"This is a school where mission matters.

"Students need to come here wanting to think hard about the positive difference that they will make in the world. This doesn’t mean that they have to have the answer, but the passion to find the answer and to fashion a career that they can be proud of has to be there.

"In the academy more broadly, there is a lot of questioning about: What is the role of business in society? What does it mean for business to be a profession? What is the role of a management school?

"SOM is a particularly exciting place to be right now: We have a mission of educating leaders for business and society that is directed exactly at those questions. And our whole community has embraced that mission with our very ambitious curriculum reform.

"The people at SOM are bringing tremendous energy to this transformation of the curriculum—and that is an essential component of its success. You can have very smart people, but if they’re not motivated, then the work doesn’t get done.

"So what is it about us that makes us so motivated around this multidisciplinary project? What drives these high aspirations?

"An interesting management challenge I’ve observed is that you can’t get as much energy from an organization if you as the leader are making all the decisions. When you open up the process to everybody else’s suggestions it gets so much better. People have a lot of great ideas. But at the same time, for people to be excited about working together, they need to know there’s a common direction. It’s your job as a leader to elevate what unites everybody. And one more great thing about being part of a mission-driven organization is that there is a lot that unites everybody. And that is what motivates us to undertake something like this tremendous curriculum reform."

—Joel M. Podolny, Dean