A Case for Liberal Arts in the MBA

In classes taught by Shreevardhan Lele at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, lines blur between business strategy and philosophical dilemmas, and that’s the way his students prefer it. From security strategy to history to law — Lele imparts critical decision making skills that apply to many fields.

“He has this knowledge about history, philosophy and politics that makes our experience in the class extremely rich,” says Ryan French, a second-year MBA student at Maryland Smith.

Lele joined the Smith faculty in 1997 as an assistant professor of statistics and created the school’s first course on data mining in 1998. But his interest in decision making shifted toward the strategic aspects of business analytics, game theory and ethical leadership, three topics he imparts to his MBA students.

Besides teaching, he serves as Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs for the school's MBA programs.

Lele says he followed his father into the teaching field, a career that comes naturally to him. While he used to be on the math side of things, he’s always had a passion for working with students. 

“I like the give and take in the classroom,” Lele said. “The social aspect is invigorating.” 

He teaches using the Socratic method, something he’s only become more confident with over time.

Lele focuses on enabling students to see their options through different frameworks. He looks at the “constrained optimization framework,” a common scheme that decision makers follow to maximize some objective function based on constraints. Lele flips that framework on its head.

One example he uses is paid maternity leave. Using an economics framework, a typical manager could maximize profit as the objective function, with given constraints, Lele says. But, “the incentive to offer paid maternity leave changes if you look at a 10-year horizon vs. a three-month horizon,” Lele says.

“You’ve changed the way you’re measuring your objective; and that leads to a very different action. A manager can decide the objective, the practices, the constraints. And I think that’s very enabling.”

As soon as Lele mentions the idea, he pulls out a pencil and paper, sketching out the concrete example with each possibility.

“Professor Lele does an excellent job of breaking down complicated topics, often quantitative in nature, that imparts learning,” French says.

Lele prefers words over numbers and emphasizes that business students will one day have to do the same. While the MBA program is quantitative, Lele breaks every concept down qualitatively, encouraging his classes to look at problems from ethical frameworks, French says.

“I think MBAs should know something about ethics simply because they're going to go into society, which is filled with nonbusiness, non-law people,” Lele says. “If someone is morally outraged, and you try to tell the person, ‘I didn't really make a lot of money in this,’ you're missing the essence of the moral outrage.”

Luckily, Lele says, his millennial students are receptive to a broader discussion of decision making, including moral and legal frameworks. “It hasn’t been a hard sell at all,” Lele says. “In the DC area, especially with millenials, reception for these kinds of issues is very warm.”

— Kira Barrett, Communications Writer at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business

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