A while back, I wrote about the up and downsides of going business school. I concluded that for some people, but especially entrepreneurs in the creative professions, business school might prove more limiting than helpful.
Well, I may have been wrong about that. It looks like business schools far and wide are starting to improve upon the old, rigid finance and accounting-based model that puts young students on the fast track to a solid mid-level management job at Target’s headquarters or an 80-hour workweek at Deloitte and Touche.
Instead, according to this recent New York Times article, some schools (such as the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto) are taking a hint from Stanford’s d.school and beginning to re-orient their curricula around “design thinking” and the idea that “students need to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they need to learn finance or accounting.”
In other words, business schools are starting to flirt with the humanities and steal from the design world.
Nothing makes me want to throw down $70,000 more than the prospect of marketing, art, and comp lit getting in bed together. And looking at my own odd career trajectory, I can say an open relationship between the three might actually work out—I majored in psychology and religious studies in undergrad and got a Master’s degree in philosophy and ethics, but I managed restaurants and mentored business school students through school. I’m pretty sure this DIY interdisciplinary approach has made me more, not less, capable of running a business.
Though it may ruffle feathers at first, it’s great to see business schools add classes like “The Fundamentals of Integrative Thinking, about understanding and analyzing how people use [finance and accounting] models in every day lives” and “The Opposable Mind, about developing and practicing the personal skills you need to be a good integrative thinker and manager” to the standard menu.
If business school’s new goal is to produce better innovators, thinkers, and problem solvers, I can see no better way than this (beyond kicking students out of class and into the job market early or offering internships at IDEO, maybe).
Still, I maintain my earlier reservations: It’s probably not a good idea to spend gobs of cash on business school unless you have a specific reason for doing so. Even if you do get to read poetry in strategy class.
4 Comments
I have to agree with you. If business people would start shifting their thinking, from the perspective of total user experience and solve problems creatively (not always artistically, there is a difference) we would have a completely different (user) experience as consumers. I can’t remember one significant thing I learned during grad school (MA for Business Arts Administration) that I apply in my day to day life of running multiple businesses. While I am normally an advocate for education, I have found the last 3 or so years, my hands on education, creative problem solving and interacting with like-minded creatives and entrepreneurs has taught me more than a business class/book could ever do. With the influx of more small businesses in our communities and especially web-based businesses I hope the coming years will prove a shift in critical thinking and creative problem solving, especially as a younger generation takes on entrepreneurship. //andrea
I agree!
I think they should start early by incorporating business courses into college-level education. I’m a graphic designer and it would have been nice to know the business side of the industry before diving in to the freelance world. Instead I learned it from experience and other designers online.
Andrea: Exactly. I’m also an education advocate type (I’d get 10 MFA’s if I could), and there’s been nothing quite so educational as the day-to-day of entrepreneurship.
Diane: Agreed. IU (where I did my undergrad) had a great major called the Liberal Arts Management Program—it was a mixture of humanities and business courses. The two weren’t integrated all that well and there was definitely no coursework in running an interactive firm, but the program seemed to pump out talented, able graduates.
Thanks for your thoughts.
An interesting follow-up to your previous post, Tiffani. I suspect, however, that the scorpion will stay a scorpion. For my part, I will encourage my children to study the Liberal Arts.