The academic world prepares to tremble...

[sensaes]

Alison Damast at Business Week uncovers an alarming new MBA trend:

"Writing classes typically aren't on most business schools' list of core required courses, but business schools are starting to recognize that MBAs' rusty composition skills could benefit from a brush-up. In Minneapolis, the University of St. Thomas' Opus College of Business

Comments

[freixenet]

The business school branch at my university has decided that their majors are woefully lacking in writing ability. We in the English department of the Liberal Arts branch of the university being obviously inadequate, the B school has decided that their majors must take a writing course...in their Junior year. It is being titled "Self Marketing."

Well, they wouldn't want a tool in their toolbags they'd never USE, would they?

[sensaes]

Roseanne Bane's definitely grasped a core issue in her four years of teaching the Business Writing Communication Lab, though: "In business writing, conciseness is a prime virtue," Bane says. Students often lose sight of this in business school, and will sometimes "just add fluff" for the sake of getting to a required page count for a paper.

Just add fluff? In business school? Shocking...

[sensaes]

I hope you left pauses between sentences, and finished with a nice pie chart.

[sensaes]

Incidentally, a quotation from Chris Puto (Dean of the Opus College of Business at St. Thomas) almost made it into an entry for the now semi-defunct attackademia community but, with the U.S. car industry already on its knees, dragging the credibility of MBA students further into the frame seemed like overkill against the potentially good news of this post.

'Today’s M.B.A.s can credit 19th century innovators such as Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor for their education. Ford’s and Taylor’s insistence upon automation and standardized work patterns helped usher in the industrial age and gave birth to the concept of scientific management-the idea that there was a formulaic, “right” way to do business.'

http://www.stthomas.edu/business/media/newsroom/inthenews/20081001_topmbaguide.html

[shisochou]

It's an excellent idea, really. I'm an MBA student and most of our write-ups are done in bullet point form. The only exceptions IME were the international business classes, and I suspect it's because the majority of the IBUS instructors are humanities professors in business suits.

[sensaes]

Agreed. Given that the last twenty five years have seen academic administrators being effectively coerced into running universities as though they're businesses (and I can't resist recommending David Lodge's novel Nice Work here, as it was amusingly prescient in that regard), this represents a long-overdue development for a course which many viewed with skepticism. Not only will MBA students benefit from a writing skills boost, but - as you point out - "non-traditional" business studies academic staff will have more opportunities to make use of their talents. Wardrobe notwithstanding... ;o)