Anecdotal account of an ex‑Epson CEO leading a Spanish business school

CHAPTER 5 (Z Real-Life Learning Projects Considered | learned more about the economy from one South Dakota dust storm than | did in all my years of college. —Hubert H. Humphrey These days everyone has ideas about ways to improve student learn- ing. These range from having kids stretch between classes, to listening to Moaart, to eating right. Of course, those things won’t harm you, but they really have nothing to do with learning. They are about getting students to concentrate on material that doesn’t interest them much. Presumably, a tedious task is made better by these kinds of things. An interesting task does not need that kind of enhancement. It should be interesting in and of itself. In the summer of 2008, I met a most unusual man. He recently had retired from being the CEO of Epson Europe. Some years earlier, his close friend, who was director general of a college, got sick and died. His dying wish was that his friend, the Epson CEO, would succeed him and become president of the business school of the college. And so it happened that a professional from the business world found himself in charge of the Business Engineering School at La Salle University in Barcelona, Spain. During his years at Epson he had hired many gradu- ates from that college and others, and believed that the training they received there was highly theoretical, not practical enough or oriented to the real world of business. It was clear to him that students needed a different kind of training in order to prepare them for professional life. He began to talk to the faculty about teaching different kinds of courses, ones that were less theoretical and more related to what people actually do in business. The faculty objected. Shocker. A provost friend of mine once said that with faculty, everything is a la carte. What he meant was that professors never feel that they have 57 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023803