A Revolution, or Ramblings of an Academic Lunatic?
Last summer, when I taught the MBA-level course “Advanced Topics in Marketing — Real-time Reaction to COVID-19” at McGill’s Desautels Faculty of Management, I found most of my students to be bright, studious and driven.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that I also found most of them to be cautious, overly-analytical and motivated more by raw marks than by actually learning something.
When I tried to break through this academic conservatism with a specific three-hour class on “How To Be Creative,” the results were:
1) a wide-eyed sense of wonder and intrigue from 33.3% of the class
2) a wide-eyed look of panic, fear and confusion from the other two-thirds
That’s when I realized my students needed more than one class on this unconventional subject…they needed a whole course.
Hence “Creativity, Curiosity and Guts,” a full semester series of lectures, lessons and hands-on experiences that will help a restrained cohort see things in a new way and add an element of unconventionality to the process of obtaining a Master’s degree in business. (By way, the “official” name of this course is “Advanced Topics in Organizational Behaviour”…which is somewhat challenging to love, and to create a logo for.)
When I got the idea for this course and pitched it earlier this year, the head of the MBA program told me frankly and unequivocally:
“If this came from anyone else, I’d dismiss it as ramblings from some lunatic. But given your history and your history with us, I’ll take it seriously and consider it.”
Well thanks…and now, consider it done. (P.S. Once again, gotta give McGill a whole lot of credit for green-lighting yet another one of my academic flights of fancy.)
I spent the summer putting together something quite out of the ordinary; something that, while on an entirely different planet than any other MBA course offered by McGill, should mesh well with them and provide a real-world reality check. I integrated pieces picked up by taking online courses from people as diverse as Edward Tufte and Alex Brightman, and discovered a superb storytelling/presentation tool called Shorthand to help get key points across.
Thus, each CC&G class is designed to be a performance, consisting of animated in-class debate, provocative guest speakers, pertinent videos, missions and challenges, many taken directly from the news cycle at the time. And did I mention that each class has its own theme song? (If nothing else, my students will be well-versed in the minutiae of classic rock and soul music.)
Madness? Heresy? Perhaps, but contained and purposeful madness and heresy…with real-world results that should resonate longer than whatever grade my students earn learning them.
I don’t know how they’ll react to this course (first class was earlier this eve, and I purposely held off publishing this post, or any previews for that matter, until it was over to maintain a sense of secrecy, surprise and perhaps shock), but if they have half of the fun, and learn half the amount, as I did putting it together, they’re in for quite the ride!
Back at you soon with progress reports…provided there’s no rebellion ;)
