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CCMF Centre for Integrative Thinking at Rotman Launched With Appointment of First Director
TORONTO, January 28, 2002 -- With the launch of the CCMF Centre for Integrative Thinking, the University of Toronto's Joseph L. Rotman School of Management has taken another step towards changing the way business schools teach business. Mihnea Moldoveanu, a Rotman professor of strategic management, has been appointed the inaugural director of the centre. "The CCMF Centre for Integrative Thinking is essential to the Rotman School's mandate to become one of the world's top business schools by leading a revolution in the teaching of business," says Roger Martin, dean and professor of strategy at the Rotman School. "In order to push the frontiers of Integrative Thinking, we will need to conduct original research and make the Rotman School a focal point for thinking and dialogue in this area. Under Prof. Moldoveanu's leadership, I am confident the Centre will prosper and play a revolutionary role." The current model of business education was developed at the Harvard Business School in 1908 and has changed little since. This traditional model divides business into a number of functional areas such as marketing and finance. "The fundamental problem with this approach is that business problems do not often lie within the boundaries of individual functional areas, but sprawl messily across the functions," explains Martin. "Solving these complex problems and making robust decisions in a turbulent business environment requires integrative thinking skills. In addition to having knowledge of specific functional disciplines, we believe that business leaders need to develop the ability to create mental linkages to understand the disciplines together." The creation of the CCMF Centre for Integrative Thinking was made possible by a generous gift of $10 million in 2000 to the Rotman School from the Canadian Credit Management Foundation. The Foundation was formed in 1996 following the sale of Creditel of Canada Limited, a business credit information firm serving 12,000 Canadian corporations. The foundation, with Marcel Desautels as president and CEO, supports specific educational organizations and institutions in Canada. Mihnea Moldoveanu, assistant professor of strategic management, joined the Rotman School in 1999. He studies the ways in which managers solve problems and take action in complex predicaments. One key complex predicament is the process of investigating a new business opportunity. Accordingly, he has performed comparative studies of due diligence processes in venture capital organizations and large institutions, such as government agencies, finding markedly different processes of seeking new information and changing organizational beliefs in the two kinds of organizations. Prof. Moldoveanu's findings suggest interventions aimed at making due diligence processes in both types of organizations more open to evidence that disconfirms stereotypical beliefs, thus making the due diligence process itself more efficient. One of Prof. Moldoveanu's central concerns is the propensity of managers to solve particular kinds of problems. Part of his empirical work focuses on the question: Do managers' cognitive habits resemble those of Mastermind® players or those of PlayStation® players? Mastermind® stresses deep calculation and reflection about what the other player thinks. PlayStation® stresses quick reaction times based on intuitive grasps of a problem. His work looks at managerial thinking styles in a variety of settings and asks: Where are Mastermind® strategies superior to PlayStation® strategies? Can you teach a PlayStation® player to become a Mastermind® player? Because of the importance of interactive reasoning to managerial problems, Prof. Moldoveanu is studying the ways in which strategic managers take into account other people's beliefs, their beliefs about the managers' own beliefs, and so forth and incorporating these 'belief hierarchies' into a new model of what we call 'knowledge'. He aims to build a model of knowledge that is relevant to a new age of business transactions in which the traditional foundations of knowledge (trust in established scientific authority, for instance) are being challenged even as they undergo unprecedented rapid change. Prof. Moldoveanu's first book, "Master Passions: Emotion, Narrative, and the Development of Culture", will be published by MIT Press in April 2002. He received his DBA from Harvard Business School in 1997 and also holds a BSc and MSc from MIT. The University of Toronto's Joseph L. Rotman School of Management offers leading-edge research and degree programs, including the prestigious Rotman MBA, the newly redesigned Part-Time MBA, the Executive MBA, a first-rate Doctoral Program, the distinctive Master of Management & Professional Accounting program, the undergraduate Commerce program in partnership with the Faculty of Arts and Science, combined programs with the University of Toronto faculties of Law, Engineering and Nursing, and an innovative series of Executive Programs tailored to the current needs of businesses and individual managers.
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For further information, please contact:
Ken McGuffin
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