| course
description & student objectives || syllabus |
| texts & resources || assignments
& evaluation |
| special requirements & self-assessment || software competencies |
Think about when you'll finally be the boss. Who will you
want your organization to hire right out of MBA school? If MBA's are going to help lead
the organization into the future, they will have to keep learning to do things differently
and to think differently. Part of this course is our structuring a safe environment for
you to think in new ways about new ideas.
When I'm learning a new skill or or taking in new information
that challenges what I've always thought about something, I go through a sequence of
thinking modes.
Mode
I  |
At first, I
want to learn the bottom-line truth from an authority I can trust. I want to use the best
way to find the right answer. Just tell me, and I'll do it. |
Soon
I realize that with this skill or subject, as with everything else, uncertainty and
ambiguity rule. It depends. So I try the anything- goes mode. I don't have any rules or
enough experience I can apply to resolve conflicting ideas. All I can do is figure that
everyone is entitled to their opinion and that my opinion is as good as theirs. |
 Mode II
|
Mode
III |
Gradually, I
learn to use appropriate criteria to see not black and white but shades of gray.
But then that's all I can see, shades of gray. So I turn cynical in that mode and figure
that it's all a game. Give 'em what they want. Pile it higher and deeper. |
But
games matter, don't they? If I apply my values, I can start to play the games well enough
that I sometimes win. As I win, as I realize that context is what matters, I start
to play for real. |
Mode IV |
As you wrestle with graduate school, with marketing, with new
media, and with the course project, you'll probably find yourself going through a similar
set of thinking modes.
And you're supposed to do all that
out-of-the-box thinking in nine weeks? While performing in written, oral, and digital
form? And we're supposed to be able to discern the difference so that we can rank you on a bell curve?
A Philosophy of Grading
Grading widgets or eggs makes a lot of sense. Grading people
is offensive. Early in this century, the grading of widgets was applied to people because
the people made the widgets. Note how most classrooms still look like piecework factories.
Replace the PC with a sewing machine and you're staring at the back of the heads of the
folks in the row in front. Eyes on your own work, please. Collaboration is a waste of
time, so let's call it cheating.
Today, that system is irrelevant to your growth. Raise
your hand if you intend to get a benchjob in a piecework factory. Unfortunately, to many
people that system is harmful because it doesn't begin to measure how intelligent they
are.
In a piecework factory, the big trick is to survive until
payday. You've been in classes like that. Just give me a grade, any grade, and let me outa
here.
This Industrial Age system has no place in graduate school.
If you aren't your own hardest grader by now, there's not much that more grades can do.
In this course, we're compromising by giving categories and
crude measures. We have scheduled enough activities that we're going to be making most
decisions between 5 and 4. Using a carrot rather than a stick, we'll save the plaques for
the top three. If 5 is the far right end of the scales above and 4 means you're making a
sincere effort and progress toward that far right end, you should be able to assess yourself. |
 What's your
philosophy of learning and grading?
|
