Business Schools Bring the Arts into Classrooms - Wall Street Journal

Gleaning business lessons from "The Godfather," painting watercolors in class and using comic books as strategy textbooks—faculty are bringing the arts into business-school classrooms in an effort to push students to think creatively. As B-schools have grown open in recent years to less traditional teaching methods and areas of study, the arts have gained a greater presence in many programs. Some schools are offering courses, concentrations and even specialized arts-management M.B.A.s for students planning careers in creative industries, a sector where strong business skills are needed more than ever as budgets grow tight. On other campuses, professors are using techniques from the visual arts, theater and music to help those on more conventional paths to approach business problems from a new perspective.

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The new business school strategy: customer becomes king - well that's the intention

Here is an article from the Financial Times that provides some insight to the thinking of business schools and business management education. There are two biaises in this article you need to consider whilst you are reading it. The first is that those working in business schools are not in business. They are in the education industry and a very specific part of the education industry. In the main their concern is not the concerns of business. Business is concerned with risk, entrepreneurship and free markets. Business schools operate in a regulated environment, a regulated market where risk has been removed by the very construct of the industry. Further business is revolves around entrepreneurial behaviour. Business schools and their personnel completely lack those skills. Business school personnel work at business schools because they don't like, desire or most importantly feel the need to develop entrepreneurial skills.

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Is this the Re-Emergence of Apple University & What Does That Mean? | Horace Dediu - asymco

Any student of organizational theory must struggle with the question of how to assign weight to the influence of the leadership of a company. In the case of Apple, the question is: Is Jobs is the embodiment of Apple or is Apple already Jobsian, imbued with his ethos? John Gruber summed up (start at 8:00 min) the “Apple is Jobsian” argument by saying that Apple is Steve Jobs’ greatest creation and that he has been working on crafting the company as much as he has been crafting products. The result being that it’s well designed for sustainable longevity. The arguments for “Jobs is Apple” are mostly rooted in anecdotes of a supreme leader that is indispensable to every decision and detail. There are also ample examples from history of companies who foundered after the departure of founders (Apple itself is notably cited.)

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Never Mind the Business Model; Here’s the Learning Model - The Heutagogic Archives

I was going to entitle this post after Malcolm McLarens’ keynote at Games-Based Learning in 2009 “Never-Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Txt Pistols” as his talk captures the tension between Innovation and Control that occurs when any new technology enters education. McLaren, like McLuhan, was arguing for the conversational crafting of new creative potentials, something social media makes readily available. The delicious crowd-sourced ideas of #BectaX were arguing for a socialised, participative, learning exchange, roughly speaking, “every learner their own TxT Pistol”. New media, new technologies in fact, create new affordances for disruptive innovation, as they offer new tools and processes for problem-solving. Social media offer the opportunity for the “creativity, innovation and collaboration” of Group Genius to became processes welcomed within educational institutions. We play, we learn, we imagine new futures; the point of course is how do we realise them?

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Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in A Start-Up World - TechCrunch - Vivek Wadhwa

A long time ago, I had to make a really tough choice: invest in an MBA from New York University, or make do with my bachelors. I was newly married, had a child on the way, and didn’t have much in savings. The degree would set me back tens of thousands of dollars and take years to complete—especially if I did it part time. And I couldn’t imagine doing anything but programming computers for a living. So why learn finance, marketing, and operations management, I wondered? Well, I decided to enroll because my understanding of the business world lacked depth, and I harbored a deep-rooted desire to get the best education possible. My wife and I moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in North Bergen, NJ, and we made do with what we had. For a couple of years after getting my degree, I wondered whether I had made the right choice. Even though I scored a great job at CS First Boston in its IT department, I was just writing code and designing systems. Yes, I started to enjoy reading BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal; but had the financial sacrifice and time away from my family been worth it? It didn’t seem to have been.

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