Sunday, January 10, 2010

Critical thinking skills in b-schools

Interesting page one story in NYT business section about how some b-schools are starting to put more emphasis on critical thinking skills in their curricula. Most of the article focuses on the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. At NC State we certainly are guilty of not having any courses with "critical thinking skills" in the title. But we do have courses in innovation management that are fairly similar to those at Darden, Rotman and Stanford that are mentioned in the article. Is this an area where NC State students would like to see more activity?

1 comment:

  1. It seems to me that critical thinking skills would fit well into the existing leadership curriculum. In fact, the example in the article about where to locate Google's servers for Chinese customers was one of the cases in the Leadership and Ethics class when I took it last year.
    Critical thinking is only valuable when you combine it with the ability to connect with people in the organization. Prior to applying critical thinking, we need to listen deeply to understand existing models and collect "salient" points. Afterwards we need to be able to communicate the results clearly (and persuasively). All of this can tie into the innovation process where NC State is already strong.

    ReplyDelete