Archive for May 2009
A-school, B-school
As the semester draws to a close, I’ve been inspired by the many similarities between business school and the fine arts college where I received my undergraduate degree. Like Loyola, the end of the school year at MICA is a time filled with excitement, activity and celebration. Both colleges go the extra mile to honor and support students and take pride in their accomplishments.
A big distinction between a visual arts college and business school is the way that student talent and work is shared. At MICA’s senior exhibition every graduating student is given a space on campus to display her work. A special preview event provides the opportunity for the general public to tour the studios and meet the artists. I can’t think of a better way to showcase talent and provide students with an opportunity to share the culmination of their learning.
In b-school, this opportunity for sharing our knowledge and experience in the program is more private. Our semester ended with a series of team presentations which brought together much of the learning from the last module. What could b-school learn from an art school about making the learning experience more transparent and accessible to other students, family and community members? And what can business learn from the art traditions of critique and feedback?
As John Maeda wrote in this post, individuals and organizations that are open to models of critique indicate that “…you are open to asking bigger questions about your work and its validity within your organization.” Some colleges in Finland are bringing the worlds of business and design together and I am very interested to follow their progress.
Critique @MICA (www.mica.edu)
Analysis and Synthesis
In Loyola’s EMBA program, we talk a lot about the synthesis of learning. Throughout the program, we are challenged to look beyond the segregation of systems and to integrate knowledge and experience.
The final module of this year (composed of Macroeconomics, IT Strategy and International Business) has been the most exciting in terms of bringing together the academics of business and the actual experiences of world around us. I feel very fortunate to be in this program during a time of economic crisis and global change and to be surrounded by twenty five talented and smart classmates who bring a range of perspectives and meaning to the subjects we study.
One of the biggest challenges when I started this program was figuring out how to synthesize my school experience into the rest my life.
A Framework for B-School
Inspired by frameworks of business process change introduced during our IT Strategy class, the picture above is a graphical representation of my synthesis of the EMBA program. Similar to the business concepts behind the framework for IT Strategy, my B-school model illustrates the four main areas of life — work, school, life and community. By using a model of synthesis (and not just analysis), I believe the Loyola program pushes students into deeper learning by helping us to recongize that success in any one area cannot be achieived by taking the pieces in isolation. It took me a few months to gain some lopsided alignment in all the quadrants of my life, and it is the process of integrating input from of all these systems into a larger and broader whole that creates value.
