Emotional Striptease, and Other Paths to Ethics

March 7, 2004
Emotional Striptease, and Other Paths to Ethics
By AMY WU
ON a crisp morning last September, Srikumar S. Rao leaned upon a
lectern, set his marble-shaped eyes on 35 Columbia Business School
students and simply stared.
Cellphones silenced and BlackBerries muted, these aspiring executives
stared back, then began eyeing one another more anxiously with each
mounting minute.
Finally, a young woman shattered the silence. "O.K.," she started. Dr.
Rao, mellow and fatherly, grinned back, testing the patience of the
typically type-A business students. 
In a school where most of the 200 or so classes are Wall Street-centric,
Dr. Rao's course, called Creativity and Personal Mastery, is as
unbusiness as business school gets. To Dr. Rao, 52, who has been
teaching the course at Columbia since 1999 and first taught it at Long
Island University in 1994, it is a forum for self-exploration, meant to
help future business leaders define their personal ethics and goals. 
Although not every student converts to what some half-jokingly call
Raoism, 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, which began in January, 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. 
"We're talking about something very important, especially in today's
world," said Prof. Safwan Masri, vice dean of the business school. "The
Enrons and the Parmalats of the world are making people think about
these issues a little more," Professor Masri said. "People are
reflecting more profoundly on what it means to be successful."
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, as did Columbia, although it is not the one that Dr.
Rao teaches. 
Nevertheless, many of Dr. Rao's students say that his class is one of a
kind. 
A few of them said other students have criticized them for taking the
unconventional class. Some critics have described it as "Tuesdays With
Morrie'' meets ''Oprah.''
"Some people at the school say, 'Oh, it's those weirdos,' or, 'It's the
New Age class,' " said Narayan Raghu, 29, a former KPMG consultant who
is taking the course. "Everyone is sympathetic toward the underlying
concept of the course, but a lot of people are not ready to do it." 
The telephone-book-thick syllabus for the course is packed with parables
and quotations from Ecclesiastes, Thoreau and the Bhagavad-Gita, a
sacred Hindu text, among other works. Required readings include ''Flow:
The Psychology of Optimal Experience," "A Search in Secret India" and
"The Art of Possibility." 
At a recent class, students performed emotional stripteases, discussing
topics including depression and marital problems.
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,
like how to see a bad boss in the best light. His sayings include, "When
the flower blossoms, the bee will come," and "Good thing, bad thing, who
knows?" 
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. He
worked in corporate America for five years, including a stint as an
assistant to the president of Warner Communications, but said he
disliked his jobs. 
He decided to head into academia and is now a marketing professor at the
C. W. Post campus of Long Island University. He is an adjunct professor
at Columbia. 
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
Shankara Charya, an eighth-century Indian philosopher. 
Like his guru, Dr. Rao uses stories to make points. One tale was about
someone who continued to give money to a foul-mouthed panhandler because
he did not want to stoop to the panhandler's pettiness. 
"There are terrible jerks, and there are an unusually large
concentration of them in the workplace," Dr. Rao lectured. "And that
means that you do have to make some changes in your behavior, but there
is absolutely no need for you to give them power over your happiness." 
The personal essays that students write to get into the class reveal the
conflicts that occur daily in business. 
Charles Marcus, 32, who was in charge of sales and marketing at an
online business in San Francisco, and worked at several start-ups before
the dot-com crash, said he was always forced to fire people and squeeze
clients for higher bill rates. 
In his essay, Mr. Marcus, a Harvard graduate, wrote: "Woke up one
morning, late in the fall of 2000, and wondered whose life this was that
I was living. I had been sucked into a greed machine." 
Sara Gooch, an investment banker before entering business school, wrote:
"My biggest struggle is trying to find a balance between wanting to
emulate the life that my mother has led, full-time wife and mother,
living in a tranquil suburb, with soccer games and P.T.A. to keep me
busy," and a career in finance.
Two months after writing that essay, Ms. Gooch said that the course had
not solved her problems, but that she had learned some life lessons.
"It's helped me realize that, whatever I choose, I can be happy," she
said. "I can be happy in my 80-hour-a-week investment banking job. It's
a choice to be happy and to get out of it what's going to fulfill you." 
The students are assigned friends to force them to get to know
classmates better, and they are told to hold conversations while
blindfolded to become acquainted on more than a superficial level. They
are also told, over the course of a week, to eat at least one meal a day
alone and in silence, to sharpen focusing skills. 
Ms. Gooch said that the demand to focus on one thing was a useful
experience. 
"It made me realize that I do spend an enormous amount of my time
multitasking and not really enjoying any of the things I am doing," she
said. 
Other assignments focus on the evils of what Dr. Rao called "mind
chatter" - allowing needless thoughts to clog the mind. During another
week, students were told to concentrate on one task at a time and to
resist looking at their hand-held computers. 
The class includes a weekend retreat in which students talk about a
variety of topics, including sex and workplace politics. 
Dr. Rao requires students to contribute to the "community," his term for
the class. So Mr. Raghu invited fellow students to his wedding
ceremonies in Mexico and India, and other students offered to hold
flamenco dancing lessons and kayaking expeditions.
The unusual exercises and assignments give Dr. Rao's class the feel of a
Friendster forum. 
James J. Lewellis, an international affairs student, acknowledges that
he took the class to meet people. "I wanted to do it as much as a
networking exercise as much as possible," Mr. Lewellis said. "That's
what a business school is anyway." 
But Dr. Rao emphasizes that despite its social aspects, his is a serious
business course, and that he is only teaching marketing with a twist.
His style of networking includes suggesting that people help five people
they admire without any expectation of repayment. 
Matt Kraft, a partner at the Kraft Group, a financial services business
in Montvale, N.J., that was started, but no longer owned, by his family,
took the course when he was at Columbia in 1999. Mr. Kraft, 32, said
that, as a result,, he tries to steer his rich clients toward
philanthropy.
"I refer to it as Raoism, and I've said it before and I mean it in the
most positive sense," he said of the professor. 
JOSHUA KLENOFF, 28, went to Columbia after a successful career as an
entrepreneur. 
"I went into the Internet because money was a key component of it." he
said. "I was not happy in any meaningful way. I was not deeply fulfilled
or invigorated by business." He said he found his life's calling after
stumbling upon Dr. Rao's class. Since he graduated last May, Mr. Klenoff
said, he has focused his business instincts on helping others find their
life's calling.
Mr. Klenoff began a company with Dr. Rao called League4 Lifelong
Leadership Inc., in which he travels to universities to help students
find suitable career paths. 
Students who took Dr. Rao's class last fall said that it had already
affected them. Brandon Peele, 27, said he found direction in the class
after being disenchanted with his life as an investment banker for
Merrill Lynch
</redirect/marketwatch/redirect.ctx?MW=http://custom.marketwatch.com/cus
tom/nyt-com/html-companyprofile.asp&symb=MER> .
"I wanted to make a lot of money, travel the world, sleep with a lot of
women,'' said Mr. Peele, who will graduate from business school in May.
"It's typical of a lot of my colleagues. I came to realize that there is
much more out there than getting that big house. He just raised my
consciousness." 
Mr. Peele says he plans to start a television channel focusing on
corporate responsibility and personal growth. "You spend so much of your
day working, you might as well be enjoying yourself," he said. 
Copyright 2004 </ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>  The New York
Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>

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