Wanted: MBA's who know how to manage change

The Fortune 1,000 are shedding workers, while fumbling for a foothold online. Internet upstarts have lapsed into a dot coma. Can the nation's 341 accredited business schools help managers keep pace with the changes roiling business–let alone set it?

Scott Tucker has bet the farm on it. For 13 years Tucker worked at Maple Leaf Farms, his family's venerable poultry business, growing ever more frustrated by the resistance among longtime employees to new ideas and technologies that could expand the retail and restaurant marker for learn, easy-to-prepare ducks. In 1999, with his parents' blessing, Tucker, 36 uprooted his wife and two kids from northern Indiana and headed off to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's business school to discover how entrepreneurs lead an enterprise around entrenched management or through volatile times.

Tucker recognized a fundamental principle of success in today's market place: Those who stand still get flattened. Scores of similarly enlightened young professionals have been flocking to B-school lately, making "change management" one of the hottest specialties today. You won't find the term in many course catalogues yet. But managing change promises to become as central to M.B.A. programs on many campuses as case studies, spreadsheets, and Power Point presentations.

Stressed out. Employers are only too happy to hear it, now that they've been pushed onto a global playing field crowded with nimble online challengers. (Witness online auctioneer eBay's $12.8 billion in capitalization compared with Sotheby's $1.5 billion) On the Web, investors can play the global stock market 24/7, retail shops never close, and companies can squeeze 24 hours of work out of their employees by passing tasks across time zones. "Every organization is under intense stress," observes Joseph Morone, the president of Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., whose new "Information Age M.B.A." offers a concentration in change management. "I don't think you'll see companies coming to campus looking for three change managers and two accountants," says Otis Baskin, dean of Pepperdine University's George L. Graziadio School of Business and Management in Malibu, Calif., which offers a master's degree in the area. "But what employers are looking for from business schools is people who can adapt."

Managers can't adjust to–or instigate–change in the workplace if they can't handle it in their personal lives, reasons Edgar Schein, who teaches organizational development at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Sloan has offered courses in corporate structure and the dynamics of change since the 1960s. To help his students figure out why there is so much resistance to new ways, he has them identify a trait or habit they would like to change in themselves and write weekly reports on their progress towards achieving the goal. "If you can't change yourselves, how can you change others?" Schein asks his students.

Doris Cope, 48, an M.B.A. now pursuing a master's in advanced administration at Claremont Graduate University's Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, has certainly mastered the art of self-transformation. On day 1 of a course called" The Knowledge Worker," Cope, an executive with 19 years at Union Pacific Railroad, was asked to write an essay answering three questions. Who are you? What is your job? What do you contribute? "I'd been an employee; now I'm a contributor and a leader," mused Cope, suddenly seeing her career in a new light. 'This class was the best thing that ever happened to me as a tool to open up the second half of my life," says Cope, who derived the courage to switch jobs a few months ago. She now heads a sales division of a Northern California biotech firm, where she is applying what she learned about making her goals clear, listening to employees, and inspiring them to stretch to meet new goals.

At some schools, including the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and the Harvard Business School, the focus on change shows up in an emphasis on leadership. Along with the basics of finance, first-year Harvard M.B.A.'s take a required course in organizational change that teaches them about group culture, how to establish "productive relationships" with their peers, and strategies for motivating people. On other campuses, the skills are honed in courses aimed at entrepreneurs, which often require students to get out and tackle the problems of actual companies. To train the "entrepreneurial leaders" called for in its new mission statement, the Anderson School at the University of California-Los Angeles pairs students with top level executives in a "living" case study. Several M.B.A.'s recently gained some gritty insight into Apple Computer's turnaround strategy by watching as senior executives figured out their moves. At Wisconsin, which has a strong entrepreneurship program, a team project analyzing his family's duck business gave Scott Tucker plenty of new ideas. Among them: how to boost returns on investments that are tied up in hatcheries, farms, and processing plants in five states and a flock of 14 million fowl.

Practice, practice. Such opportunities to put theory into practice are crucial to look for in a program on managing change. Internships and students consulting projects have given Renee Dinsmore, a second year Information Age M.B.A. student at Bentley, a much deeper appreciation for the finesse required handling people in any change process. During an internship last summer at an information-technology services firm, she looked for ways to shave cost and boost sales. Her goal was a modest one: to create a database about previous jobs and how many days it took to hook up the phones, say, and how much wiring was required- so that the firm could bid more competitively based on experience rather than guesswork. First she had to learn "geekspeak" to communicate with the engineers. Then she had to translate everything into terms management could understand and rally behind. "It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do, and I speak three languages," recalls Dinsmore. She eventually got a knowledge-management system ready to run. Now, as part of a student consulting team, she's tackling another change-management problem: how to help Keane, another IT services company implement the kind of E-learning systems it sets up for clients to boost information-sharing among its own far-flung employees.

One clue to how well a program will prepare you to deal with change lies in how quickly it has adapted to change itself. A stagnant body of core courses probably indicates you'll be learning to run last millenium's company. At Harvard, some 30 percent of the material–and 700 case studies used in courses–are new this year, and courses now are delivered in part online. At Bentley College, feed-back from graduates, students, and employers received in late November is used to revise and update courses for class the first week in January.

Globalization, as a force that buffets mom and pop concerns as well as multinationals, certainly ought to be a strong theme in the curriculum. "The reality is, no one will ever practice purely domestic business again," says Pepperdine's Dean Baskin. Many schools have overseas outpost; the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, for instance, has an M.B.A. program in China, while the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business just opened a campus in Singapore. Study trips abroad also are gaining in popularity. The University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, for instance, requires full-time students to spend 10 days touring Pacific Rim businesses.

So far, duck farmer Tucker thinks his gamble has really paid off-particularly the course and power and politics, aka Office Politics 101. He knows he'll need good people skills to point the flock in new directions.