An interview with Dr. Robert Turrill, USC Organizational Behavior business professor

USC(University of Southern California) is a competitively ranked American university that offers unique EMBA and MBA programs to both domestic and international candidates through the Marshall Business School. Dr. Robert Turrill has been involved with MBA and EMBA programs for over thirty years. He spent two years directing USC’s EMBA program and fifteen years on the board of directors for GMAC(Graduate Management Admissions Council). He was also involved in running the first national MBA forums in 1977 and has been responsible for graduate admissions and all MBA and graduate management programs at USC for over 16 years.

WS: Does USC recruit internationally for its MBA program? If so, how does it go about doing it?

RT: USC’s geographical position in Los Angeles, California, is a hot spot for candidates from the Pacific Rim and those interested in the Entertainment industry. Generally speaking, between 20% and 25% of the students in the program are international students, which is high for MBA programs. Most of the recruiting is done through online information, publications, or international forums. International students can get books, see us on all the potential MBA program lists that exist, subscribe to rating services, check out the GMAC website, Business Week magazine, or US News and World Report magazines.

WS: How have International students added to the "team workshop" section of the program?

RT: Typically team workshops and team types of activities are new experiences for international students.

WS: Is it a particularly American MBA program trait?

RT: Yes, it’s much more of an American phenomenon. Many international students, especially if they come from cultures that are collective in nature, already have their own brand of integrated teamwork. That’s the way they already see things, the way they’ve been raised- with the notion that it’s the whole rather than the individual. The advantage this has in teamwork exercises is the diversity; you get people together who really think and act differently. If you can teach them how to work together(which is what team building is about), rather than reject each other, they will come up with more unique and theoretically better solutions to any problem you give them.

WS: Can you explain what’s entailed in USC’s entrepreneurship program- what are its goals, and how it’s different than a normal MBA program?

RT: The entrepreneurship program involves 4 courses that take you through an entrepreneurial cycle of ideas, concept development, feasibility, business plan and operational planning. So someone could go through the entrepreneurship program and actually develop a full business plan for a product or service business. A number of students actually implement their entrepreneurial idea, concept and feasibility plan when they leave the program. It’s only four courses, so that means that it’s your elective concentration or specialization in the MBA program.

WS: You’ve had a lot of experience with EMBA programs. What are the primary differences between an MBA program and an EMBA program?

RT: The first difference is that EMBA students tend to be older than MBA students; we ask for about 13 years of work and managerial experience. The average age of the EMBA student is around 37. The second major difference of EMBA programs is how they are structured. They typically are for fully employed individuals, so the classes are usually offered on the weekends. In our program we offer classes on alternate Friday and Saturdays. Every week the student is in class for 8 hours; one week it’s Friday, the next it’s Saturday. The other primary format is a Friday/Saturday combination every other week so that we can recruit more broadly so people can fly in for the Friday/Saturday class and then not come back for two weeks.

WS: Does USC have any upcoming online E-Learning programs?

RT: We established a program in Japan called the "BBT" program in which the Japanese managers do a year in E-Learning and then come to USC to do their second year in residence. We don’t have any full distance E-Learning programs yet. It’s a rather controversial issue. Most schools are resisting the idea of having full E-Learning programs, but there are some who are working on the idea.

WS: Do the students get any kind of hands-on international exposure?

RT: In both our EMBA and MBA program, all students travel abroad one week in their second year. The week is spent touring and visiting companies, listening to government as well as business speakers, touring businesses, going to stock exchanges and so on. A number of schools, rather than just touring and doing the general business orientation, will do a specific consulting project. I know of one EMBA program that goes abroad to a specific firm and does a consulting project as a class.

WS: What kind of community work, if any, do the programs offer?

RT: A lot of MBA programs do various kinds of community work. I’ve heard of two for example, that instead of doing team development work during the orientation, what we call "rocks and ropes" experiences, they actually send their students out into the community, which makes a lot of sense; you can go out with your team and clean up a vacant lot and learn a lot about teamwork- just as much as you could from a high ropes course. In the Marshall School of Business we do several things- there’s a challenge for charity to raise money for a "Special Olympics", a "Read and Learn" program with local schools, and more.

WS: You’ve been involved in many leadership programs. Can you explain those leadership programs and their relation to your MBA work?

RT: The primary leadership program that I’ve been involved with is called the "Presidential Fellows Program", which consists of 24 graduate students selected from 20 departments within USC. All majors are invited to send nominated candidates to the leadership program. The year is a volunteer year on top of everything else these grad students are doing. They go through what we call "transformational leadership development" and complete a number of community service projects during the year. "Transformational leadership development" is primarily taking yourself wherever you are and transforming yourself into a larger, more capable person who can take on leadership roles by having experienced greater challenges in their personal lives.

These programs unfortunately do not translate into the MBA program. In the second year of the MBA program you can specialize in leadership, but there is no transformational leadership experience within the MBA. The MBA program, in my opinion, is or should be a program of leadership development, and very often I think programs fail in that domain. Many students coming into the MBA program don’t understand that ten years from now they will not be doing finance, information systems or marketing- they will be in a leadership or general manager role. The MBA is a general manager program; the candidates have to be able to lead an entire organization, not just be interested in accounting, finance, operations, manufacturing, marketing etc. They have to be able to coordinate and integrate all those efforts to achieve overall enterprise goals.