Won

Also spelled one.

She found it on my head yesterday. A gray hair. No big deal. I am distinguished because of it apparently - not for anything more merit worthy - yet.

I could go on about just how much it means to me, how it reminded me of my own mortality or how it was a wake up call to relax and enjoy the sun despite the frigid weather. Instead I'll write about something else and say have a good day.

I want to write about my concern regarding business school learning. It's not that we don't learn, we do - I promise. There are cases to be discussed in class, diagrams and structures to place management styles and excel models to value anything from a stock to the value of going on the Cavs making it to the playoffs. We are also taught how to work in groups with classes that are high-touch, experiential and bottom up.

This is all well and good.

But I'm taking a class in the engineering school that teaches the basis of programming an app for the android phone. The class is not concerned with teaching us the android sdk (the programming environment and language) or how to program. It's concerned with the bigger problem of coordinating group programs and multiple people working on the same program. We are simulating the writing of Unix, MSDos and Snow Leopard in a micro-environment. The presumption is that the students can teach themselves whatever they need to or rely on each other and the web to resolve the technical issues. The class itself is a seminar style class but the end product is a potentially marketable app.

The programmer deals with an intractable matter - the stuff of thought. Whatever we will a computer to do, can, in one way or another (sometimes simplified) be hacked together.

Nothing in business school can teach you that.

An English professor of mine who wrote my favorite book about Mexico - Mexican Mornings - once said that the great scholar is not the one that knows all the answers, it is the one that knows where to find them.

Under this definition the Wharton education prepares us to read the markets and analyze marketing strategies as well as the pulse of equity and fixed income beasts of our days. You can google facts for business school. You can't google knowledge. That one is generally limited to group work or cathedratic teaching.

The moment the Engineers realize just how capable they are - business school might not have a future except as a collection of cute little electives the engineers can master.

It should be said that I am a student of both schools and identify more closely with the Wharton subject matter. That I understand what the engineers are talking about and their potential is what scares me. I have found equally successful and high potential individuals everywhere from the College to Nursing to Wharton. But when this is the case it's not about the classes they take but the individually motivated curiosity to push the edges of learning. Of their knowledge and their capacity to deliver.

That's what we need to learn.