Seven Essentials for Business Success

Lessons from Legendary Professors

George Siedel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000416916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Education
• Index: Business

Successful leaders are great teachers, and successful teachers serve as models of leadership. This book enables both leaders and teachers to understand and use the best practices developed by award-winning professors, each of whom teaches one of the seven areas that are essential for business success.

These professors candidly discuss their successes and failures in the classroom, the mentors who inspired them, how they developed their teaching methods, and their rigorous preparation for class. Through descriptions of the professors in action, readers will gain an insider's perspective on their teaching skills, and witness how they teach the seven essentials for success in a variety of settings—MBA, Executive MBA, and executive education courses. The chapters also describe the daily lives (professional and personal) of the professors, and the impact they have beyond the classroom in improving organizations and society.

If you are a leader or teacher—or if you are interested in the content of a business school education—this book provides an insider's perspective on the best practices used by legendary professors when teaching the seven essentials that represent the core body of knowledge for business success.

Chapter 1

Seven Remarkable Professors Teaching Seven Essential Areas for Business Success

This book identifies the best practices used by leading MBA professors when they teach the seven essential areas for business success. The formula used in developing this book is simple. Owners of and managers in any business, large or small, must understand seven areas that are essential for its success: accounting, business law, finance, management, marketing, operations, and strategy. To illustrate best practices in teaching these areas, I have selected seven legendary business school professors—one from each area—who have been honored for their exceptional teaching skills at seven top-ranked schools.

Overview of this Book

After introducing the seven professors in the next section, the rest of Chapter 1 describes the goal of this book in detail. Later sections in this chapter focus on (1) why this book is important for leaders, teachers, and individuals interested in the content of a business school education, (2) the process used for selecting the seven professors, and (3) the importance of the seven essentials in achieving business success.

Chapter 2 elaborates on the seven essentials by describing how business schools cover this core body of knowledge. Profiles of each school in this chapter include little-known facts. For example, can you match these individuals with the business school they attended: President John F. Kennedy? Dr. Oz? Jay Berwanger (the first Heisman Trophy winner)? Benjamin Netanyahu? Michael Bloomberg?

Chapters 3–9 profile each of the professors, who are from seven leading business schools. These chapters include summaries of the professors’ teaching, research, and other activities (including a “Day in the Life” feature); in-depth interviews; observations of the professors in action while teaching their classes; comments from their students; a discussion of their impact beyond the classroom; and a summary of the lessons learned from them.

Chapter 10 concludes the book with a review of the seven professors’ teaching methods, along with an examination of the “authenticity” that makes them extraordinary. The authenticity they bring to their teaching and research extends to the positive impact they have on society. In an interview published in Poets and Quants (the leading source of information about business schools), Dean William Boulding of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University emphasized the importance of this impact when discussing the role of business schools in society:

If we can’t produce the talent and insights that help us tackle the challenges in the world then we are not doing our jobs. So we need to make sure we are responsive to the times we are in and the times we will face in being a positive force in society and helping to improve lives.

(Byrne, 2020)

Meet the Professors

Before turning to the goals of this book in the next section, we will first visit the seven professors to learn how they spend a typical workday. Our trip begins on the East Coast, at Harvard Business School in Boston, Massachusetts, and concludes on the West Coast at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in Palo Alto, California.

Are you familiar with the “Snooze Alarm Test” that determines your level of enthusiasm for life by counting the number of times you hit your snooze alarm before getting up? (Hint: a high number indicates low enthusiasm.) On our chosen day, Harvard Business School (HBS) Strategy Professor Jan Rivkin passes the test with flying colors, as he wakes before the alarm. His main event for the day is preparing for and teaching a class on Strategy—a course that all Harvard MBA students are required to take. During the class, he focuses on a case that involved crafting strategy during a leadership change at the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s. However, as a senior leader at HBS, his day is also filled with meetings with corporate recruiters, students, colleagues, and alumni. His leadership responsibilities also include serving as the Co-Director of the US Competitiveness Project, which focuses on making America more competitive while simultaneously enabling the average person to benefit more from the country’s resources. It is no surprise that his day ends late in the evening with an email review that includes sending thirty-two messages relating to his widespread responsibilities.

MIT’s Sloan School of Management is located down the road (Memorial Drive) from Harvard in Cambridge, a seven-minute subway ride on the Red Line. Sloan Operations Professor Georgia Perakis, fueled by Greek iced-coffee, begins her workday with a presentation to a research project sponsor in Spain and a follow-up meeting with PhD students on the project’s next steps. As director of the Executive MBA Program (EMBA), she then meets with the program’s assistant dean and staff. Next come meetings with PhD students for research updates and with teaching assistants to prepare for her next class. In all these activities, her goal is to have a positive impact by working on important real-life problems that drive her research and provide her students with examples of the models she teaches. Her day ends late in the evening with work on emails and posting materials on her EMBA course website. The course—Data, Models, and Decisions—is considered to be the most challenging in the program.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philadelphia, is a five-hour car ride (or ninety-minute flight) southwest of Cambridge. Here we find Business Law Professor Richard Shell, after an early morning breakfast and meditation, opening his workday with a phone discussion about a faculty development program. This is followed by a meeting with the Deputy Dean, emails and calls regarding upcoming programs, helping a student with a midterm paper, preparing and teaching a three-hour class in the Wharton-mandated law course titled “Responsibility in Global Management,” and after-dinner work on email. One of his calls relates to a program he co-founded called “Purpose, Passion, and Principles.” This program helps students address issues that are not part of the formal MBA curriculum, such as defining how success and happiness relate to the students’ life goals—topics covered in Professor Shell’s bestselling book Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success (Shell, 2014).

Moving northwest nine hours by car (or two hours by air) from Philadelphia to Ann Arbor, Michigan, Gretchen Spreitzer, a Management professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, is already in her office by 7:30 a.m., following an early morning jog with her dog and running partners. Her day includes discussions with colleagues about faculty and teaching matters, listening to a student’s thesis defense, teaching a cutting-edge course on the new world of work, meetings with student teams and with the donor who endowed her chair, and attending a StoryLab event, which concludes her twelve-hour workday at 7:30 p.m. In teaching her course, she includes research from a new field called “Positive Organizational Scholarship” that she has pioneered with Ross colleagues. Their research focuses on creating positive work environments designed to enhance employee engagement.

A four-hour car ride west from Ann Arbor to Chicago takes us to the University of Chicago on the south side of the city, where Finance Professor Steven Kaplan opens his day by teaching a three-hour course on corporate and entrepreneurial finance at the law school. He then crosses campus to the Chicago Booth School of Business where, after a short break for lunch, he leads an afternoon session in his Special Topics course that is part of the school’s New Venture Challenge. During this session, student teams practice presenting their business plans to successful entrepreneurs who serve as judges. By the end of the course, eleven of these teams receive investments totaling over $850,000. Companies created by past teams have made more than $7.5 billion in mergers and exits. Professor Kaplan concludes his afternoon by editing a research paper and, in the evening, reviewing the judges’ feedback to the student teams.

A forty-five-minute cab ride from Chicago Booth north along Lake Shore Drive takes us to Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and into the life of Professor Florian Zettelmeyer, who chairs the Marketing Department. Professor Zettelmeyer passes the Snooze Alarm Test by awakening before his alarm sounds. After arriving early at his office, his workday begins with a meeting with the Global Head of Learning for a large consulting company on the design of a new executive program. He then teaches a two-hour session to around fifty executives in a program titled “Leading with Advanced Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.” After lunch, he helps a colleague develop a lecture, talks with the CEO of a major travel company who needs help finding a new head of Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, meets with a colleague to discuss the Marketing Department’s teaching schedule, and teaches another session in the executive program. His day closes with dinner, viola and violin lessons with his sons, cleaning up the kitchen, and a well-deserved glass of wine.

The last trip of the day is a four-hour plane ride from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to the San Francisco International Airport, followed by a short drive to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in Palo Alto. Stanford Accounting Professor Charles Lee arrives at Peet’s Coffee when it opens at 5:00 a.m. and then heads to his office, where he responds to emails and prepares for back-to-back sections of his course titled “Alphanomics: Active Investing in Equity Markets,” which run from 8:00 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. He is highly qualified to teach this course, which won the Innovation in Financial Accounting Education Award from the American Accounting Association. His experience includes serving as the leader of a worldwide active equity research team with joint responsibility for the North American active equity trading business at Barclays (now Blackrock). At the time, Barclays managed over $300 billion in active equity assets. Following class, he attends a long meeting of a university-wide faculty appointments committee, meets with students until 7:00 p.m., and then heads home to watch the Golden State Warriors play basketball.

The Goal of this Book

The leading universities where they work have honored these seven extraordinary professors for their teaching excellence. By sharing their teaching philosophies and inviting us into their classrooms, they have given us a wonderful gift—the opportunity to learn about the best practices they use when teaching the seven essentials necessary for success in business. The profiles of the professors in Chapters 3–9 illustrate how they prepare for teaching, build a learning community, emphasize the big picture, simplify their subject matter, make the learning interactive, and show their students why understanding the course material is essential to business success. This book provides leaders and teachers with a menu of these practices (summarized in Chapter 10) that they can use to improve the learning process in their organizations and classrooms.

This book also provides examples of that rare quality called “authenticity,” which is a product of each professor’s passion for the course material, concern for their students, and dedication to continuous learning. Authenticity is also characterized by a sense of purpose that leads to an impact beyond the classroom. In the chapters that follow you will learn about

• Jan Rivkin’s work on developing the next generation of civic leaders in cities across the country,
• Georgia Perakis’ passion for using high-quality research to address pressing problems facing businesses,
• Richard Shell’s program that helps MBA graduates find purpose and happiness in life,
• Gretchen Spreitzer’s pioneering efforts to develop positive work environments,
• Steven Kaplan’s New Venture Challenge that has resulted in the creation of thousands of jobs,
• Florian Zettelmeyer’s efforts to enable managers around the world to understand and u...