DuPont Model: A Tool Promotes System Thinking and Integration in Undergraduate Business Education

Abstract

The increasingly complex world of commerce has forced business schools to focus on preparing students for a new environment that requires systemic thinking, the ability to work in teams and the skill and motivation needed to respond to rapid change. Unfortunately, little has changed in how we educate future business leaders. In this paper we report the preliminary results of an attempt to increase under graduate students’ levels of cross-functional and systemic thinking using the DuPont model to integrate across the traditional functional areas of information systems and operations management). The model provides a valuable framework for educators, and can be used to display how typical functional-area tasks (e.g., determining capital structure) are related to firm-level outcomes (e.g., return on equity), and how decision making in one functional area (e.g., managing inventory) has a similar impact on firm-level outcomes as decisions made in other functional areas (e.g., managing cash).