The Schulich Strategy Field Study – Developing Skills for a Complex World
Experiential learning is one of the biggest trends in management education today.
But it’s been a cornerstone component of our MBA program here at Schulich since the School’s very inception. Schulich’s Strategy Field Study – referred to simply as “the 601” by Schulich students and the alumni who took the course – is a real-time, real-world team-based consulting project that takes eight months to complete.
It’s been called the ultimate in integrative, real-world learning. It’s gruelling, intense and demanding. It’s also enriching for our students, who get to combine fundamental management concepts learned in the classroom with real-world experience that takes them far beyond the case study. And it’s highly valued by the companies and organizations that agree to become client sites by letting our students get an up-close look at the inner workings of their organizations.
Needless to say, the Strategy Field Study leaves a lasting impression. During the past 50 years, it’s the one course experience all of our alumni have shared in common, and at alumni events around the world Schulich graduates will inevitably end up reminiscing abut their 601 experiences even today.
In this month’s column, Ingo Holzinger, Distinguished Adjunct Professor and Director of the School’s Strategy Field Study, takes us through some of key features and benefits of this time-tested learning tool and explains why it may have even greater relevance in today’s age of AI and machine learning than it did decades ago.
I invite you to learn more about the “601” and see how Schulich’s MBA students are utilizing their skills to help a wide variety of companies and organizations deal with real-world challenges and opportunities.
Best,
Detlev Zwick, PhD
Dean, Tanna H. Schulich Chair in Digital Marketing Strategy
Schulich School of Business
The Schulich Strategy Field Study – Developing Skills for a Complex World
The Strategy Field Study, also known as the ‘601’, has served as the Schulich MBA capstone project for the last five decades. It requires a team of graduating students to conduct a comprehensive strategy assessment for a client company and present strategic recommendations and a detailed implementation plan to the company’s executives. Over the course of its history, roughly 20,000 Schulich MBAs have worked with more than 3,000 companies to complete this graduation requirement.
Since its inception in the early 1970s, the Strategy Field Study has held a central role in the school’s emphasis on strategic management and experiential learning, foundational aspects of its MBA program. It is a critical element in developing well-rounded graduates that possess specialized expertise in areas such as marketing and finance and are capable of seeing beyond functional boundaries and understanding a business as an integrated system within dynamic and competitive landscapes. Engaging directly with clients grappling with authentic strategic challenges compels students to confront the dynamic tensions that exist in business organizations and between companies, their competitors, their customers, and other external factors.
In contrast, case studies – widely employed in business education – offer a momentary snapshot that contains all information required and creates stable boundaries for analysis. Thus, the case method enables students to deduct general principles that are applicable across different but comparable scenarios. As circumstances become more idiosyncratic and complex, the usefulness of case studies wanes and the Strategy Field Study excels.
After 50 years, how is the Schulich Strategy Field Study holding up? Is it still relevant and valuable in the rapidly changing world of management education?
Data collected from industry partners and students indicate that the Strategy Field Study stands as a useful learning experience that creates value for all involved parties. Participating executives tell us that they gain invaluable insights derived from the students’ research and appreciate the fresh perspectives and questions the students introduce. Meanwhile, students acknowledge that the experience is highly demanding in terms of time and effort. Yet they attest to its pivotal role in honing essential skills such as thinking more strategically and working in teams more effectively.
Furthermore, and against the backdrop of the prevailing inclination toward increased specialization in business education, I assert that the Schulich Strategy Field Study holds more relevance today than it ever has. This relevance is rooted in its capacity to foster the critical and strategic thinking skills essential for today’s MBA graduates. This contention rests upon two distinct rationales.
First, today’s businesses confront complex challenges that include combating the repercussions of climate change, navigating hyper-competitive landscapes, adopting to recurrent economic and geopolitical upheavals, or spearheading rapid innovation. To tackle complex challenges, businesses cannot rely on established best practices and known solutions. Instead, they require adept specialists equipped with refined expertise and capable leaders endowed with contextual awareness and the ability to navigate uncertainty by embracing diverse viewpoints and asking novel questions. The Strategy Field Study combines both and excels at the latter.
Second, MBA graduates encounter emerging competition in the job market stemming from the advent of machine learning and generative artificial intelligence. Machines have already demonstrated superiority over humans, even experts, across diverse domains such as financial analysis, market research, and computer programming. As a broad principle, generative artificial intelligence is poised to surpass human performance in fields characterized by well-defined rules and boundaries, where its capability to process vast amounts of data and extract insights from past experience is critical for achieving success. In other words, machines are on the verge of replacing specialists. Conversely, tasks demanding open-ended thinking and contextual understanding, such as the strategic assessment required by the Strategy Field Study, pose a greater challenge for machines. (This is one reasons why I hold relatively little concern about students using ChatGPT to craft their 601 reports.) As AI researcher, entrepreneur, and psychology and neural science professor emeritus Gary Marcus suggests (as cited by David Epstein), “[i]n narrow enough (specialized) worlds, humans may not have much to contribute much longer. In more open-ended games, I think they certainly will. Not just games. In open-ended real-world problems, we’re still crushing the machines.”
Hence, by immersing students in ill-defined scenarios that require inquiry and synthesis, the Schulich Strategy Field Study cultivates the skills that provide our MBA graduates with a distinct competitive edge in the job market and surpass the capabilities of machines. It could very well serve as the viable remedy for the predicament outlined by David Epstein in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World: “The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyper-specialization.”
Ingo Holzinger, PhD
Distinguished Adjunct Professor & Director of the School’s Strategy Field Study
Schulich School of Business
Sources:
Epstein, David J. (2019). Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York, Riverhead Books.
