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NEW YORK, NEW YORK, March 7, 2004: In a school where most of the 200 or so classes are Wall Street-centric, Dr. Srikumar S. Rao’s course, called Creativity and Personal Mastery, is as unbusiness as business school gets, says this New York Times article. To Dr. Rao, 52, who has been teaching the course at Columbia Business School since 1999, it is a forum for self-exploration, meant to help future business leaders define their personal ethics and goals. Applications for the course have grown steadily. Last fall, Dr. Rao accepted 35 of the more than 90 students who applied. For the current semester, he took 80 because he had more than 140 applicants. To some people in the business school, Dr. Rao’s popularity reflects a need for training in ethics and values that has become all too obvious with the deceptions carried out by executives in the last few years, states the article. Some schools have added ethics courses in the wake of the scandals. Harvard Business School made an ethics course mandatory for students entering last fall. Nevertheless, many of Dr. Rao’s students say that his class is one of a kind. Dr. Rao offers his students what he calls “mental models,” ways to think about situations that will confront them, and ways to deal with them. Dr. Rao was born in Bangalore, India, majored in physics at Delhi University, received an M.B.A. from the Indian Institute of Management and earned a doctorate in marketing from Columbia’s business school. Dr. Rao, a Hindu, says his teachings and the mental models are inspired partly by his guru, Abhinava Vidya Teertha, who was a disciple of the Shankaracharya. To read more about Dr. Rao’s class, click on “source” above.

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