History & Evolution

The origins of the Certificate Program in Business Strategy can be traced back to the 1929 beginnings of the Philosophy and Strategy movement in Chicago. That year, University of Chicago Professor Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, then the young dean of the Yale Law School (but soon to be the President of the University of Chicago) collaborated together with the great novelist and English professor John Erskine to create a program of study around the classic texts or "great books" of world civilization.

Hutchins and Adler pioneered great books discussions in a seminar format for University of Chicago undergraduates. Together, they taught a dynamic honors course for freshmen that rattled professors and galvanized students; as an alumnus of the "Hutchins College" recalled decades later, "there was an excitement of intellectual discovery, a sense of shared adventure…"

Hutchins and Adler also began to develop a vision for the great books that outstripped the bounds of the university. They believed it was important to offer liberal arts education to adults as well as to undergraduates; they placed particular emphasis on business insights from the classics. In October of 1943, Hutchins recruited prominent Chicago businessmen and their wives to experience the Great Books methods for themselves. "The Fat Men’s Great Books Course," as it came to be known, was a select group that met downtown every other Friday evening. Hutchins was secretive about the membership list and strictly forbade photographs. (It was rumored that participants included Leo Burnett, Jack Chrysler, Marshall Field, Robert Galvin, Fowler McCormick, Andrew McNally, John Nuveen, Sanford Otis, Mrs. Potter Palmer, Harold Swift, Alfred Vanderbilt, and Charles Walgreen.) The Fat Men’s Club generated fantastic publicity and had some of Chicago’s wealthiest public figures clamoring for the privilege to read Aristotle and Locke with Adler and Hutchins.

Tremendous curiosity about the great books and their power to affect business strategy ensued. In 1944, in the wake of the Fat Men’s Course, a new great books program for adults at the University of Chicago’s downtown University College (now the Graham School of General Studies) took off. Preston Cutler, who would become the program’s first director, named the program "The Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults," which has been running since.

In the 1950s, a number of visionary faculty members at the Graduate School of Business and within the Department of Economics became interested in the idea of business strategy insights from the classic texts. Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz, the father of modern portfolio theory, was widely influenced by Darwin and Hume. The intellectual environment at the University of Chicago was exhilarating during this time, and the Philosophy and Strategy movement reached its peak as the University became a center for innovative scholars at the intersection of philosophy, economics, finance, and business strategy. At the center of the Movement was the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics. Though focused primarily on new research in economics and finance, philosophy and the classic texts loomed large in the Commission, and Cowles himself worked closely with Hutchins. Nearly all US winners of the Nobel Prize in economic sciences have spent time at the Cowles Commission. (For a good history of the Cowles Commission please see cowles.econ.yale.edu/reports/25yr/25_index.htm).

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the Philosophy and Strategy movement struggled. The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business was focused on making the study of business and management more scientific and saw little need for the classic texts. There were exceptions, such as Dean George P. Shultz and Professor Ed Wrapp, but the movement was not big enough to garner widespread interest.

In the 1980s and 1990s the Graduate School of Business further distanced itself from the movement by de-emphasizing interdisciplinary study within the Graduate School of Business and focusing heavily on economics, finance, and quantitative methods as the foundation for a business education. The GSB rejected the movement’s call to cross disciplinary as well as chronological boundaries and focused instead on the ideal of disciplinary purity and the suspect status of new disciplines. As one observer noted: "The University of Chicago’s home for adult learning in Chicago is the Gleacher Center, a new building off Michigan Avenue. The Business School taught its business classes upstairs, and the Graham School taught its philosophy and great books classes downstairs, and the two were like ships passing in the night."

But the Philosophy and Strategy movement began to re-ignite as the Internet created interesting possibilities for teaching business strategy to a widespread global audience. At the center of the movement was a group of faculty and students who were jointly associated with the Graduate School of Business and with the Graham School of General Studies, principally, Harry L. Davis, the former Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Business, Distinguished Service Professor of Creative Management, and the Chairman of the Board of the Graham School, and Russ W. Rosenzweig, the Chairman and CEO of Round Table Group and an alumnus of both the Graduate School of Business and the Graham School.

Rosenzweig had formed Round Table Group in 1994 as a think tank in which business, economics and liberal arts professors collaborate via the Internet to teach and consult to corporate leaders; Harry Davis became an Executive Director of the think tank in 1997. By 1998, over 3000 professors from the most prestigious universities in the world were participating in the Round Table Group think tank. Many of these professors began to record their teachings and insights to be shared through Round Table Group to a global audience of learners.

Round Table Group was interested in new methods and approaches to management consulting that were very different from the prevailing schools of thought at large consulting houses. With its emphasis on "Socratic consulting," RTG brought the Philosophy and Strategy movement into some of the largest US companies. "This approach to business strategy, which draws on insights from management science, philosophy, anthropology, and the classics, is particularly effective when the speed of change if high and the magnitude of change is turbulent, as in the Internet era" noted Rosenzweig in a 1999 interview.

Rosenzweig and Davis were also interested in creating educational programming that combined the rigor of the tools and models taught at the Graduate School of Business with the equally rigorous insights and metaphors from classic texts and non-business domains. This idea caught the interest of Dean Dan Shannon at the Graham School, and a course called the "Certificate Program in Digital Strategy and Innovation" was created (www.roundtablegroup.com/6month).

The revolutionary Program is designed to be an "in between" alternative to a two year MBA and a 2 day executive education event, is a six month course of study that met infrequently in Chicago and had a heavy emphasis on Internet-based learning using both real-time and pre-recorded lectures of preeminent faculty. Participants included managers and executive from Fortune 1000 companies in the US and abroad. It also became the new home of the Strategy and Philosophy movement. As with the Fat Man’s course sixty years earlier, now business leaders were collaborating together at the University and on the Internet to discuss business strategy and the classics.

The $9000 price tag for the Certificate Program in Digital Strategy and Innovation, along with its regular classroom requirements, kept the program off limits to many global learners, so the Certificate Program in Business Strategy was created as a lower priced and more accessible alternative.