Innovative Lipscomb class combines business and Christianity
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Into a business climate, marred by scandal and controversy, steps a unique new program designed to prepare Lipscomb University freshmen to be strong Christian businesspeople in today’s rough and tumble world.
This fall, all freshmen business majors will be required to take “Foundations of Business: A Christian Perspective,” an innovative course including a weekend retreat, a semester-long project where students launch and run their own businesses and a focus on learning business skill sets such as communication, leadership and teamwork.
“To our knowledge, no one else is packaging these elements together in this way,” said Charla Long, Chair of the department of Management, who visited and researched similar university programs across the nation while developing the course. “It is the first required course in the College of Business and what happens in this class will set the tone for the following four years.”
That tone, according to College of Business Dean Greg Carnes, is one that encourages these future business leaders to integrate their personal, spiritual and professional life. It is not acceptable to leave your Christian beliefs and attitudes at home when you head to the office, he said.
“I think the business climate is more focused on ethics than it has been in the past, because business leaders are coming to understand the need for strong principles to govern conduct,” Carnes noted. “Management, shareholders, creditors and employees have learned that making the wrong choices can be very costly. Businesses have learned that making the proper, ethical decision, is also the best financial decision. If one is not convinced of this, they should talk with the shareholders and employees of Enron.”
The Lipscomb freshmen will learn the challenges of running a successful, ethical business by starting their own business during the semester, Long said. In the first six weeks of the course, students will create their own products, develop business plans and make presentations before a mock bank board to get loans.
The board will determine the amount of funding, and then students will be allocated funds to get their businesses up and running to sell real products or services, she said. At the end of the semester they report their financial earnings.
Along the way, they will face and discuss various ethical issues that crop up, Long said. Should a business owner reduce the quality of a product just to boost profits? What if the price of a product eliminates a key audience that actually needs to use it? Should you sell a service that is not morally acceptable? Is it ethical to use philanthropy to sell a product?
The university will kick off the “Foundations of Business” course this fall with a mandatory weekend retreat on Aug. 25-27 at Camp Hillmont in White Bluff. The weekend is billed as “BASIC Training Camp” (Business Administration Students Imitating Christ), and will focus on students discovering their God-given gifts to begin their college career with a spiritual mindset.
Students will take a self-assessment test, meet with faculty to learn more about specific areas of business, participate in team-building activities and attend a session on how to combine Biblical principles with their business skills. The university is expecting more than 100 business freshmen to take the course this fall.
“We want them to think about the gifts and skills that God has blessed them with,” Carnes said of the retreat’s purpose. “We want them to understand that God doesn’t see them as one person at home and another person at work. By the time they leave Lipscomb, we want students to understand that their character and behavior needs to be consistent across all phases of their lives.”
The third innovative aspect of the course is the use of what the business world calls “competencies.” Competencies refer to particular skill sets such as conflict management, diplomacy, visioning and problem-solving.
The term “competency” came about several decades ago as a way of describing “the right stuff” needed for a particular job, and corporations today use competency models in their hiring practices, training regimens and performance reviews, said Bruce Griffiths, president of Organization Systems International (OSI) of San Diego, which has developed the Polaris Competency model, outlining 41 competencies found in high-performing leaders at 55 successful companies such as Nike Inc., Hallmark Cards and The Walt Disney Company.
Lipscomb is only the third university to license use of OSI’s competency model and is the only university at this time incorporating the skills into an undergraduate curriculum, Long said.
Competency skills are highly valued by business executives, but are not always taught well in higher education because it is much easier to measure content knowledge than to measure the abilities to lead and make decisions. Lipscomb faculty hope their use will prepare students better to succeed in business no matter how much the landscape changes around them.
Thanks to a $40,000 Academic Advancement grant awarded by Lipscomb University, the College of Business will incorporate the competencies throughout the graduate and undergraduate business programs.