I thought maybe I’d open a business school. This is particularly ironic given my past: No student in the history of the Stanford Graduate School of Business has ever come closer to not receiving an MBA than yours truly.
When I was at Stanford (it seems like decades ago — probably because it was), I thought that the environment there was terrific, and I truly enjoyed some of my classes. But before the start of my second year, I got an irresistible job offer — which prompted me to try to go to school and work at the same time. I soon realized that the classes were in Palo Alto, and the job was in Boston. But, thanks to some help from TWA and a bizarre willingness on my part to fly on the red-eye, I managed to commute for a semester. After that, a kindly professor decided to stop the madness and just give me the rest of my credits, so graduate I did.
Despite my less-than-stellar attendance record at business school, I’ve since found that teaching business is a blast. I taught a class to second-year students at NYU this year and discovered that aggravating 90 soon-to-be-graduating students is great fun. I had so much fun, in fact, that I started thinking about what business school is, what it’s good for — and what it’s not good for at all.
As far as I can tell, there are only three reasons to apply to business school. My school, the New Order Business School (NoBS), will focus on excelling at all three.
