Music and History instead of Financial Accounting at Top MBA Schools

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

It is just like putting a new pair of glasses and starting to see the world differently. More comprehensive I would say. I am slightly jealous of those who will be studying after me as they will have the privilege to enjoy more of such courses and for them they would form part of the base of their education, and not the nicely whipped airy topping, as it is for me. But I am grateful for the opportunity to be in such a class, and i will share my thoughts on Beethoven with you a bit later.