By Carter A. Prescott, Management Communications Consultant

Your team's assignment: Help the members of a rural dairy cooperative find a cheaper way to bring their products to market. Sound like typical MBA fare? If you answered yes, you pass.

Today's graduate business programs are undergoing what some experts tout as nothing less than revolutionary change. In response to new competitive demands on corporations and increasing globalization — both of which require tomorrow's business leaders to be flexible and manage workforces and internal structures that cross cultural and political lines — graduate-level business programs are diversifying and redefining themselves.

The basics and then some
You'll still graduate with a firm grounding in the staples of business education — finance, strategy, operations management, marketing, and the like — but you'll also learn how to work in teams, how to motivate others, and how to see the "big picture" when solving problems. Strong communication and interpersonal skills are just as important in today's new graduate-level business programs as technical knowledge and the ability to "crunch numbers."

"There's more churning going on right now in management education than at any time in thirty-five years," says Charles W. Hickman, former director of projects and services at AACSB International, which accredits MBA programs in the United States. "The emphasis today is changing from teaching to learning," Hickman notes.

"The front-end-load module, where you dump two years of education into a student's head and then sew it up, is over," he continues. "The world is moving too fast. Companies want MBA graduates to know how to learn, because lifelong learning is the key to success for practicing managers and executives. The graduate-level business degree is not an end in itself. It positions the degree-holder for a variety of general management positions."

A changing landscape
The days when MBA graduates could dazzle their bosses with only a few mentions of decision trees, regression analysis, net present value, and agency theory are gone. You'll still learn these concepts, but you'll be synthesizing them into a broader skill set.

Dennis J. Weidenaar, professor of economics at the Krannert Graduate School of Management at Purdue University, calls it the "new management environment." He says it is characterized by "teamwork and alliances, continuous changes in technologies, globalization, and networks that are in instantaneous communication with each other."

Change is now
How specifically do today's advanced business programs prepare you to succeed in this environment? Here are ten primary ways:

• Cross-functional, interdisciplinary curricula
• New programs
• Global perspectives
• Increased student and faculty diversity
• Teamwork, teamwork, and more teamwork
• Richer learning environment
• Greater use of learning technologies
• More applied learning
• Strategic alliances
• Customer focus

Explore the links above to learn more about how each of these developments is changing the nature of today's MBA.

This article has been adapted from Peterson's MBA Programs, available for purchase in our online bookstore.