The art of teaching imagination

By Peter Walker for CNN

Adjust font size:

(CNN) -- For many people, going to a business school conjures up images of classrooms full of students poring over figures, or dry management theory. But how about a visit to an art gallery or a museum?

In an era when innovation and imagination is seen as the key to business success, increasing numbers of schools are trying to arm MBA students with something more than the usual theoretical essentials.

David Sims, professor of organizational behavior at London's Cass Business School, leads a course called The Business Mystery which aims to teach students four seemingly intangible virtues: imagination, inspiration and intuition and improvisation.

"When you hear accounts of people who have done really well and done something really interesting, those are the sort of words which get used, but you don't associate them with an MBA or a lot of business education," Sims says.

"So this module seeks to develop those. Obviously, there is no sausage machine through which you can put people which brings them out with those four things."

Rather than trying to learn the skills from books, students taking the elective are led on themed exercises, for example learning about decision-making at the Cabinet War Rooms underneath central London, where Winston Churchill lead Britain during World War II, now turned into a museum.

They are also taken to London's National Portrait Gallery to look at pictures of leaders with the help of an art historian.

21st century skills

However difficult such skills are to pin down, the modern business school is duty bound to try and teach the, Sims believes.

"Our feeling that is that there is a huge amount of stuff in business schools and in MBA courses about the science of management. We know quite a lot of things about what works, what doesn't work, there's been ideas collected over time, pored over, re-tested etc.

"That was, we think, the story of the 20th century. For the 21st century, our intuition is that the art of management is coming much more to the fore.

"Employers keep talking to us about wanting things which have to do with the art of management, how to communicate, they want them to know about soft skills, they want them to be able to assess people, to understand the aesthetics of what is going on, if you like, as much as they want them to be able to do the sums.

"They reckon that on the whole the science is relatively easy, and you if someone doesn't know the science they can usually develop them in that. But if they don't know the art, that's much harder to get hold of."

It is, at times, slightly unusual stuff for generally sober MBA students -- as Sims calls them, "serious people paying serious money, and taking a year out of their lives to do so" -- but the response has been good.

"The way students react is that they say it's better than they thought any course could be," he said.

Such unorthodox teaching strategies are increasingly common. As another example, MBA students at Columbia Business School can take a course in which the strategies of figures as diverse as Napoleon and Pablo Picasso are analyzed for lessons.

Meanwhile, students at New York University's Stern School of Business can take a course in ethics based on lessons contained within literature and films.

Get up-to-the minute news from CNN CNN.com gives you the latest stories and video from the around the world, with in-depth coverage of U.S. news, politics, entertainment, health, crime, tech and more.

---

• Massive icebergs floating towards coast of New Zealand
• Missing teen spent 11 days on NYC subways
• From Asian pop star to 'Ninja Assassin'
• Death toll rises to 52 as Philippines mourns
• Facebook paves way for IPO

• Irish PM to quit over payments scandal
• NATO chief: Afghan troop increase likely
• Militants hunted as calm retuns to Basra
• Pressure on Bush to skip Olympics
• BA sending misplaced T5 baggage to Milan

• Recruiting suicide bombers (2:50)
• London was lucky (2:36)
• Cars in London rigged as bombs (3:48)
• Second explosives-packed car foun (2:32)
• Soviet culture returns (3:47)