Managers look to crack code of New Economy

Almost 80 crowd into the first e-business cram session put on by Queen's University

2000-04-25 - by Elizabeth Church
The Globe and Mail

Toronto -- It's Monday morning, and there is just one empty chair in the crowded conference room at Toronto's Royal York Hotel. The rest are filled with executives from companies willing to pay close to $3,000 a person for a two-day crash course on the Internet world.

"In the Internet age, speed is God and time is the devil," quips Salman Mufti, an organizer of this e-business cram session put on by the business school at Queen's University in Kingston. The line is not his, but his delivery is smooth and he gets a good chuckle from the mostly suit-wearing crowd.

Clever lines aside, this is no joking matter. The 78 men and women in the room are here to try to crack the code of the New Economy. Their life is changing, and changing fast. They need to get a handle on how they should respond to that.

"I'm just trying to keep up," explains Steven Cross, manager of Mountain Equipment Co-op's Toronto store, during a coffee break. "You can miss things when you are caught up in the rush of projects. It's always good to take a step back."

The university is trying to position itself as the place to do that. Queen's business school, like other management faculties, faces the challenge of remaining relevant in a fast-changing world.

Some people in the high-technology community have raised questions about the value of a traditional business education. What good is academic research and case studies, they argue, in an industry where the rules are rewritten almost every day?

"It is a bit of a wake up call for everyone who is teaching business," says Mr. Mufti, an adjunct professor who, until he came to Queen's three years ago, ran an information technology consulting firm.

It's time, he says, for business schools to reflect more closely and more quickly what is happening in the real world.

"E-business is giving academic institutions a golden opportunity to align themselves with business in real time."

As for critics of business education, Mr. Mufti argues that business is business, regardless of whether there is an "e" in front of it. Like Mr. Cross from Mountain Equipment, he says business schools can play an important role, providing a different perspective to the people caught up in the day-to-day frenzy of running a company.

"We can see the big picture. We can be an objective third party who can provide advice that is not about selling anything," he says.

But business education is a business in itself, especially when it comes to the lucrative executive education market. This two-day offering by Queen's represents a push to capture more of that business.

Too tough to travel to Kingston? For the first time, the business school has packed up its professors and sent them to Toronto. Too busy to devote a few weeks to executive development? The school has boiled down the content into two days of lectures.

This is, after all, Internet time. Breaks are seven minutes long and executives get 20 minutes to gobble their sandwiches before the next speaker begins.

"We want to attract executives who are serious about this business. They do not have time to attend a traditional program," Mr. Mufti explains.

The short session, he says, is designed to help senior people develop an understanding of what is happening on the Internet and to give them a number of tools to cope with that change when they return to work.

"There is a lot of noise out there about the Internet. Our mission is to help managers cut through that and understand how the Internet is different," he says.

During his two-hour talk, Mr. Mufti describes for the group the various models of e-business and quizzes them on examples to illustrate his points. By the end, the executives are using terms such as "metamediaries" (third-party vendors such as edmunds.com, a U.S. Web site that provides products and information related to the auto industry) -- not exactly with ease, but as though they have some clue as to what they are talking about.

"This is a chance to learn from those who are looking at the whole evolution of business," says Scott Urquhart, an account executive with New Brunswick Telephone Co. Ltd. and a Queen's MBA graduate.

Mr. Urquhart says his customers often look to him for advice on what is happening in the Internet, and courses such as this one help him to answer their questions.

Mr. Mufti says it looks as though Queen's business school has a hit on its hands. The school had to turn away students for this first session. Given the waiting list, he expects there will be one or two repeats of the two-day course in the summer or early fall.

Now that the course has gone on the road, he says there is no reason why it could not travel to other locations. Ottawa, with is concentration of high-tech companies, would be an obvious choice.

"Demand for this program is quite huge," he says.

But, he says, the school's response to e-business must go beyond special executive briefings such as this one. It has to be taken into consideration in all the school's offerings.

"This is not a new economy, it's an economy in transition," he argues. "The key thing is understanding how things are changing."

He sees that change as an opportunity for business schools such as Queen's.

"We want to establish ourselves as an innovator in the field," he says.