JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / April 2001 Smith, Forbes / A MODEL FOR SMALLER SCHOOLS CREATING A COMPETENCY-BASED LEADERSHIP AND MANAGERIAL SKILLS PROGRAM: A MODEL FOR SMALLER SCHOOLS

For well more than a decade, many schools have responded to criticisms of the relevance of management education. One area in which business pro-grams were found lacking was the development of management skills (Leavitt, 1989; Porter & McKibbin, 1988). A wide variety of curricular inno-vations at both the graduate and undergraduate levels have been introduced that focus on managerial skill development (Boyatzis, 1994; D. Whetton, Windes, May, & Bookstaver, 1991). These innovations range from integrated sets of courses that comprise a whole curriculum focused on development of managerial competencies (e.g., Case Western Reserve University and the University of Michigan) to self-contained electives or required courses within undergraduate management majors. The successful development of these innovations requires a large amount of intellectual, financial, and perhaps even political capital. Although some 209 Authors ’ Note: We are grateful to the Cleveland Foundation and to the Jepson Foundation for providing funding for an experimental undergraduate program that paved the way. Additional support for planning the MBA program was received from the Cleveland Foundation. We are especially appreciative for the early inspiration and encouragement that John Miller of Bucknell University and Richard Boyatzis of Case Western Reserve University gave us. Our thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. Correspondence should be addressed to Jonathan E. Smith, Department of Management, Marketing, and Logis