The Real World Business School

About a month ago, a LaSalle University professor of business was suspended for hiring strippers to give lap dances during an extra-credit seminar. Jack Rappaport was apparently trying to teach a class in business ethics, and has tried to use rather unorthodox means to teaching business concepts in his class, such as using horse better to illustrate the real world application of statistics.

No, I'm not going to defend the hiring of bikini-clad women in miniskirts dancing seductively on a desk, but I would say that Rappaport may very well have exposed his students to more realistic and practical examples of everyday business life than his students might have received in 90% of their other classes.

For example, in my two years in business school, I can (not proudly) say that I'd be hard pressed to identify the application of 10% of my coursework in my current job. Specific to the example above, I'm going to say outright that virtually none of my classmates are applying Heather Haverman's "Leading and Managing Organizations" class (which was also known by the unfortunate acronym "LAM-O") and probably not many more are really applying David Juran's statistics course during the course of their day. In contrast, I know many of my Cluster G mates visited Scores on more than occasion both during and after graduating from business school. No, I wasn't one of them, and no, I won't divulge the names of my friends who are now happily married.

When I worked for a consulting firm in my previous job, we had a "Community Service Day" where everyone in my 300+ person office were distributed to a number of projects. I was sent out with a handful of individuals to a public school in Harlem to teach them some business concepts to sixth graders. At some point, I came to the conclusion that what we were doing was not only completely uninteresting to the class, but had nothing to do with the real business world. So I hijacked the program and taught everyone how to give a proper handshake and introduction in a business setting, and had them practice it with the student next to them in front of the class. We then got a series of kids standing up with increasing confidence giving firm handshakes to their classmates saying (for example), "I'm Jesus Flores from Deloitte Consulting. It's great to meet you and I look forward to our collaboration together." The energy level completely spiked.

Am I advocating classes on giving proper handshakes and how to order the proper lapdance when entertaining clients? No. But it might be refreshing if we started to see more curriculum in our business schools that reflected the reality of the lion's share of the work day. Classes along the lines of:

• Managing Upwards - how to survive and prosper in a matrixed organization where your upper managers have vastly different goals but refuse to acknowledge this or work to bridge the gap. Also in the course we will cover how to drive improvements of your boss without jeopardizing your own career
• Managing Downwards - how to keep both your high performers and low performers motivated despite human resource policies which restrict you from adequately differentiating the rewards your top performers and make it a logistical nightmare to fire low-performers.
• Teflonizing Your Career - how to effectively take credit for successful programs that you had very little to do with while deflecting the blame on fiascos which were clearly the result of your own poor decision making.
• Business Linguistics - how to use proper buzzwords to create a false aura of intelligence.

That'd be a school I'd like to see.