Interview with Van Muse - Director of MBA Programs (Mihaylo College of Business)
1. Mihaylo has put emphasis on Leadership and Interpersonal skills in its curriculum . Tell us how the curriculum will help MBA grads.
For decades, business has uniformly told MBA programs nationwide that they deliver graduates who have incredible book knowledge but poor interpersonal and soft skills. These are skills like being able to make decisions with incomplete information, how to negotiate, manage human capital, and how to communicate effectively. Study after study has told MBA programs that they had to do much more than put a class on “leadership” in the curriculum, which in some limited cases addressed the problem but mostly just gave them yet another academic experience centered on learning theories with perhaps a case study or two. We in academia tend to reject anything that is seen as a “practical” skill because that isn’t “academic” in nature.