Martin Gordon's Blog

One of my biggest problems with my Wharton education is that a lot fo the stuff we're being taught is outdated. Our Marketing 101 and Management 101 classes are being taught based on models and frameworks developed 30+ years ago.

In either class, I have yet to hear the word "blog", yet blogging has been around for at least five years and doesn't show any signs of slowing down. Blogging has changed the way businesses should be run, yet the leaders of my generation will be running businesses the way we learned to in school and the way its been done for the past few years. You know that boss that'll fire you in 10 years for blogging? They're sitting next to me taking pages and pages of notes on the Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model and learning how to do "business as usual."

So do we get it or not? Dean Harker does, but its not apparent from the "front lines". As the leading undergraduate business school (and one of the top graduate B-schools), I'd have hoped we could do something a bit more cutting-edge than the usual research/paper/presentation deal we have been required to do in many of the core classes. For example, in Management 101, we are to research a company "with a problem", analyze it in the context of the frameworks of the class, and offer our recommendations. Imagine instead, we assembled a class-wide World of Warcraft guild (or for the less war-mongering among us, perhaps set up a Second Life business) and built our characters over the course of the semester. Over the course of the semester, we would have to do small writeups defending the contributions we made to our guild. Which one would teach us more about being leaders and managers in the real world? I can tell you that the former probably won't and Joi Ito can tell you that the latter probably is.

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