A Roundtable with the Professors Behind
the Jack Welch Executive MBA Experience

If you're like most prospective students, you probably want to know what makes the Jack Welch Executive MBA program unique. Or you may be concerned about how things work day-to-day in the online environment.

You also probably care a lot about the teachers you'll be working with in the classroom. After all, you'll be spending a lot of time together at JWMI, working intensively to apply what you've explored in the lectures, readings, and videos to the required online discussions, assignments, case analyses, and simulations.

To that end, we recently assembled a roundtable of current JWMI professors to discuss a range of these issues. Mickey Butts, chief content editor of the JWMI curriculum, moderated the discussion. The participants in the roundtable were:

	Douglas LePelley, Ph.D., who teaches the people management, strategy, and capstone courses. Professor LePelley is also the CEO of a consulting firm that helps companies lead organizational change, and earlier in his career he worked at GE Consulting Services.
	Brian McElyea, Ph.D., who teaches the operations management and finance courses. The CEO of a company that creates collaborative business environments, Professor McElyea previously worked as a CFO at several large healthcare organizations.
	Rachelle Disbennett-Lee, Ph.D., who teaches the leadership course. Professor Disbennett-Lee, who spent many years as a senior manager in the telecommunications industry, now runs an executive coaching business.

JOINING THE TEAM

What attracted you to the JWMI program?

Douglas LePelley: It was Jack Welch. When I worked at GE back in the early 1990s, I was one of the early participants in the company's famous Work-Out process-improvement program, which we teach in the JWMI program. That was such a wonderful experience for me personally, and it gave me skills that I brought with me to future positions.

Rachelle Disbennett-Lee: I've been teaching leadership for a long time, and I don't think I have ever read a business book that didn't mention Jack Welch and how much he has contributed to the business world. I also like how the JWMI program is so real-life. Our discussions are at a really high-level, because the program attracts high-level students. We talk about the material, but then we talk about how it applies to what they're doing right now. We'll have a discussion one day and the next day students are coming back telling us what happened when they applied the ideas we've been talking about. We also discuss the stories in the reading. Students then tell their own stories, and that really opens up a dialogue. And I love the fact that Jack is featured in the videos discussing events that are happening right now in the real world. It's not just teaching from a textbook.

Brian McElyea: I agree that it was the name recognition of Jack Welch. But I also like that the JWMI program is consistent, and the expectations from the professors and the material are challenging. But equally important, the program is relevant. I don't believe in teaching a lot of theory if you don't teach how to apply it. The JWMI program focuses on how you transfer what you're learning in the classroom to your industry. If you can't do that, you really just have a nice piece of paper to hang on a wall. And I think Jack Welch has higher expectations than that.

STANDING OUT

What are the unique advantages of the Jack Welch MBA over other programs?

Douglas LePelley: For me that's a very easy question. It's our capstone course, which is the final event in the curriculum. The capstone is a business simulation that GE and many other Fortune 50 companies use for executive development. We group students in teams and they have to run a company over six quarters. They actually make financial decisions using fairly complicated spreadsheets. Students do role-plays with each other, representing customers, suppliers, and people within their fictional organizations. I have not been anywhere else that we've been able to bring true executive development into an MBA program. We're giving the students a chance to run a company, deal with all the dynamics of virtual teaming, make decisions, and then be responsible for those decisions in an environment in which they're competing against other teams.

Brian McElyea: I think it's that the JWMI has a focus of developing students to go from the classroom to the boardroom. As they move through the curriculum, you can see their academic maturity grow. We have the standard textbooks, of course, but we also have appropriate business books that the leaders in the industry are reading. And then we supplement readings with case studies and videos that are extremely appropriate for the subject matter. And the discussion threads are students' chance to learn while doing and apply what they're learning.

Rachelle Disbennett-Lee: I love the fact that we use the DiSC personal leadership assessment. This exercise gives our students a tool that they can use with their teams, helping them understand that you need to understand yourself, but you also need to understand how other people behave to be able to communicate with them as a leader.

At JWMI, we spend a lot of time producing original lectures and learning materials to distill the landscape of important concepts, apply the ideas to the real world, and focus the student's learning experience. How do you see lectures helping students learn?

Rachelle Disbennett-Lee: The lectures add another layer of complexity and nuance. Students often say, "This week's lecture said this, and here's how I applied it." They're using the lectures as a way to guide them through the program. They're not just left on their own to go in any direction. Lectures really give them a compass. And the lectures, the videos, the books, and everything else provide so much information that is not just telling students what to think, but giving them ideas about ways to think.

Douglas LePelley: I actually think that what makes the program work is not the lectures by themselves. It's how the lectures are integrated with the videos, with the textbooks. It's the whole package.

THE ART OF ONLINE TEACHING

What role do you play in the classroom day-to-day?

Rachelle Disbennett-Lee: My role is as a co-creator. I'm not there to lecture anyone. I'm online asking questions, using the Socratic method to get students to dig deeper. I tell them, "I'm not the sage from the stage. I am right there learning with you." We're all helping each other get to a different level. I'm online almost every day, sometimes twice a day. I'll get online in the morning and then I'll go back online that evening just to post something that I've thought about, and there are 15 more posts. It is a very dynamic discussion.

Douglas LePelley: The role I typically play is as a coach. I try to help students become their best. I'm there to help them improve and make sure their voice is heard more clearly. Our discussion questions and our weekly wrap-ups facilitate that. I make sure that every note is responded to. We're preparing people for leadership roles, so I focus on students' voice. It's not enough just to do an accurate analysis; I want to know what they think. When I find students who have really strong opinions, I'll start pushing them with questions to see another perspective. I might even point them to another student's posting, so they're coming at things in a different way.

Brian McElyea: I think that coach is a good word. I would add that I try to act as a guide through the course. Even if students are right in their answer, I want to understand at a deeper level what they're thinking. My primary role is to question their thinking, and to get them to ask themselves, "I wonder why I think that way?" That's an important question, particularly as you move into senior leadership positions in organizations and you're faced with difficult decisions. Being able to understand your own thinking as you understand others' is critical.

What do you like best about working with JWMI students?

Rachelle Disbennett-Lee: That they're so knowledgeable and engaged. My students often say they're amazed at how much they learn from each other. Initially they think that online, they are just going to make a post and there's not going to be an interaction or a connection. And they're so surprised that they do. There's no sitting in the back of the room in an online class. You have to be participating, you have to be engaged, you have to be present. Students are getting to know each other and developing really good business connections.

Brian McElyea: I enjoy how we balance the hard skills that you need in finance and operations management with the soft skills. So I've pulled aside several students to say, "I notice in your discussion questions, you don't receive many responses from fellow students. Have you ever thought about that? If you would, give me a call and I'd like to talk through a little bit of that with you." At the end of the curriculum, one comment was, "I never would have guessed in an online environment that we would have been dealing with soft skills as much as hard skills, particularly in a finance course."

Douglas LePelley: What I love most is when it starts getting real, and students start sharing something that's happening right now at their company or their life. Often that leads to little side notes privately by e-mail and phone calls asking for advice. We're very much a part of students' lives for those eight weeks.

THE REALITY OF STUDENT LIFE

How challenging are classes?

Douglas LePelley: The program is so well designed that the weekly workflow is very predictable, as Brian suggested. We set clear expectations: Two discussion questions a week, a weekly wrap-up, assignments every other week. It's a challenging program, but not an overwhelming program. The power and the work are in the interaction.

Brian McElyea: To me, I think the expectations for the course curriculum are made clear to the students, prior to even beginning a class. JWMI is a significant time commitment, and the expectation is that you can't sit in the back of the room. I see who posts and who does not post, and reach out if I see someone not being as involved as I would like to see them be in the course. The other side is that faculty are accessible. We have office hours, for example. We also know that life happens, and that there are times when you have to understand the situation someone's in and work with them to make sure they are successful in the program. We let students know that we empathize and sympathize, and talk about their real options.

Rachelle Disbennett-Lee: Actually, one of the things I do is give students my home telephone number. You might think that's crazy. But students just love the fact that they have that kind of connection with their professor. They have the ability to reach out. Some people say that being online is easy. But they have never taken an online course. I've taught on-ground and I've taught online, and online is so much more demanding because it demands the person to be part of making the class dynamic. We don't just expect you to regurgitate the material in a paper. We want you to be discussing things at a much deeper level.

Talk a little about the backgrounds of the students you've worked with and how they get the work done.

Brian McElyea: Students are extremely motivated. They're balancing a lot of things in their lives. When they get online, they're very focused, and the program allows for that. They know exactly what is expected of them, when they need to post, how much time they have, and how they will be graded. There are very few places as a faculty member that you can rub shoulders with this caliber of people and learn together in a nonthreatening environment. High-quality relationships lead to high-quality results, I like to say in class. From the initial introduction through the closing of the course, I try to build that high-quality relationship so we can get the high-quality results that students are paying for and that they deserve.

Rachelle Disbennett-Lee: A lot of our students are leaders and managers of companies. I've got entrepreneurs that are running multi-million-dollar companies. They bring a lot to the table. It's an honor to be in the classroom with them all.