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June 12, 2005
Business school true to law school ideals
An important effect of going to business school is that it may keep
one from going to law school—an especially important effect these
days, when so many people in government have legal training. Many law
schools and business schools, including Harvard's, use the case
method, requiring students to work through historic trials or the
problems of actual companies. But they use the method differently. Law
school accustoms future lawyers to discerning theoretical constructs,
either in past decisions or in legal principles, and applying them to
the case at hand. Business school immerses future businessmen in the
histories of specific companies, in order to develop problem-solving
abilities. Law school worships understanding, business school worships
skill. Law-school students scrutinize what has been done.
If business-school students don't quite learn by doing, they learn how
things have been done. Typical of the Harvard Business School's ethos
is a line from the textbook Business Policy, by C. Roland Christensen,
et al., about company presidents: in "the incomparably detailed
confusion of a national company" the role and function of a president
"cannot possibly be made clear [by] generalization." In a famous
lecture at Harvard, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared that "the life
of the law" was not logic but experience. These days the business
school is actually truer to Holmes's dictum than the law school is.
[The Atlantic Monthly | April 2003
Close Up: The Mind of George W. Bush Richard Brookhiser]
Posted by omor at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2005
Irony, back in style
Failure seems but a step away. Loneliness hovers. They often
feel stunted and restless (I haven't moved up in six months!),
so they adopt a conversational mode - ironic, self-deprecatory,
postpubescent fatalism that masks their anxiety about
falling behind.
-- David Brooks
Posted by omor at 04:00 AM | Comments (0)