The Kelley Direct (KD) G596 Managerial Economics was recently revamped by Steven and Ellie Kreft to become an integrated Core in the MBA program that also includes Organizational Behavior and Business Law. The philosophy behind the overhaul was to make integration impactful for students rather than surface-level. Since MBAs already have a lot of experience thinking about different scenarios and variables that might impact a decision, they’re naturally thinking on multiple levels.

“We wanted to give justice to that perspective,” says Steven.

Ultimately, Steven and Ellie took two other disciplines—management and business law—and found ways to have real points of integration with their econ coursework. The idea was to not only teach their own material but also teach the other discipline’s material as well.

“This is where the newness came from because usually in programs that claim to be integrated, one professor teaches their material and another professor teaches theirs and then they just hope the student can make the parallels,” says Steven. “Here, the different disciplines are not seen as two pieces of a puzzle that the student has to put together on their own; rather, the professor is actively connecting the pieces with the student.”

Professors meet weekly to teach one another the material in order to really make those points of integration meaningful. It’s that kind of commitment that led to Steven and Ellie winning the Eyster Teaching Award.

Since they are teaching one another’s information, they include questions that have perspectives from multiple disciplines in their assignments.

“From the student’s perspective, that’s pretty powerful that a professor feels strongly enough that they’re not only asking you their core material but then giving you another perspective to think about on an assignment,” says Steven. “We don’t just throw out a couple of terms and hope that integration happens. We look for substantial points where all the disciplines come together nicely because no one graduates from the Kelley school saying, ‘Let me solve this problem solely from my managerial economics class.’”

Students have been hugely receptive to the revamped KD Core.

“Students have definitely been thirsty for more perspectives,” says Steven, who notes that he and Ellie have gotten an increasing number of emails from students asking for recommendations on future classes that would continue what they started.

“Students can see the impact it can have on their profession,” says Steven, who, along with Ellie, run professor panels in which they debate current hot topics according to their disciplines. They’ve tackled relevant topics such ride-sharing & driverless cars, leadership & racial justice in corporate America, and COVID-19’s impact on the business cycle.

Oftentimes economics sounds abstract because it’s a model or a graph, but the KD Core invites students to ask how a manager would use a certain model.

“All of our assignments in the class are completely applied,” says Ellie. “We spend eight weeks coaching students on how to make a decision based on different observable roles they see in data and within models.”

Students told Ellie that the integration resonates with them. They noted that in economics, they were looking at numbers and have an unbiased decision where a price should be X in order to optimize profit. After talking about management, however, they understood that there’s a lot of psychology that can also go into decision making at the optimal point. Then in the law, they understand whether or not the decision they’re making is actually legitimate in terms of following the law.

“I thought it was interesting that the students said in economics they have the answer that for sure is optimal in terms of just numbers but they also understood that numbers are not all that counts in this world,” says Ellie. “There’s also the psychology and the system.”

Adds Steven, “Because personal biases can enter any manager’s decision making, the other disciplines are an amazing checks-and-balances on our number crunching.”’