MBA curriculum description with no actionable investigative leads

&4 Teaching Minds predict which sales pitches will work as well as predicting various costs and benefits associated with their product. In fact, it seems obvious that prediction is at the very heart of this MBA program. But so are all the other cognitive processes. Students are always working in teams and are always trying to influence their peers, their superiors, their customers, and so on. They are in constant negotiations and they are creating all kinds of plans—financial plans, marketing plans, and business plans. They are constantly diagnosing problems in the various stories and constantly creating documents as work products (describing). They must determine the cause of various problems in each story and evaluate solutions to those problems. They make judgments about what to do, and what is working and what isn’t, in each story and they create models of proposed solutions. Each new solution they propose is, in effect, an experiment, and they must evalu- ate the results of each experiment as they proceed. Now let’s reconsider what it means to teach and what is impor- tant to teach within the context of a good curriculum. One might have expected, given that there are 12 cognitive processes that must be learned, that each project in the curriculum would be put clearly into one of categories. The schooling mentality naturally leads to the idea that if diagnosis is important, then we should offer a course in diagnosis. But you can’t diagnose randomly and you can’t teach stu- dents to do diagnosis in the absence of an acknowledgment of their real interest and goals independent of a context. While diagnosis is fundamentally the same process whether you are plumber, a doctor, or a businessperson, there is also much to learn about the context of the diagnosis, and real students with real goals will fall asleep while hear- ing about diagnosis in one context, whereas they will perk up while actually doing diagnosis in a context they find fascinating. We have designed this curriculum to teach the 12 cognitive pro- cesses within the context that was decided upon by the students. No one is forced to take an MBA program. The students are those who want to run their own business or work within the context of a large business. It is the job of the curriculum designer (and the teacher), therefore, to teach them how to think well within that context. Now I am not saying that this is not done (or at least cannot be done) within traditional schooling. Sometimes it is. A good history teacher does in fact teach about diagnosis and causation and plan- ning. One can think about the Battle of Waterloo and learn a great HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023810