Entre Nous with Steve Maguire, Director of the Marcel Desautels Institute for Integrated Management

After an extensive international search, the Desautels Faculty of Management recently appointed one of its own, Prof. Steve Maguire, as the first director of the Marcel Desautels Institute for Integrated Management (IIM) for a five-year term.

The mandate of the IIM, formed in 2008 with a donation from Faculty benefactor Marcel Desautels, is to break down traditional barriers between disciplines, encouraging professors, students and industry leaders to take a more holistic approach to management. That approach already has helped shape new curriculums in the Desautels MBA and Executive MBA programs.

Maguire joined McGill's Faculty of Management in 1998 and has also been an associate member of the McGill School of Environment since then.

The Reporter spoke with Maguire this week about the future of the IIM and his role as its first director.

What role do you envision for the Institute?

The Institute is our Faculty's articulation of interdisciplinarity - of its commitment to management education and research that are relevant to contemporary societal and organizational challenges. It will hopefully be another hub for interdisciplinarity at McGill, based on partnerships (across the University).

How is the integrated curriculum in the MBA's program different from the traditional approach?

In a traditional MBA program the core courses are typically organized around disciplinary specialties - Marketing, Accounting, Finance, Information Systems, Operations Management, Organizational Behaviour, and Strategy. Our program was redesigned with the core courses organized around cross-cutting themes. So, for example, I teach in a course focused on Markets and Globalization, there's another course focused on Value Creation and another addressing Managing Resources. Each of these core courses is delivered by a team of up to four different faculty members, each from different areas. In the Markets and Globalization course, I teach with a colleague from Finance, who brings an international economics perspective, and a Marketing professor who brings that perspective. I bring the Strategy perspective.

 Any examples used in the Markets and Globalization course to get students thinking across disciplines?

One teaching case we use is that of a large, vertically integrated global agribusiness company that has investments and activities in everything from fertilizers through to the processing of vegetable oils and commercialization of those products. It faces a decision on whether and how to embrace the boom in biofuels: In short, should it get into the business of making ethanol? One perspective, which I bring, relies on traditional corporate strategy analyses to understand the company's current businesses and the impact on them of a sudden shock - the increased price of petroleum, which has put this question onto the table. Should it diversify into ethanol? If so, where should it invest geographically - a large investment in Brazil, which has a favourable cost structure? Smaller investments in other jurisdictions - the U.S., Europe, etc. ?

It's a classic case of whether, how and where a firm should grow. But for my Finance colleague, this is an excellent example, empirically grounded, of a supply curve and how it shifts in response to government policies...

Read full article: McGill Reporter, September 15, 2011