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Hawai'i Pacific University - Master of Arts in Organizational Change
Hawaii Pacific University's Master of Arts in Organizational Change (MA/OC) emphasizes the
management, design, implementation, and application of such change methods as continuous
improvement and performance management. Students learn how to design innovations for
organizational culture change, as well as how to implement an actual program of change
in an organization. Forty-two semester hours of graduate work are required to complete the program.
Hawaii Pacific University is a dynamic and innovative institution of higher learning strategically
located in the heart of the Pacific Rim. Students are provided a rigorous and contemporary education
with undergraduate degrees available in nearly 50 different areas. HPU’s Center for Graduate Studies
offers 12 graduate degree programs, including the largest MBA program in the State of Hawaii.
Please visit www.hpu.edu/maoc for more information.
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Hawai'i Pacific University's MA/OC Day In The Life Podcast
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Guest List:
- Jerry Glover, MAOC chair
- Margo Poole, MAOC professor
- Gordon Jones, Dean, College of Professional Studies
- Lisa McElvaney, MAOC alumna
- Wes Woodruff, Booz Allen Hamilton consultant
- Ted Peck, Acting branch chief of Energy, Planning, and Policy in Governor's office
- Camille Pinard, Joint-degree MBA/ MAOC student
- Stuart Hase, MAOC student
- Richard Ward, Associate professor of Organizational Change
Transcription:
“Change is a normal part of things and I think what our program tries to do is, help to create a generation of people who are comfortable with that notion.” “How our organization has changed to improve them and when we talk about change, rather than being haphazard change, we’re really talking about planned change.” “This program is unique in its perspective; it offers a broad view of human behavior in social systems.” “Our current program is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.” “I’ve made a living at Booz Allen being a jack of all trades, not really a master of many but well enough so that I can operate in a number of different spheres. And the MAOC really seemed to fit to be able to help me be able to quickly come into an organization or field or community and be effective in driving change.”
I’m Janet Nakano for MBA Podcaster and this is Hawai’i Pacific University’s Masters of Arts in Organizational Change.
It’s the first day of an annual conference for Hawai’i Pacific University’s Masters of Arts in Organizational Change program. This year, the two day event is being held here on campus in downtown Honolulu.
Jerry Glover is Chair of the MAOC program and is Professor of Organizational Change, “Generally we try to have one day related to research because it’s such an important part of graduate work. The second day is a topical day where we have people come in and talk about issues and topics related to the field.” Glover says many MAOC students are distance learners, in fact around 60% live outside of Hawai’i. “And we have an annual residential conference so that we can all get together in a face-to-face environment.”
Margo Poole is a MAOC professor. She flew in just a few days ago from Australia, “This particular program is available, completely online and so as a student you could be in a situation for instance I have even had a student who has been deployed and she kept going and she got through the program. So I actually lecture online with my students and I’m just getting to meet some of them today for the first time.” How has that been? “It is really interesting because I guess that sometimes you get a sense of what somebody looks like and believe it or not, I even once made an error of gender. And so meeting them face-to-face is frightening”
“At an alarming rate and there is billions if not trillions of dollars spent on changing issues around the world,” Dr. Jerry Glover, “International or a local community, or a corporation or whatever, change is a very pervasive thing that goes on. One of the things that happens of course is the human, the financial costs are great, but what happens to the organization is often a great concern too because when you have a changing issue and it hasn’t been properly institutionalized or embedded in the culture of the organization. What may also happen is you have the old culture there and then you have the new culture layered on top. And what happens to people in the organization is they end up having to do both things. The old way, and the new way.”
“Change is the one constant in every part of society today.” Dr. Gordon Jones, Dean of the College of Professional Studies, “We do special work, a special cohort with the Booz Allen Hamilton Corporation, they are a very large consulting company and they have a division of over 900 people who are all change management specialists and use them as an example because it highlights the importance of including people who have studied change as a process in the leadership mix, in any modern organization. And there are a couple of fundamental ideas that associate with the first one is that change is the normal state of things. Everything changes and they change all of the time. And I think that what our program tries to do is to help to create a generation of people who are comfortable with that notion, that looking backward is not always the best prescription to building for the future and so rather than dealing with change as a problem, one embraces that as part of the larger calculus used to come to strategic decisions about who does one, an organization become better, more effective and more efficient in a modern, global economy.”
Wes Woodruff works as a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton in Florida. He studied online and says he enjoyed it. “Taking all of those courses, they were structured very similarly, you read three books spaced out in the course, have online chats and discussion with your classmates, then you would do a group project. You had to write an executive report on something for example, so we would divide up, I’ll do the first part, you do the second part, and then we put it together posted on this website and then we would critique each other’s work and put it together in the final form. To me, being all online was just as effective as being physically in the classroom. Actually you got to know the people just through the computer online as well as if they were sitting in class next to you. That was my experience; I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was amazed at how well you got to know the people that you worked with.”
Woodruff completed what is called the cohort program, a partnership made between Booz Allen and MAOC. Booz Allen employees are given the opportunity to take four online courses in the MAOC program and if they want they can then continue on to complete the master’s degree.
Former Booz Allen consultant, Ted Peck was the one who helped facilitate the partnership. He’s now a current MAOC student, “My Bachelors is in Physics and the MAOC program struck me as a little more tied to what I wanted to do. I did not want to have a Masters that was narrow; I wanted to have a Masters that I could leverage. I made a living at Booz Allen being a jack of all trades, not really a master of many but well enough so that I could operate in a number different spheres. And the MAOC really seemed to fit to help me to do that, to be able to quickly come into an organization or field, or a community and be effective in driving change.” That’s what Ted Peck is doing now in Governor Linda Lingle’s office; he’s the acting Branch Chief for energy planning and policy working towards a secure energy future for the state of Hawai’i.
“I did leave Booz Allen in November and I came onboard with the Department of Business and Economic Development & Tourism. You can see as I walk through this that I kind of joined a fast moving train, but I think you’ll see that there is a lot of change implications here and some things that aren’t in the slides that I can talk to is what is going on both internally and externally to our organization. Okay so do you look at your power bill? Yeah. You notice the utility doesn’t tell you the cost per kilowatt hour on the power bill, you have to calculate it. I’ll tell you a year ago it was 18 cents per kilowatt hour, last month it was 26 cents per kilowatt hour, okay?”
The MAOC program teaches students to understand and implement change says Richard Ward, Associate Professor of Organizational Change. “How are organizations changed to improve them and when we talk about change rather than being haphazard change, we’re really talking about planned change. How do you change organizations to improve what they do and how they do things and how they deal with people?”
In the MAOC program Ward says, the term organization is roughly defined, “Here we try to use a very eclectic approach to organization. For instance in business school the business schools normally look at business organizations: corporations, companies, etc. We use the term organization whether it’s a business organization, a government organization, an educational institution, it could be not for profit organization, it would be non-governmental organizations as they’re known in other countries and whether or not you’re dealing with political organizations. So a much more broader view of organization, rather than just the business organization.”
Lisa McElvaney is a MAOC alumna, she also taught in the program, went on to get her PhD in organizational systems and currently owns her own consulting company, “This program is unique in its perspectives, it offers a broad view of human behavior and social systems. It’s not just an American model of how things happen or how business should or shouldn’t be done or is done. It is really an international global perspective. For example, when I was teaching I took note that in my classes probably no more than 20% of my students were Americans. So what would happen was that added an incredible value to the discussions because we couldn’t make assumptions based on our American culture and not realize it. So everybody in the class, we have students come from all over the world to HPU, everybody had something to offer and it basically showed all of us that there are a lot of different ways to do things and so as a business consultant one of the things that I bring to the table that is very valuable now is the ability to work past assumptions, help the client see past the assumptions that they are making about what their options are because they might only look at it from a certain narrow perspective and not realize that that perspective is narrow because they don’t understand how many other models are out there or how many other ways people in the world are doing things that would be useful to them to consider. So having that type of an approach has been incredibly useful as a consultant. The other piece of that is really having a deep understanding of culture and it’s influence, it’s deep influence on people you know both on the organizational culture level and on the country level, or regional level and just understanding what that contributes to our expectations, to our behavior, to our assumptions because all of those things are things that you need to be able to see and help other people see if they are going to make changes in their organization.
The MAOC program consists of 14 courses, students who enroll full-time can complete the degree in as little as18 months. Again, Richard Ward, “We have a recommended sequence for our courses, we recommend right now that students pass and take our course in Organizational Change and Development and then we have a course in Organizational Culture and Intervention Strategies and then Organizational Leadership and then into a course like Organizational Behavior. Our program is pretty much built the same way between say the Organizational Change program or Global Leadership program or Human Resource Management program. 14 courses, two of the courses are professional paper at the end which is, we call it a professional paper, and a lot of schools call it a master’s thesis. We also do some very basic course in research methods. Students also study information systems, a general course in information systems they have to study, quantitative methods, those kinds of things which are pretty general courses across several different graduate programs.”
Students have the option of completing the degree on-campus, online or in a blended format where you take some courses online and some on-campus. Again, Doctor Gordon Jones, “One of the things that we found with the Master of Arts organizational change is that we were attracting fairly mature students. These were people who in many instances had already had a fairly robust work history or they were people who were partly employed and were looking at advanced study and organizational change as a way to support their own upward mobility. In having that a principle component of our target population, we decided that we needed to package our program in a number of different ways so scheduling classes at night, scheduling classes on the weekend and ultimately then packaging individual courses for online delivery seemed like a logical way to go. Our current program is accredited by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the US Department of Education accrediting permission for US and Hawai’i. We’re accredited to offer both the face-to-face traditional offering in organizational change but also a completely online program. So there are some students who will never go to class here, ever. We do have a residency component so when do their master’s thesis, when they get to the point where their research is ready to be presented and defended then they are required to come to Honolulu and we, the faculty will meet with them at that final point we will make the final determination as to whether or not this student is ready to be awarded the master of arts degree. And along the way I think we’ve done some very interesting things with the online classes. Now most people this it is going to be an electronic correspondence course kind of a thing, read the text book, fill out a study guide, take an exam. We found early on that that is not the essence of graduate education. Graduate education is about a conversation, a conversation between students and students and the authorities listed in their text and their research with the professors and other professionals in the field. And so what we have done is we designed the courses so that in each one, being a member of a virtual study team is essential to completing the coursework.”
Camille Pinard is joint-degree student getting both a MBA and MAOC. Currently she is working at the National Commute Foundation. “Having work there and seen them developing their current strategic plan, I thought that organizational change would be really good but I also thought that to have my MBA would be very useful in the future as well so I decided to do the joint program. I actually enjoyed the MAOC program a lot just because it allows you to look at different ways that you can structure an organization, make changes to become more productive, more sustainable and just more efficient.”
MAOC students come from a range of industries and professional backgrounds, many of whom have already had very distinguished careers says Dr. Gordon Jones, “In my last Knowledge Management Class, I had one student who was a former NASA Engineer, another who was a FBI Cyber Terrorism Expert, a female student who was a former ambassador to Nicaragua. Another MAOC student who is an Executive of Daimler Chrysler in Munich and she began with us face-to-face and then business called her back to Germany but she has been a very outstanding student, she participates in all activities even though we know she has a very demanding executive, global job with a very high powered, multi-national corporation. We have others who are entrepreneurs who have gone into business with themselves, we have students with Aloha Airlines, we have students with the BG in government, we have students in Australia, in New Zealand and the reach of our program is truly international and it really cuts across a number of different industries from large multi-nationals to entrepreneurial start-ups to governments. They’re a very august and experienced group and they are also most democratic and egalitarian. The conversations are terrific and it is usually only after the fact that people in the class kind of get to know who was that person at the other end of the conversation. In other words the Elementary School Teacher who is looking to change her career path by entering the MAOC program is not in any way a disadvantage in terms of conversations or the participation or the other work that they are doing with this very experienced, professional cohort. So our students come to us from a lot of different backgrounds, the majority of them have already had a significant work experience and I think they all profit by the sense of engagement that they find with other students.”
MAOC graduates can also apply to the PhD program in Organizational Change at Southern Cross University in Australia through an articulation agreement through the universities. SCUs PhD candidates are also here at the conference presenting their research. Stuart Hase says he helped create the program after meeting MAOC Chair Dr. Glover in Australia, “And we talked about the possibility of setting up a program like this and one thing lead to another and we set up the arrangement which is to offer a PhD program at Southern Cross but using supervisors from HPU and also tapping into the graduates of the MAOC program. One of the things that we decided to do as part of the agreement was that students would either visit Australia and have a conference there which we hold every year or we would have a conference here. It’s great, it gives the PhD students time to talk about their research and it gives the MAOC candidates an opportunity to see and talk about the possibility of doing research and going on to do the PhD program. The last time I think we held this at Booz Allen, at their offices, this time it is here. It is great; it’s a good conference, a good opportunity for candidates.”
Alumna Lisa McElvaney says a key component of the MAOC program is that it prepares you to do research, “How to think about research, how to approach research because that is a critical part of doing well in the academic world, but it is also really important in the business world. And the other aspect is understanding how to look at and solve the questions that you face. So a lot of the conference today has been focused on helping the students to understand what the requirements of good research are. And to be able to articulate what exactly that they want to do and how they are going to do it. And we’re providing, a lot of people like myself and professors are providing support to them to help them do that better.”
PhD candidate and Booz Allen employee Wes Woodruff says he’s already benefiting from his expertise in organizational change, “I recently switched jobs within our company and being in the PhD program was the reason that I got this new job. Having a PhD it helps you with credibility and it makes you more valuable to the company.”
Professor Richard Ward says the program’s focus is on teaching individuals to be effective problem solvers, “And so that when they do go out and work in the whether it is the business world or the not for profit world, or educational world or whatever it may be is that they can indentify problems and develop alternative solutions in order to be able to solve particular problems and we’re not trying to sell them any particular brand of organization development. We offer them various ideas in how to solve problems in organizations today. And so therefore by giving them a broad range of ideas and tools on how to solve problems that they’re more likely to be able to when they face a specific problem that they’ve never seen before, they’ve never done a simulation in class, that they can actually work through that problem, identify what it is, develop alternative solutions to the problem and then come up with a realistic problem solving method in order to solve the problem for that particular organization.”
Although many MAOC graduates stay in their current field, still many others use the degree to change direction says Dr. Gordon Jones, “We definitely have some folks who are changing their focus of their career as predicted by their bachelor’s degree, and we have had, we’ve had school teachers for instance who are looking at studying change management. Some of them want to go back because they understand departments of education need leadership and they need people who understand change dynamic as part as modern, strategic and management thinking. Others are actually looking to get into consulting, start their own company or move into a different business direction as a consequence of what they are studying in the MAOC program. I think ultimately the focus if you had to come up with a stereotype or who are these people who graduate a consultant springs to mind, a problem solver, someone that you bring in within your own corporation or outside your corporation to deal with problems that the organization maybe had not seen before or dealt with in previous attempts.”
For information on how to apply to Hawai’i Pacific University’s Masters of Art in Organizational Change visit hpu.edu/MAOC.
For MBA Podcaster, I’m Janet Nakano in Honolulu, Hawai’i.