People Skills at MIT
This seems like a great program that is long overdue, and not just at an engineering-focused school like MIT. The crux of the matter:
“A lot of MIT graduates go out into the real world and fall on their faces because they don’t know how to work within a company,’’ Goldhaber said. “They expect their bosses to be impressed by their creativity, but they don’t deliver the product on time.’’
Incorporating leadership development into an undergraduate curriculum is something that I have been focusing on quite a bit in my day job. For more, read here. Comments, whether on the blog or by e-mail, are welcome and encouraged.
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More likely to work at Dartmouth than at MIT
My experience is not recent (late 70's, early 80's) but I have 2 children at Dartmouth now...and no reason to believe the cultures have changed that much. MIT is an extremely competitive environment. Work teams are rarely effective; the few classes that had study groups found that most of the people attended to "receive" ideas instead of "contributing" them. It is hardly a surprise that someone who has been told he/she is brilliant all life long, and is taught that you succeed by being individually outstanding, would have trouble adjusting to a corporate setting.
The Dartmouth experience is almost a mirror opposite. The programs you run are great and will find fertile ground. If you ran them at MIT, you'd get the econ majors (like me :) ) and other non-engineers, but the techies would blow it off with utter disdain...the same way, for example, the average Dartmouth kid thinks of lab science...
Just a couple of points: (1)
Just a couple of points:
(1) As someone who has participated in a number of corporate-sponsored, off-site, "team-building / organizational communication" exercise days, I can tell you that for the most part, they are a waste of time. People do all the goofy stuff, and yeah, it takes some creativity and communication, but nobody really ends up applying much back at the office. (Oh, and the pretense that these exercises foster less of a top-down communication orientation and replace it with ideas being judged on their merit rather than people deferring to and kissing the a**es of superiors [and the superiors expecting anything less], is laughable.)
(2) The best way for universities to get students to learn communication, teamwork, organization (in terms of division of labor, not authority) and persuasion boils down to two words: group projects. Including group projects dealing with case studies relevant to the students' other coursework, majors, and anticipated careers.
(3) As for "deliver[ing] the product on time", in addition to "people skills", basic project management concepts and tools (e.g., PERT charts) and efficiency-related creative thinking (e.g., business process reengineering) should be taught to all and tested (via exams and/or projects). When I taught the core marketing course at an MBA program I included both in one class, one exam and one case analysis rather than just giving them the "4 P's".