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Economic Crisis Brings Opportunity

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Yash Gupta, dean of Johns Hopkins University's Carey Business School, suggests in The Chronicle of Higher Education, that the collapse of the economy, showing our ineffective and even destructive business methods, has created opportunity.

Believing that future business partners are worldwide, Hopkins' Global MBA program indicates a commitment to the idea of business that keeps "humanity in mind." Students spend their first year intercession in Peru, Rwanda, Kenya or India helping local people build business plans. Later, as a group, they work to commercialize inventions and discoveries by Hopkins' engineers and scientists.

Moving away from teaching accounting, marketing, finance and similar disciplines, the program stresses intellectual flexibility, juggling a variety of ideas; cultural literacy, knowledge of customs and histories of those in other continents; a grounding in ethics (surely needed!); the ability to communicate well; and optimism, creativity and collaboration.

Similar changes also planned for Penn's Wharton School, in Gupta's words, "are a response to the failed methods revealed in the economic downturn, a new kind of business leader attuned to cultures, the hopes and demands of people" over our rapidly changing world.

Reported By Dr. Marciene Mattleman, KYW Newsradio

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