The Yale School of Management has always been known for its innovative approach to management education. In our new integrated curriculum, we continued that innovation. One focus of the curriculum is the use of team-taught classes, in which perspectives from multiple disciplines are used to better understand complex current management challenges.

Yale SOM teaches the fundamental tools of management: how to run regressions, how to think about supply and demand, and how to do a net present value analysis, for example. But students are able to apply what they've learned much more effectively because they learn these tools in the context of rich, real world problems. When we get context right in the classroom, it is motivating and impassioning for the students.

I have led the Integrated Leadership Perspective, which is a first-year component of SOM's integrated MBA curriculum, since its inception. In one session of the course this past spring, we examined the problems associated with toys manufactured in China that were found to have unsafe levels of lead in them. Here in the United States, we focus on the health risks to children who play with these toys, and that is obviously a very important issue. But we know that this problem also represents an important economic challenge for China. China's growth has been export driven, and these problems with quality control have powerful implications for their ability to sustain that growth.

I team-taught this particular class session with three other professors. Peter Schott, an economist who specializes in trade, talked about the broader context and the important role China plays as a trade partner to the United States. Then Art Swersey, one of our operations research professors, drilled down into the operations and supply chain issues, looking at how toys are actually produced and the cost advantage to manufacturing in China. Connie Bagley, who's a lawyer, talked about the legal and regulatory environment. I discussed the strategies that Mattel and Hasbro employed as the extent of the lead contamination became known.

In addition to the perspectives presented by the faculty, students who had experience in the Chinese government or in Chinese commerce spoke in the class, describing the challenges that China faces.

The student input was, in some ways, the most exciting aspect of the class. When we teach these real-world cases, the material matters a great deal to students who have dealt with similar problems in their careers before business school. If you've chosen the right cases, and you teach them in an open enough way, you can create real passion and engagement on the part of the students.

In the collaborative team approach we take to teaching these cases, we are also modeling how people with different views can respectfully and effectively move toward the solution of a problem. That is a valuable skill in many businesses, especially those that depend on human capital and relationship capital. We know the solutions to these complex problems can best be achieved when you bring together people who know about finance, who know about macroeconomics, who know about leadership, who know about politics, and who know about organizations. We need leaders who are not just pursuing narrow, specialized interests, but rather engaging with each other to find solutions. We expect Yale SOM graduates, as they rise in the world, to fulfill that role.

—Sharon M. Oster, Dean