USMA IN THE NEWS
By Sarah Murray
Financial Times
May 3, 2004
As the train rolls past the Hudson river, leaving behind it the busy commercial activity of New York City, a vast fortress-like structure looms up on the opposite bank of the river. It is West Point, the celebrated US military academy. Within the solid walls of this 200-year-old institution America's finest soldiers are being groomed for military service that may take them to Iraq, Afghanistan or Kosovo. But some of them are being funded for a rather different kind of training: an MBA at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in North Carolina.
From this autumn, a scholarship programme will allow two active duty army officers to attend Fuqua on the army's advanced civil schooling allocation of $16,000 per year - about half of the annual tuition. Once admitted, Fuqua's "Leadership Scholarship" will offset the tuition difference.
The fact that members of the US military are boning up on their business skills is nothing new. The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, has a partnership with the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, whereby military personnel in the Washington area can take a combined MBA degree.
US academic institutions are increasingly welcoming military professionals into their classrooms. In April, the first group of senior US Department of Defense employees embarked on their year-long graduate programme in international affairs at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. During the Global Master of Arts Programme, students will covers topics such as negotiation, trade, economics and global politics.
However, the partnership between West Point and Fuqua represents the only scholarship programme that the army has so far established with a top graduate business school. The idea was born last year when Everett Spain, a 2002 Fuqua graduate and major in the US army, contacted the school with bad news. Because of government cuts, much of the funding for military officers taking MBAs would be cut.
While officers had previously been fully financed by the government, new rules meant that, in order to receive sponsorship, officers could consider only institutions whose tuition was less than $16,000 a year, in effect eliminating all the top US business schools.
"[Major Spain] didn't want to lose the momentum with West Point graduates, so I suggested we form a partnership," says Liz Riley, Fuqua assistant dean and director of admissions. "We agreed that, even if the dollar value that the army could pay changed, we'd still cover the rest of the tuition."
At the end of the two-year programme, the officers return to West Point. They will then owe the army three days for each day spent in class, amounting to a four-to five-year commitment, two to three of which are spent teaching at West Point helping the army spread business school knowledge and experience to its cadets.
Major Spain says that the Fuqua programme had a big impact on the way he now teaches. "I learnt about half of what I do from the business school professors that I watched," he says. "They had a lot of creative ways to lead discussions and ways to get students intellectually engaged."
He also points out that in spite of widespread impressions of its bureaucratic culture, the army requires officers able to challenge decisions and debate issues.
"People ask you what you think, and if you don't like something, it's your responsibility as an officer to articulate that to the person above you and give an alternative suggestion," he says. "Business school teaches you to stand up for your own opinions and articulate them in an empathetic manner that builds consensus."
For its part, Fuqua had good reason to want to encourage military officers to take its MBA. Fuqua graduates from West Point such as Major Spain, as well as Mike McElrath, another major, and Chip Daniels, a captain, had proved valuable additions to the MBA cohort.
"We've always had really good students from West Point who've taken an active role in the greater community," says Ms Riley.
"They've been some of the most charged-up students in terms of leadership. They can really get people to follow them."
It was Major Spain who, with three other, non-military students, started the Leadership Development Initiative - now the school's largest student voluntary organisation - where Fuqua students study leadership models and theory, observe leaders in practice and experience leadership through extracurricular activities.
But while leadership has long been required of those serving in the army, business acumen is becoming increasingly necessary for military personnel. For a start, the past few years have seen several rounds of business reforms rolled out though defence department operations.
Initiatives include projects to test alternatives to the Pentagon's traditional outsourcing methods - something that normally requires a competition between federal employees and contractors before jobs can be put out to the private sector - the lifting of limits on procurement of goods and services and the use of private-sector tools such as performance-related pay.
Major McElrath believes that, as a result, business education is becoming increasingly important to the army. "As an executive officer, one of my big tasks will be to manage the money for the unit and to handle the finances, and being at business school taught me so much of that, that I never had," he explains. "You learn about opportunity costs and return on investment and all those things that are critical when you're making investment decisions that's very valuable, especially when the world is changing so rapidly."
When serving in international combat and peacekeeping zones, officers, some of whom have been out of school for only six months, could well be engaged in running the health and education systems and ensuring utilities and other services are operating smoothly.
"Lieutenants - that's the lowest grade at West Point - may be serving as authorities of regions and small towns in Iraq or Afghanistan," says Major Spain. "So they need to be sophisticated enough to deal with people and to negotiate and operate in multi-dimensional cultures that they did not grow up with."
Major McElrath points out that young captains in Iraq and Afghanistan are being asked to rebuild communities and re-establish an economic system. "How do they do that? They've had no business training and they figure it out because they're very bright," he says.
"There are no cookie cutter solutions. But you can definitely think about things in a more systematic way and eliminate a lot of the trial and error."
As well as enhancing their military careers, the MBA degree will serve officers such as Major McElrath and Major Spain when they eventually leave the army.
Major McElrath is not yet sure where he will end up when he moves from a military career to the corporate world. However, his MBA has given him a few ideas.
"I took a lot of courses in entrepreneurship and investment capital. That stuff was exciting and maybe it's because I'm comfortable with that," he says. "There are a lot of unknowns in the army. When you get deployed to a new region you don't know what's happening. You have an idea, and you've trained for it, but things can soon change."
Given the increasingly unpredictable nature of business, life in the army is perhaps not so different from that of the corporate world after all.