Presidio School of Management believes that traditional business skills won't take students far enough. Our courses are designed to cross disciplines, teach through experience both in and outside of the classroom, and provide a new framework for talking about both business and sustainability.

Our educational philosophy provides students not just with a skill set, but with a unique perspective on solving the world's most pressing problems — leading to action driven by their vision and values. We prepare students to implement their vision of sustainability in multiple contexts — as entrepreneurs, managers or consultants, inside big or small companies, nonprofits or government agencies. This philosophy is grounded in three tenets:

Learning from Interactive Experience and Reflection

The first tenet is that learning is an interactive experience that depends in large measure on the learner's active participation — intellectually, physically, intuitively and ethically. Presidio School of Management believes that goal-directed action, mutually agreed upon, is more motivating and more potent than random or scattered action. The same is true of self-directed action, as opposed to authority-directed action.

It follows, then, that a positive, transformative education cannot be “delivered” to the student. It is, instead, an experience of co-creation by student and mentors, a stream of encounters and interactions and feedback, some carefully designed, some true adventures.

Therefore, the School believes that pragmatic inquiry and learning — the process of disciplined reflection and action based on experience — is far more effective and lasting than learning from experience alone (inductive reasoning) or reflection in the abstract (deductive reasoning). It is this continuous, testing movement between experience and assumptions — called abductive reasoning — which leads to genuine understanding, education and authentic, effective action.

Systems Thinking and Practice

The second tenet — systems thinking and practice — involves looking at issues or problems as a whole and designing solutions and practices that take into account the interrelationships among human, organizational and ecological systems. The systems perspective has often been omitted from and even discouraged by the highly specialized, discipline-centered model of higher education we have known for the past 150 years. In the words of the 1999 State of the World Report, education has increasingly taught “disconnection.”

While this model has given the Western world a high state of technological advancement, its narrow focus has operated on the principle of separation. The result of this approach is that yesterday's solutions have become today's problems. But the earth tells us that it operates — in both the personal, social and natural spheres — on the principle of integration and wholeness. Each part of each system is related to every other part, and all systems are related, in turn, to one another.

So the need is not so much for specialists who can isolate issues as it is for “connectionalists” who can think creatively about the way that things, numbers and people relate to one another. Jerome Bruner of Harvard has defined creativity as “the capacity to make unexpected connections.” The ability to recognize and articulate those connections in tangible, narrative language as commitments and promises in the world, leads to action. These are the principle capacities for which future leaders must be prepared.

Integration and Communication of Knowledge

The two tenets described above, in combination, lead to the third tenet, which is a management practice based on the integration and communication of knowledge. Since we learn from active participation and seeing interconnections, the Presidio curriculum culminates in the Integrative Capstone course. In this course students develop a Venture Plan that captures the narrative quality of their work. This plan draws on all their studies — including strategy, operations, marketing, finance, and sustainability — and engages the marketplace through the creation of a rigorous business plan to demonstrate their mastery of the MBA program’s core competencies.

For Presidio students, creating and developing their Venture Plan also provides the opportunity to uncover, define, articulate and test their “calling” – the work they sense they are here to do – engaging others and leading toward their goals, and the School’s goal, of furthering sustainability in the world.

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Presidio Provost Emeritus Ron Nahser catches up with 2006 MBA Graduate Nick Aster at a graduate networking event.