Experience The Chicago Approach Difference

At Booth, we talk about bold thinking. Curious exploration. Questioning answers and answering questions. But prospective MBA students may wonder, what does that actually mean? What is it really like to be in the classroom, learning the fundamentals of business with some of the world’s best MBA faculty?

Thanks to Booth’s ongoing MBA Masterclass Series, prospective MBA students—and anyone curious about what learning from Booth’s faculty is all about—can get a special glimpse into the unique insights and teachings of Chicago Booth’s world-renowned professors. You can join Booth professors and fellow prospective students in an upcoming virtual MBA Masterclass session. You can also watch sessions on demand from a growing video library currently featuring 15 previous sessions covering a broad array of business areas—including accounting, behavioral economics, entrepreneurship, finance, impact investing, management, marketing, and more.

“An MBA education represents the beginning of a lifetime partnership between the students and a school,” says Kathleen Fitzgerald, ’03, adjunct associate professor of strategic management and senior director of academic support at Booth. “It's important that prospective students make the right decision for which school to attend.”

A Scientific Approach to Business

In May 2021, hundreds of prospective students logged in from as far away as Hong Kong, India, Colombia, South Korea, and France to attend professor Jean-Pierre Dubé’s MBA Masterclass, Introducing The Chicago Approach to Marketing: Pricing. Dubé is the James M. Kilts Distinguished Service Professor of Marketing at Booth, as well as the faculty director of Booth’s James M. Kilts Center for Marketing. His Pricing class has become increasingly popular with MBA students over the past decade and a half.

“I’ve tried to take some concepts from my Pricing class, but use them less to teach you about pricing, and more to give you a flavor of what sort of values we espouse at Booth. And, more importantly, how we tackle business problems,” Dubé said in his introductory remarks.

The Chicago Approach to a business problem—in this case pricing—is in fact a scientific approach, which differentiates the Booth classroom experience, Dubé says. Many business schools today still focus primarily on the case-based approach to business education.

“The idea is that by studying dozens of business case studies on a topic, students will acquire simulated ‘business experience’ from which they can draw postgraduation,” Dubé says. “In other words, when confronted with a real-world problem at work, students would try to recall a case with similar challenges and the manner in which the case was solved in class.”

However, Dubé argues the case-based approach has several shortcomings. “First, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution,” he explains. “Second, the nature of ‘evidence’ has evolved in the digital era. So a few pages of spreadsheets and figures like the ones included in the exhibits of a typical case study are woefully inadequate to capture the granular nature of data typically available to managers these days.”

While Booth faculty leverage real-world examples and cases in courses for illustrative purposes, the overall Chicago Approach is more transformative in nature, Dubé says. “We teach students the tools to design and implement solutions that are adapted to the facts and circumstances of the situation,” he says. “The Chicago Approach includes frameworks from the social sciences to learn how to devise a theoretical understanding of how actors in a given scenario likely behave, as well as data formats and corresponding tools to analyze the data. It also includes business objectives to ensure that decisions achieve the desired outcomes and optimize objectives.”

Blending Research and Application

In August, Booth professor Devin G. Pope taught an MBA Masterclass entitled Behavioral Economics Applications. The session explored the question: Can psychology lead to a greater understanding of how the economy works? Pope, professor of behavioral science and a Robert King Steel Faculty Fellow, walked attendees through recent theoretical and empirical advances in this increasingly important field of economics.

“My hope is that the Masterclass gives a sense for how Booth classes weave academic research with practical insights and applications,” Pope says. “I didn’t water down my Masterclass much from what I would present in an academic seminar setting, but then we also spent a fair bit of time discussing implications of the research. I think that blend of cutting-edge research and application is somewhat unique to Booth and something that prospective students hopefully were able to get a taste for.”

Chicago Booth faculty have full independence in how they teach their courses, which is one critical distinction at Booth from many other elite business schools. For that reason, within the MBA Masterclass Series, no two sessions are alike, notes Fitzgerald, who recently taught her second Masterclass, Read and Analyze Financial Statements.

“Some classes here are more lecture based. Some are case based,” she says. “There’s more than one way to deliver the material.”

Whichever MBA Masterclass a prospective student might watch or attend, The Chicago Approach is sure to be a part of it. “No matter how each class is delivered, we still have the same approach, which is to start from the bottom up,” says Fitzgerald. “You really understand the fundamentals, so you can apply them in any situation or environment.”