From: Tom Bryant [mailto:
Tom.Bryant@nicholls.edu]
Re: Samson's Off-Peopling Article
Let me suggest that there are two modes running concurrently in modern
business education. The dominant mode, with us since the beginning of
B-schools and refined every year, leads our students to entry level
white-collar jobs in highly structured corporations. To be successful in
that environment, they must understand the dominant mode, touch all the
right talismen of that culture, and conform.
The alternative mode has arisen out of the Entrepreneurial challenge to
conventional business education. In ENTR programs, we are preparing
students to launch new ventures, to attack pieces of the existing economy
with improved business models, even by creating new pieces of the economy.
To accomplish that, we have to teach them how to do something different.
That said, ENTR ED is not about pure chaos. It includes ways to understand
the existing forms of business, but not take them for granted, as a step
toward innovation. Good programs gives their students a wide range of
innovation options, helping them learn to assess which innovations are
likely to be effective -- and which normal modes are usefully retained.
To the extent that conventional Business curricula are adopting some of this
ENTR model, a pretty wide range of B-school students is being exposed to
some aspects of critical business thinking. Some schools have made ENTR
compulsory (e.g., Harvard). (Personally, I understand and appreciate the
sentiment, but still think that "compulsory creativity" is an oxymoron.)
Nonetheless, there's no denying that Business can be taught in a way that
constantly challenges students to ask "WHY?"
The outcomes are better educations, although the students thus unleashed
will challenge us, the B-school faculty, more than we might find
comfortable. How ready are we to coach empowered learners? How much
flexibility will we give them in meeting our "degree requirements?" In
convincing us that our long lists of prerequisites may not be the only way
to gather useful knowledge? Bring it on!
Tom Bryant.
Prof. Thomas A. Bryant, Ph.D.
The Bollinger Family Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship
Nicholls State University, Thibodaux, LA 70310, USA
Tel: (985) 448-4179; e-mail:
tom.bryant@nicholls.edu