Jim Clawson's Blog on Leadership & Career Management

 The financial events of the last few weeks--which saw the dissolution of Lehman Brothers, the absorption of Merrill Lynch, the rescue of AIG, and related events--have been compared to the collapse of 1929.  By any measure these events are cataclysmic and far reaching.  What worries me is that they are far too unlikely to be discussed in business school curricula. 

Major business schools develop relatively intense curricula that typically include core courses in finance, marketing, operations, decision analysis, accounting, economics, strategy, management, and perhaps ethics and management communications.  The course work in these courses may or may not be coordinated, but even if they are, the course designers often assign readings and cases that create a tremendous volume of material on a daily basis.  Students speak of learning to “drink from a fire hose.”  The volume and rigor of these combined assignments ironically tend to drive students away from some activities that are essential to their long-term professional success, health and well being. 

One of the casualties often is keeping up with the business media.  When students are in class for five hours a day and preparing for the next day’s classes until well past midnight, there is little time for exercise, family, and leisure reading.  Ironically, MBA candidates may go to school and because of their curriculum, find little time to keep up with current events in the business world. 

Some argue that the pressures of the business school curriculum prepare students for the intense schedules of the working world—where they’ll have to carve time out their busy working days to read the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Business Week, Fortune, the Economist, the Far Eastern Economic Review, and so forth.  Perhaps.  I still find it ironic that in the places where we want to students to learn as much as they can about the business world, we do things that drive them away from staying current and relevant. 

One way to fix this would be to include in the required core curriculum a course on business events.  Such a class might meet once a week in groups of 30 to 60.  The assignments might be to read something from an array of business media or to read one source more thoroughly.  Or they might include some directions from time to time to find out all one can about a certain issue or company from all sources including the web.  The class time then would be given to discussing the events of the week and what they mean.  Students would come into class with a variety of information which they would share with each other thus enriching everyone’s understanding.  Students would gain valuable experience calibrating the editorial slants of various publications and begin to settle on trusted sources.  They would be pressed to sift through volumes of data and pick out the relevant, current and important.  More importantly, they would augment their skills in identifying trends and patterns.  

I’ve been in two institutions where such courses were proposed and in both cases they were dismissed as being non-rigorous, non-academic, and overly personal (as opposed to learning to run a business).  The argument goes that in the same way that we would not teach a course on Personal Finance we should not teach a course on Current Business Events.  Students should, detractors say, be doing this on their own. 

The problem is, they aren’t, primarily because of the volume and structure of our required curricula.  

A First Year student mentioned today that his peers in other schools were writing and texting asking each other about the conversations that were being had, or not, regarding the current financial crisis.  I wonder what an overview of that poll would show. At one school, the students were lobbying the administration to set up a discussion panel.  If a group of students have to lobby the faculty to set up a panel to discuss major business once-in-a-century events something must be wrong with our curricula.  Maybe the student clubs will address the discussion issue.  Maybe some faculty will on an ad-hoc basis drop the material for the day and discuss the major events.  Again, though, if our regular curricula don’t make room for facilitated, reasoned, active, participative discussions on current business events, how can we claim to graduate people who know what they’re doing?  Masters in Business Administration should, in my view, have developed the reading-to-keep-up habit by the time they graduate and not have to develop it on-the-job.