and so on. And I pioneered that program in Warwick Business School. When I left Warwick Business School, we had 150 students in the program. When we launched it, the first class we had 70 students and a current one close to 100 or maybe 90. I always knew there was a market for it here. And I think it's a market that makes sense because it makes people job-ready who have not studied. And we also have a partnership with SUTD as well in that program which enables students who have done 4 years of Engineering degree to do the 5th year of management with a number of electives counted towards the master degree. That's worked out pretty well. And of course, just before I gave up, in the last year I launched the distance learning version of the MBA with Instituto de Empresa, which is a Spanish Business School in Madrid. I know the director extremely well and we launched that last year in 2014 and we now have a 2nd cohort in 2015 and that was because I always felt there was a need to be looking at distance learning in the context of Asia. In Quantitative Finance, well that's been a strength of ours for a long time. Master of Management was very much an MBA for people who didn't have a business studies degree. And so I engineered the reengineering of the MBA degree. That took place over 2011-2012 and we were launched in 2013. So we will have by, 2017, 4 cohorts of the MBA program so that we can go into the FT rankings.And I should add by the way, I know you have asked me about post-graduate programs, but I would add, and I also mentioned about the Doctoral programs, which is tremendously important. You should see those 2 things in parallel. The Doctoral programs, in many ways, was financed by the surpluses after the Masters programs. But they are also a source of students, very good students on there, we may be able to attract to do PhDs. And one of the objectives is to get good research, and good doctoral programs. Faculty will leave unless they have doctoral students. Unless you have a flow of doctoral students, you are going to get faculty leaving. So it's part of a virtuous circle, running a business school. If you are providing very good quality masters programs, and I think we do, then the resources we gain from that, we're putting into faculty development, which makes the teaching in those programs better in the long term. So just as it generates good quality research, it also generates good quality teaching. And it is a virtuous circle.
It's a bit like what I said earlier on about having accreditations and being ranked on research by the University of Texas at Dallas. It is nice to have, and in many ways, you need to have it. But having said that, you should not manage the school or manage the university on the basis of rankings. The resource allocation decisions and strategic decisions you make should be made on educational reasons, not to get up in the rankings. That said, we have been planning to go into the FT rankings ever since I got here. EMBA was not the first. Masters in Wealth Management got in in 2013, its number two in that field, dropped down the next year because we didn't have enough alumni responses, came back the next year at number three. So you know, what that attests to, is quality. But there's a tyranny in this game. If you manage for the rankings, you could be spending a ton of money, giving scholarships to students because they have higher merit than other students. You could be spending money on public relations instead of spending money on high quality academics, spending money on research. I think that's wrong. But I think for us to be in the position we are in, in the EMBA rankings, 36th, first time in, [is] great. You know the Master of Science in Corporate Finance also got into the rankings last year, and they got in, in the thirties, which, for an entry, was extremely good. And attest to the quality of our finance offerings. And then Master of Wealth Management, because it follows competition going in at two or three. But I think it's a mistake to then, start saying that we need to be in every ranking the world has ever seen and that, that is the only criteria that we should be operating to. That's quite wrong. I mean the right decision is to be doing things [for the] right academic and strategic reasons, not simply to make money for the institution.
If I looked at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, that is a great state university by any standards. Huge, tremendous commitment to academia. I still think that the American graduate schools, be they private or the best state schools, are the best in the world. There are a few exceptions in Britain like Cambridge or Oxford, Imperial University College, London School of Economics and so on. But generally speaking, that was a well-run, well-oiled machine, tremendously strong mathematics department, engineering department and Computer Science at that time, Larry Smarr was there, we had the center of super-computing applications, Marc Andreessen was there as a research assistant and started up Netscape. I mean it was a science-oriented Valhalla in many ways but with great Arts and great Social Sciences faculty. Its business school was strong, very strong, number one public accounting school. And so on and so forth. It was easy to run the business school because the place was well-oiled. There were resource constraints in state universities but if you wanted to get somebody really good, you know, there were billion dollar campaigns Illinois had every five or seven years, which generated endowment money, that generated ways to pay very good faculty. So the rules and regulations there were well established; Americans worked incredibly hard too, and there was no compromise with regard to academic quality there at all. None at all. But a very different way of working. I mean very open conversations. The heated debates took place in committees, they never took place elsewhere. And I think that's healthy. Warwick is more British, and people say one thing to your face and knife you in the back when you are standing in the toilet. Do not get me wrong. It's a very different culture. So you have to be more political. So you have to understand the underlying politics very much more closely. Warwick was more political. Great school but affecting change there, you really had to understand the political system. There was a very different operation of what one may call the Council of Deans. It was more ritual rain-dancing then actually getting anything done. And the university Council was a load of worthies like the House of Lords who you need to kick awake to make sure they were still listening to you. So two very very different cultures but very good school that had strong academic traditions. And I don't think I'd fit a school that didn't have a strong academic tradition cause I have always done research, and I have always believed that if I can do it, then other people would see me as the wrong model and do it themselves. So Warwick was good but different.
So, I had the wonderful opportunity to design a whole new course for SMU. It is called Financial Markets and Institutions. It is very much in the arena of my own strength. So that was a core course for all our finance majors as well as our non-finance majors, so it's actually a business core, and therefore, you will have a chance to influence many people. So, in the early days, we don't have our six schools, it is just one big SMU, one big business school. So the alignment was towards, we have to get that first batch of undergraduate students out and they have to be so good that no amount of advertising or branding is needed. So, the whole concentration of the energy, both from the academic perspective and the non-academic perspective, was aligned to get the best batch of pioneer students out.
And I think that's a wonderful exercise because we talked to many business people on what do they want to see as the first output from SMU. Many students like to think that they are the customers, but in the eyes of all of us in those early days, they are our raw materials. They are the inputs and we hope that we will have enough time and sufficient interaction to make sure that, four years later, they will be the best output that the market would want. And the real customers are the corporate clients, the government, the non-profit organisations taking our students as their talent. So, in fact, I've already had access to many corporate clients, right smack in the year 2000. We were talking to them about what kind of students and output they wanted. And I think that was a really great exercise because from the mouths of all the corporate leaders, we also know the challenge that they are facing on their own training programs for their own talent, and while exec ed was at the back of my mind, the vision started more with the undergraduate.
In the year 2003, I had an email from Ho Ching. She was then Temasek CEO [chief executive officer] and she had the vision that Singapore, because of our economic restructuring, should become a wealth management center. So Ho Ching is going to set up a WMI, Wealth Management Institute, but an institute outside of a university can never issue a degree.
But when that email came, I actually told Chin Tiong, Can I launch a Masters in Wealth Management? But launch it almost like a EMBA [Executive Masters of Business Administration] model, which is what they did in the in US under Carnegie Mellon and under the Swiss Finance Institute, the equivalent Swiss banking school today. So they launched it modular like an EMBA. So our Applied Finance is a part-time, evening program but I wanted our Masters in Wealth Management to be a modular program so that I can tap talent from the region. Because if it's a part-time MBA, you need to be located in Singapore, whereas if it's a modular, your students can come from the region. So I wanted to build Singapore as a wealth management hub. So that went in line with the government's initiative to build connections as a wealth management. So the second masters program that came out, out from the business school is the Masters in Wealth Management.
And for years, we have lots of other specialised masters and we actually defer having an MBA. And everyone keep saying, you know, this is amazing, you know, you guys are a management university and yet you don't have a MBA. That's not a happy situation. But the reason is very simple. We actually found tons of MBA in the market. We need to ask ourselves, where is our differentiation and where is our positioning? So when we did finally launch an MBA, that was when we had Doris Sohmen-Pao who came from INSEAD to join us. We knew then straightaway that when we launched the MBA four years ago, we wanted it to be fast-tracked MBA because many of the people who went to MBA these days actually said, we have prior learning, we come with a lot of on-the-job learning. And, you know, this is the Internet age where there is a lot of information. So, if it comes to finding information, you know where to find. So our MBA should not be looking at teaching by silos, and module by module, as though people need the hand-holding. We must have a MBA that allow people to take information and know how to integrate them and get insights. So my mantra then for everything has been, how do we turn information into insights? In fact, I run an executive education newsletter for the last eight years which is called Insights and that's been the mantra.
So the one-year MBA is almost like an EMBA. We actually target it for integrative learning where every module is interdisciplinary, and that's revolutionary because this is the kind of model that people give to EMBA. We're actually taking a little of the EMBA model to people who are only five to six years out at work. But we want them to know how to integrate and we found that in the last few years, being a T-shaped individual is no longer enough, we are having Pi-shape two areas, yes. So, you might be an engineer in the fast-moving goods space and you need a management skill top-up, because you will have one early job in a particular industry. So, you will have an engineering degree, you will have a particular concentration in a particular industry, but you still haven't got the management skills, so you are now Pi-shaped.
But we are actually in the EMB have a third leg. The EMBA is another market. Have you operated in another country? So now we have the Chinese cup. So, in the EMBA, you have three legs you have a first degree, you have done a couple of jobs, so you have different sector knowledge and you have different market knowledge, so you have become a Chinese cup. The wine cup. The Chinese wine cup has three legs. And the more you have legs, the more you have extendibility, you are stable. So we started with the T-shaped undergrad, a Pi-shaped MBA and a three-legged EMBA, that's my analogy.
Sure. One of the things we did in July of '05 was we hosted the first-ever Asian conference of the Marketing Science Institute. And there were fifty to fifty-five paying guests that came to this. We had Dave Montgomery, Reibstein [David J Reibstein] from Wharton School; we had George Day [George S. Day] from the Wharton School. George and I were old friends from Stanford days and co-authors on a number of things. We had Earl Taylor who was the marketing director of the Marketing Science Institute. And when people find out we hosted the first-ever Asian conference of the MSI, the marketing community notes that. That's a big deal. And the fact that we did it brilliantly and MSI thinks we're wonderful, is even better. And of course they've then helped fund and helped sponsor the ISES conference on service marketing and stuff, about a year ago I think it was.
So I think there's continuing benefit for that. There's benefit from the standpoint of... first of all we had some real famous people arrive and teach here, which was good, I think, for our faculty, and they could watch some of them perform in front of a major executive audience. But it's also good in terms of the external relations with the companies and corporations and executives who were here, and just generally to be known that it was us that did it.
The undergraduate program was a jolly good undergraduate program. And what I was pleased about when I got here is, I mean one way of describing it in a simplistic form is it was a modification of Wharton's 4-year undergraduate program. The one advantage of the Wharton program, and a lot of the American programs cause I've been a dean in the United States and taught in United States, is that a 4-year program gives the kids a chance, for 2 years, to figure out what they really want to do before they start looking at specialization and so on. And if you compare that to a British undergraduate degree, there are 3 years, but you know, if you want to do a degree in accounting, you do a degree in accounting; if you want to do a degree in finance, you do a degree in finance. So if you start in it, then you wanted to move over, you had to start all over again. This, to me, provides the opportunity for people to start all over again, point one, but point two, to give them a broad training to start. And I've always believed in broader programs. So when I came in, I was pleased to see that. I pioneered an introductory course Managing Volatility Uncertainty Complexity and Ambiguity. I designed it. It was intended to be somewhat like what I had in Warwick but different in the sense that, it exposes students to management before they get exposed to other subjects so they think about the problem with management. Without having somebody teaching finance and accounting, they immediately say it isn't a management problem, it's a finance problem, it's a marketing problem. Management problems cut across functional areas, cut across disciplines. So this is an attempt to do that. And I think largely, the feedback is good and, obviously we will be changing things and I've monitoring, I've been coordinating the teaching this year. And I reengineered that one and it's very much now a course on business models and business model generation. It isn't a strategy course, it's a course on what I call strategy realization. It's getting people to understand how to operationalize the strategy in practice. So the students have to do projects, they have to bring projects in. Lots of them bring in projects like opening a restaurant, or opening a swimming it doesn't matter what the project is. Getting them to think through the problem in a hands-on way and a project-based way is what we wanted to do there. And I think we've done it. And we have an alternative to that capstone course which we call the Great Books course. So we get students to read eight or ten books, which in different ways can be woven together to give a course on the philosophy of management. If I taught that course and I gave people a set of books, I would pick things like To kill a mocking bird, The grapes of wrath, 1984, and 1984 predicted much of what you see in terms of surveillance now and so on and so forth. And I would go through those. I mean there's some brilliant books out there and I read a lot, Grapes of wrath for example, from Steinbeck would be an example of the death of unions. Catcher in the rye by J.D Salinger, which is again an American novel, but a terrific novel. It's about growing up fundamentally so you could go down the list. And we have a list. I'm averse to too much of Plato's Republican and all the rest of it because you can get that in an ethics course. What I think you need to get to is persuading people, and the other thing which I put a lot of effort into is the redesign of our Ethics and Social Responsibility courses because we took the course over ourselves rather than have half the course taught by, I think it was probably the Law school, and the other half they had designed cases which cut across the whole university.
