Make or Buy… a Textbook?

The pressure is mounting to order my textbooks for the nearly imminent winter quarter. I’m teaching two sections of Principles of Marketing, and one of Business, Government & Society.

The Marketing course is up for grabs, although I’m leaning towards Thomson / South-Western’s MKTG (see earlier post on this). For Business, Government & Society, the path of least resistance would be to continue with McGraw-Hill’s Business and Society: Stakeholders, Ethics, Public Policy. This has worked well for me in the past, as I liberally supplement the text with content sourced elsewhere.

My problem, and I admit I haven’t used the most recent 12th edition, is that I don’t like 3 or 4 chapters in the McGraw-Hill text. Given the increasing modularity of content, I’m sure that McGraw-Hill would allow me to customize my text with those chapters I do in fact want, supplemented with cases, or content from other McGraw-Hill sources.

But while I have supplemented existing texts with additional readings, I haven’t yet fiddled with the integrity of a complete text. For certain, there is some over-compulsive part of me that is bothered by this, but another nagging thought is how my students might react. In an ideal world, they would appreciate the fact that I am taking the time to customize the course content, thereby enhancing their learning experience; in reality, they’re likely to grumble that the resale value of the text has been seriously diminished. That may seem a poor criterion for choosing a text, but there it is.

Price is certainly a factor considered by many instructors, but how significant are other non-content factors like “resaleability” in the textbook adoption decision? Is this a more widespread concern? And what about ancillaries?

60-Second Textbook Adoption Survey

(I will publish the results of this mini-survey if I can first figure out how to activate the link!)

Study Abroad and Business Curricula?

I’ve just returned from a whirlwind 8-day trip to China with 23 Executive MBAs from my International Business class and Seminar. We spent two days in Suzhou, about an hour and a half Northeast of Shanghai, where we visited several Chinese manufacturers as well as a half-dozen western firms with operations in the Suzhou Industrial Park. (If you want to see the future of China’s industrial policy, you could do worse than to visit one or more of the 115 Fortune 500 or 2,100 other companies operating in this global, futuristic, heavily government subsidized business and social experiment.) We then spent the remainder of the trip in Shanghai visiting several more Western firms, and attending presentations on legal practices and management trends in China.

In between company visits we received a heavy dose of Chinese culture in the form of food, museums,

(Suzhou Musuem above), street encounters, wet markets,

nightlife, and in one case, an unplanned visit and stay in a Chinese hospital (cost of CT Scan and EKG was…hang onto your hats…$100!)

Despite spirited classroom discussion, and what I considered rigorous class preparation for this trip—business cases, sessions on cultural differences, discussions and role modeling, and correspondence with specific Chinese companies—students shared that most of the classroom prep failed to really engage them, and that it wasn’t until they visited the companies and could experience China “up-close and personal” that they really “got it.”

This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s traveled abroad. I’ve both worked and studied in other countries, and am a strong advocate of study abroad programs (each of my children spent two years working in Japan after college), but I was struck anew at what a spur to intellectual curiosity even a short trip like this can be. The late nights in Shanghai, notwithstanding, students at the wrap-up session on the final morning were animated, opinionated, and enthusiastic in a way that is only possible in this type of program. (It didn’t hurt that the venue was the 52nd floor of the Bank of China building with a 180-degree panoramic view of Shanghai’s Skyscraper horizon.)

While we schedule an international trip for our Executive MBAs, we do not build this into our undergraduate business or regular MBA programs. While many MBA programs schedule similar trips, I’m curious if any undergraduate international business classes do as well. And, if not, what are the hurdles to offering similar international business trips for undergraduate international business majors?