SUGGESTIONS FOR RESOLVING THESE DIFFERENCES

Many other examples could be provided to illustrate the challenges facing students because of our silo approach to teaching business concepts and methods. The end result, however, is the same. We are ultimately missing simple opportunities to clarify and integrate our curriculum, causing confusion and questions for our students that could easily be resolved if we would but take the time. For example, it would take only a few minutes to redo the SWOT or TOWS matrix to show that they are similar, then point out when a different perspective might be appropriate and how each version should ultimately lead to similar plans for development. Why not take the time to develop ways we can help our students deal with these issues in each of our classes? One important reason is that the incentives for faculty focus on research productivity instead of on teaching or curriculum development (Navarro, 2008). Perhaps if administrators included integration issues in their raise, tenure, and promotion decisions, more faculty members would spend time developing the skills and pedagogy needed to fully address this issue.

While economic pressures and competition might eventually force business schools to change the incentive structure and develop fully integrated curricula, we do not have to wait for these extensive changes. Based on our experiences and small successes, we propose two ways that we, as individual faculty members, can address these issues immediately instead of waiting for our colleges and schools to change.

Developing our own understanding

Perhaps the best way to resolve these issues is to develop our own understanding of the various business disciplines and how they interact, so that we can easily talk about them in class or office hours. Ideally, each of us would have the time to do a faculty internship or some consulting work that would push us to see how the different elements of a business interrelate first hand. Unfortunately, with limited budgets and constraints on faculty time, such opportunities are few and far between. As an alternative, there are three means by which we can develop our understanding by working with our colleagues while we teach.

First, we can talk with our colleagues when specific questions come up in class. Like the first example in this paper, students’ questions can often highlight the issues that are confusing between disciplines. While most of us tell students not “to worry about that” for the particular class we are teaching at the moment, we could instead tell students that we’ll get back to them, then seek out a colleague and discuss the matter. Doing so will not only allow us to address the particular questions asked in our next class session, but will also allow us to better understand the relationship for future reference. We can then incorporate these relationships into our future lectures. For example, one of the authors typically pauses for a few moments after discussing the method of calculating bond values to discuss the differences between finance and accounting. Doing so always brings a lot of nods from students and a better degree of understanding, not to mention reducing the number of challenges regarding the appropriateness of a certain rate of interest or questions of why a company would choose to make the decisions implied in the class examples.

Second, we can discuss current events and economic news with our colleagues in the hallway or "around the water cooler." These discussions can even happen between classes as one instructor cleans up to leave the classroom and another gets set up to start her lecture. Another option is to discuss with each other the challenges we are having in our classes, since doing so might highlight not only pedagogical tips and techniques that might help resolve those challenges but also begin discussions about the topics themselves. Learning how our colleagues approach similar topics in their different courses should open our eyes to ways that we can more effectively inter-relate our topics. Third, we can sit in on other instructors’ classes, not for assessment purposes but to provide perspective in their class or to gain perspective for ourselves. As in our second example, this method can not only improve faculty understanding, but also improve student performance. If nothing else, it can emphasize to students in our own majors that these other topics are important for them to understand. Seeing an accounting professor in a marketing lecture, just to listen to the content, would suggest to all of the accounting majors in the class that this is an important topic for them to understand. Careful choice of which days to attend could provide even greater emphasis to those specific topics that will be important to our students or that are most difficult for them to understand. Finding common ground

Another way to resolve these issues is to identify methods that do not cause this type of confusion. In other words, if we get questions or concerns from students about one method, we can switch to another method that is common between the two disciplines. In our example of determining IRR, the only difference between the accounting and finance methods was the assumption about straight-line depreciation. However, the question could be answered using the MACRS depreciation method required by the IRS. This method is generally required by law for capital budgeting purposes and is always required by law for tax reporting purposes, which means that it provides the actual amount that the company will save. Table 3 presents the annual cash flows for our example problem using MACRS as the depreciation method. Under this method, the IRR is 23.32%, consistent with the shortcut in the finance method and still only slightly different than the U.S. GAAP method.

Table 3: Incremental After-tax Cash Flows Using the MACRS Tables