Can listening to Beethoven make you a better boss? Is a business more likely to survive in the marketplace if its manager has a familiarity with the works of Charles Darwin? David Bach thinks it just might. Mr. Bach, the dean of programs at the IE Business School, in Madrid, is an architect of a pioneering new collaboration between IE and Brown University that is offering a liberal arts and management executive M.B.A.This was how an article titled "Spanish-U.S. Master’s Degree Will Be Steeped in Liberal Arts" in New York Times started earlier this year. The new IE-Brown Executive MBA program has a heavier emphasis on the role of liberal arts in the process of business education. Whether prompted by the recent crisis, addent attacks at the current system of bussiness studies or a genuine realization that making profit is not the sole responsibility of a company, this is a clear evidence that the curricula are changing in leading business schools.
I am not sure how it is going to come across to the rest of the MBA crowd, but I am really enjoying this shift. One of the elective courses that I am taking is going to be part of the core IMBA program here at IE starting with the current intake already and it´s called Creative Management Thinking. I am half-way through it and I can guarantee that I have learnt more useful things than in all the Finance disciplines put together so far. Consider some of the issues we have been talking about in class:
- Grain supply in Ancient Rome and notion of equilibrium in the system (economic, political or whichever)
- Looking at Innovation through the prysm of a shipping container and how it changed the world (by the way, this book is highly recommendable: The Box)
- Beethoven´s 5th as a great innovation and breaking off the traditional sonata form
- Comparing four Gospels and the idea of a Narrative in business + subsequent discussion of the housing bubble in the US
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