For the past several years business schools have been busy trying to break down the functional silos that had developed over the years in response to the silos in corporate America. In reality, business schools have tended to be followers mirroring the corporate world that supported them. So when the corporate world began pushing cross-functional teams, business schools tinkered with their curricula in an a attempt to “integrate” across the functional silos. However, traditional b-schools have fostered even more entrenched specialists than we have even seen in business organizations.
There are now some attempts underway at some Universities to not only break down the silos, but to get us off the farm in search of new ways of thinking and new ways of acting. Metacool has a post on a Business Week article that shows the innovation that can occur when we really reach across campus by drawing from Design Programs to improve innovative problem solving.
I have been blessed to work at two universities that allowed me to reach across campus. And believe me, this is not an attempt for me to show the rest of those academics what business schools can teach them. Quite the contrary. At the University of St Thomas I had the pleasure of working with Professor Michael Naughton from Theology. He helped me to truly integrate Christian Social Teaching into how I think about, teach about, and write about Entrepreneurship. Here at Belmont University we have a more ambitious project, funded by the Coleman Foundation, to reach all across campus to find linkages.
We are working with Art, Music, Design, Music Business, Political Science, English, Theater, Health Sciences, Audio Engineering, Video Engineering, and many others. And although we do this to help integrate entrepreneurship, self-employment and free enterprise with these disciplines, I take even more back with me from what I learn from these students and their faculty. I use what they teach me in what I do in my classes and in my writing every day.
(Thanks to James Shewmaker of Qwerty for passing this along)
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