MIT Sloan School of Management

MIT Sloan School  ;of Management
Established	1914
Type	Private business school
Endowment	US$ 657 million
Dean	David Schmittlein
Academic staff	190
Undergraduates	263
Postgraduates	976
Location	Cambridge, MA, USA Coordinates: 42°21′39″N 71°05′02″W / 42.360732°N 71.083774°W / 42.360732; -71.083774
Mission	To develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice.
Affiliations	Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Website	mitsloan.mit.edu

The MIT Sloan School of Management (also known as MIT Sloan or Sloan) is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.^[1]

MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs, as well as non-degree executive education, and has over 20,000 alumni globally.^[2] Its largest program is its full-time MBA, which is one of the most selective in the world,^[3] with students from more than 60 countries every year, and ranked #1 in more subjects than any other MBA program.^[4]

MIT Sloan places great emphasis on innovation and invention, and many of the world's most famous management and finance theories—including the Black–Scholes model, the binomial options pricing model, the Modigliani–Miller theorem, the neoclassical growth model, the random walk hypothesis, Theory X and Theory Y, and the field of System Dynamics—were developed at the school. Several Nobel laureates in economics and John Bates Clark Medal winners have been on the faculty.

MIT Sloan Management Review, a leading academic journal focused on the management of innovation, has been published by the school since 1959.

History

The new state-of-the-art MIT Sloan main building, E62, opened in 2010

The MIT Sloan School of Management began in 1914, as the engineering administration curriculum (or "Course 15" in the MIT parlance) in the MIT Department of Economics and Statistics. The scope and depth of this educational focus have grown steadily in response to advances in the theory and practice of management to today's broad-based management school. A program offering a master's degree in management was established in 1925. The world's first university-based executive education program—the Sloan Fellows program—was created in 1931 under the sponsorship of Alfred P. Sloan, himself an 1895 MIT graduate, who was chairman of General Motors and has since been credited with creating the modern corporation.^[5] An Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant established the MIT School of Industrial Management in 1952 with the charge of educating the "ideal manager", and the school was renamed in Sloan's honor as the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management.

In the 1960s, the school played a leading role in founding the first Indian Institute of Management. In 1990, the MIT Entrepreneurship Center was founded at MIT Sloan, one of the few business school entrepreneurship centers in the world focused on high tech. It sponsors both the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition as well as the popular and unique Entrepreneurship Lab and Global Entrepreneurship Lab courses, which sponsor MBA students to work on-site with start-ups throughout the world. The school has grown to the point where management has become the second largest undergraduate major at MIT, and in 2005, an undergraduate minor in management was opened to 100 students each year. The Sloan Business Club is the official undergraduate business club for all MIT students.^[6]

MIT Sloan has numerous initiatives to establish business practices that strengthen local economies and positively shape the future of global business. These include initiatives aimed at giving people and organizations the knowledge to conduct business productively in every corner of the world. Examples of MIT Sloan's primary initiatives in this arena are the MIT-China Management Education Project, the International Faculty Fellows Program, and partnerships with IMD, IESE, Tsinghua University, the Sungkyunkwan University Graduate School of Business, the New University of Lisbon, and the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management. In addition to these programs, the school is engaged in other educational and research initiatives on five continents.

Student life

The Tang Center, E51, houses classrooms and breakout rooms

The MIT Sloan culture is similar to, but also distinct from, overall MIT culture, and is influenced most strongly by its MBA program. The curriculum is focused on action learning, which requires that students apply concepts learned in the classroom to real-world business settings. Courses are taught using both the case method as well as through lectures and team projects. The academic level of coursework is considered extremely rigorous by business school standards, with a greater emphasis on analytical reasoning and quantitative analysis than most top programs. Courses are offered in accounting, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, industrial relations, information technology, leadership, marketing, operations management, organizational behavior, statistics, strategic management, supply chain management, and many other fields.

Academic rigor has a strong influence on the school's culture. The first semester, also known as the core, is the most difficult of all semesters by design. Students are required to take the following courses: Economic Analysis for Business Decisions, Financial Accounting, DMD (Data, Models and Decisions), Organizational Processes, and Communication for Managers. In addition, they may choose to take one of the following electives: Finance Theory, Intro to Operations, Introduction to Marketing or Strategy. In 2005, the students and faculty expressed solidarity against the core by wearing t-shirts that said "think outside the core." In 2006, the students placed their name-cards upside-down during the weeks where the workload was particularly demanding.

Courses are graded using letter grades and on the same five-point scale used throughout MIT. In its graduate programs, anything less than a 4.0 ("B") average will not allow the student to graduate. Unlike most other leading business schools, MIT Sloan is consistent with MIT and does not offer any academic honors at graduation. The philosophy behind this is that the honor is in being an MIT graduate. MIT Sloan graduates wear the famous MIT class ring, known as the Brass Rat. MIT Sloan students and alumni informally call themselves Sloanies.

A staple of MIT Sloan life is the weekly C-Function, which stands alternately for "cultural function" or "consumption function". The school sponsors food and drink for all members of the MIT Sloan graduate community to enjoy entertainment organized by specific campus cultural groups or clubs as well as parties with non-cultural themes. These functions are held on most Thursdays, often in the Walker Memorial building near the school. MIT Sloan alumni groups around the world also organize C-Functions for their club members, for social and networking activities.

MIT Sloan closely collaborates with MIT's engineering, science, and economics programs, all of which are regularly ranked #1 in the world. MIT and Harvard University also collaborate, and students at each institution frequently pursue simultaneous graduate degrees at the other. In addition, MIT Sloan students can freely cross-register for courses at Harvard Business School, and vice versa, the only pair of leading business schools to have such an agreement. Some joint degree programs have been formalized between MIT Sloan and Harvard, including a joint MBA/MPP program with the Harvard Kennedy School.

Programs

MIT Sloan degrees are conferred at Killian Court, along with all other MIT degrees, at MIT commencement

General degree programs

• MBA program
• Ph.D. program
• Undergraduate program

Specialized degree programs

• Leaders for Global Operations program
• Master of Finance program
• Master of Science in Management Studies program
• System Design and Management program

Executive programs

• Sloan Fellows program
• Executive MBA program
• Advanced Certificate for Executives in Management, Innovation, and Technology
• Executive Certificate in Technology, Operations, and Value Chain Management
• Executive Certificate in Management and Leadership
• Executive Certificate in Strategy and Innovation

Walker Memorial, the site of C-Functions and other special events

Research centers

• MIT Entrepreneurship Center
• MIT Center for Digital Business
• MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
• MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
• MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation
• MIT Center for Computational Research & Management Science
• MIT Center for Energy & Environmental Policy Research
• MIT Center for Information Systems Research
• MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering
• MIT Leadership Center
• MIT Operations Research Center
• MIT System Dynamics in Education Project

Faculty

Nobel laureate Robert Solow, a faculty member since 1949

Deans

• Erwin Schell, 1930–1951 (Department of Business and Engineering)
• Edward Pennell Brooks, 1951–1959
• Howard W. Johnson, 1959–1966^[16]
• William F. Pounds, 1966–1980
• Abraham Siegel, 1980–1987
• Lester Thurow, 1987–1993
• Glen L. Urban, 1993–1998
• Richard L. Schmalensee, 1998–2007
• David Schmittlein, 2007–present

Notable current and former faculty

Notable alumni

7th UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan  Former Hewlett-Packard CEO, Carly Fiorina  Lotus Software founder, Mitch Kapor  Ford Motor Company CEO, Alan Mulally  Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu

See also

• MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

References

External links

• MIT Sloan School of Management Official Website
• MIT Sloan School of Management Course Materials on MIT OpenCourseWare