“All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind“, posited the Lebanese American writer, poet and visual artist, Gibran Khalil Gibran in his book, “Sand and Foam”.
Many times I find myself wondering how some names and words came about. I wonder who it was that first used a certain word or name a certain object, activity, place and the likes. As Ingrid Bengis, the American author and teacher put it, “for me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change. Their articulation represents a complete, lived experience.” I want to understand, to know more.
The etymology does help sometimes but does not fully satisfy my curiosity. Sometimes, I wish I could time travel to meet the original “authors” and understand what they had in mind and how they came up with the particular word or phrase. I mean, I might as well harken to Anthony J. D’Angelo, an author, speaker, and entrepreneur when he said, “when solving problems, dig at the roots instead of just hacking at the leaves.”
The case for our Analysis of Business Problems last week was an excerpt of the movie “Eye in the Sky.” The movie is about a military operation targeting terrorists. The set was in Kenya and two of the terrorists were United States of America citizens and one was a citizen of the United Kingdom. During the mission, the objective was initially to ‘capture’ the terrorists, due partly to the citizenship of some of them, but also to extract information that may be useful to the authorities. This was however changed to ‘kill’, when remote surveillance detected imminent threat of danger due to some of the terrorists getting armed with suicide vests presumably in preparation of detonating same in crowded areas.
The case required an in-depth evaluation of the situation, including the decision making, group dynamics, changing circumstances and responses to same as well as inferring some of the unspoken biases and hidden motivations of some of the team members.
During the analysis, I could not help but wonder to myself, “why is this called ‘Business School’?” It was obvious to me, considering some of the facets we are exposed to, the nature of the conversations and even the manner in which we are being thought to evaluate problems, that the intent is for the students to not only be better prepared for ‘business’ decision making, but for ‘management’ and ‘management’ decision making. So I wondered, “this should actually be called ‘Management School’ or ‘Leadership School’.” Students will graduate from this school well equipped to take up management positions in both commercial enterprises like banks and non-commercial enterprises like the military.
I understand that certain words, phrases and clauses evolve over time and may have a different meaning and connotation to those originally intended by the author(s). I am not sure how and why ‘Business School’ was coined, but as Emanuel James Rohn, the American Entrepreneur, author, motivational speaker said so aptly, “words do two major things: They provide food for the mind and create light for understanding and awareness.“
Beyes Theorem