Abstract
For over two decades employers, advisory boards, academics and others have called for improvements in business education outcomes. Business schools have been asked to help prepare students for an environment that requires systemic thinking, the ability to work in teams and the skill and motivation needed to respond to rapid change. And more recently, business schools have been asked to consider their role in helping future business leaders prevent a repeat of the current global financial crisis. Unfortunately, despite these calls for changing the skills and knowledge that graduates possess, little has changed in how we educate future business leaders. In this paper we report the preliminary results of an attempt to increase undergraduate students' levels of cross-functional and systemic thinking using the DuPont model to integrate across five traditional functional areas (management, marketing, information systems, finance, and operations management). The model provides a valuable framework for educators that can be used to display how typical functional-area tasks (e.g., hiring, managing accounts receivable, determining capital structure) are related to firm-level outcomes (e.g., return on equity), and how decision making in one functional area (e.g., managing inventory) has a similar impact on firm-level outcomes as decisions made in other functional areas (e.g., managing cash).