In her most recent update to the Director’s Blog, Harvard Business School’s Dee Leopold announced the locations for Round 2 interviews around the world, the majority of which will take place during the weeks of March 1 – March 19.

• London
• Paris
• Mumbai
• Dubai
• Shanghai
• Tokyo
• Sao Paolo
• Palo Alto
• San Francisco
• NYC
• Chicago

Candidates are always able to schedule a campus interview, she says, explaining that on-site interviews include the opportunity to observe a first-year class and a lunch program with current students.

Leopold also confirmed that there will be a small number of interviews conducted by phone for those who are unable to travel to any of the above locations.

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Harvard Business School plans to open its first overseas facility, in Shanghai, and expand the number of overseas experiences available to its MBA students, the Financial Times has reported.

The international expansion is part of a broader curriculum development program slated to include a variety of small classroom seminars that address topics such as negotiation, healthcare and sustainable development.

This move will give both first and second-year MBA students a chance to study business practices outside the United States as they travel to China, India, Peru and Rwanda, FT reports.

Top-ranked programs such as Wharton and Stanford now offer immersion experiences as a matter of course, but Harvard has been slow to initiate such projects, FT has found, citing their 2009 rankings, which show that the other top seven US programs all rank more highly in the international experience enjoyed as part of the MBA program.

More than 400 first and second year Harvard students will participate in the program beginning this month.

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Harvard Business School has enhanced its MBA curriculum by offering a range of intensive seminars, independent opportunities, and an expanded Immersion Experience Program (IXP) during a new January Term between the fall and winter semesters, the school announced  Wednesday.

The eight HBS January Term faculty-led seminars are being taught in small classroom settings covering a variety of subject areas, including leadership, negotiation, global trends, sustainable development, and health care.

Off campus, students enrolled in January Term IXPs are spreading out to locations such as China, India, Peru, and Rwanda, undertaking field-based learning activities, company visits, and service projects as part of these international experiential learning programs.

“The HBS January Term gives students the opportunity to reflect in a different way on what they are learning in the classroom through in-depth study and by applying their learning in the field,” says professor Joseph Badaracco, faculty chair of the HBS MBA program.

“Our offerings include a mix of small seminars, international immersions, and independent professional development opportunities that allow students to take a deep, interactive dive into topics, industries, and regions that inspire them.”

HBS is among the first Harvard schools to pilot the new term at the University in conjunction with Harvard’s move to a common calendar this academic year. January Term offerings are open to first- and second-year HBS MBA students.

For more information on these immersions and seminars, click here.

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Roger Martin, the new dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has a radical idea for business education: that students need to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they need to learn finance or accounting.

Critical thinking skills — learning how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives — has historically gone hand in hand with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders, according to Lane Wallace’s piece in Sunday’s New York Times. Dean Martin even describes his goal as a kind of “liberal arts MBA.”

While some valued what a liberal arts background could provide, the dominant view was that those elements had no place in professional business schools, Wallace writes.

In recent years, however, executives working in the global arena began to recognize the value of managers who could think more nimbly across multiple frameworks, cultures and disciplines. The financial crisis underscored those concerns — at business schools and in the business world itself.

Many prominent business schools have re-evaluated and, in some cases, redesigned their MBA programs in recent years in ways that are moving them into territory more traditionally associated with the liberal arts: multidisciplinary approaches, an understanding of global and historical context and perspectives, a greater focus on leadership and social responsibility and, yes, learning how to think critically.

The Times highlights the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, Harvard Business School, the Rotman School, Darden School of Business and Yale School of Management as front runners in this new pattern of thinking.  Read the original article to find out more about how each of these programs has tweaked its offerings to include a more liberal arts approach for today’s executive.

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Harvard Business School Dean Jay O. Light announced today that he will retire in June 2010 following a 40-year career as a teacher, scholar, and leader. Light is the ninth person to serve as dean since the School’s founding in 1908.

In a message to faculty, staff, students, and alumni, Light noted that the timing felt right, even if the decision did not come easily. “There are significant opportunities and exciting challenges ahead for the School,” said Light, the George F. Baker Professor of Administration. “I believe it is time to let a new dean guide the future path of this very special institution.”

Light expressed his deep appreciation to the HBS community, commenting, “I will always cherish the opportunity I was given to lead this distinctive and extraordinary place, and value the important work we accomplished together.”

President Drew Faust said she would soon launch a search for the next HBS dean. “I intend to consult widely in the search for Jay’s successor, and will be in touch with the Business School community in the time ahead to welcome advice on the School, its future, and prospective candidates for dean,” she said. “For today, I hope you will join me in saluting Jay and letting him know how much we appreciate all he has done, and continues to do, for HBS and for Harvard as a whole.”

Remarking on the announcement, the Financial Times wrote that the business school rumor machine will now work overtime to speculate on who will replace Light, adding that Harvard has always appointed the dean from within the Harvard faculty and the two front-runners will be two of the most outspoken professors there: Rakesh Khurana, professor of leadership, and Nitin Nohria. Both have been forthright in the past year on the role of business schools, says FT.

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Harvard Business School‘s Working Knowledge published an interview last week with professor Peter Tufano, who teaches the first course in consumer finance to be offered by a top-ranked B-school.

“It’s shocking to me how little we think about the family in the MBA Program,” Tufano tells interviewer Roger Thompson. “By the time our MBAs graduate, they will have looked at financial statements for hundreds of companies. Other than our course, they would have never looked at the financial statements of a single household.”

Forbes also picked up the story, and explains that as business schools grew in the 19th century, they traditionally taught men how to run corporations, while the study of household finances became the focus of programs tailored to women.

The Consumer Finance course looks at topics ranging from the best ways to boost the savings rate to how banks can deliver better products for low-income customers. Rather than the typical corporate case studies, students will focus on the financial lives of real middle-class families. In one exercise, they create a budget for a Boston family of average means, figuring in costs for such everyday staples as food, transportation and insurance.

“We now know that consumer financial decisions are not only huge activities but have the potential to make or break entire economies,” Tufano says.

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