i2i Challenge, Second Place: James Falbe, “Using ‘Big Ideas’ to solve big problems”
For Jim Falbe, taking the GMAT led to more than graduate management education. Jim was one of thousands of recent GMAT test takers who received an email inviting them to take part in the Ideas to Innovation Challenge.
“As I am currently applying to business schools,” he said, “I looked at the contest as a type of scholarship opportunity and went for it.” Jim is currently in Jordan, consulting on projects for nonprofit and for-profits organizations and teaching classes in his community.
Jim won one of four $25,000 prizes with his idea: Using “Big Ideas” to solve big problems. The “Big Ideas” in Jim’s submission reach outside traditional business principles to incorporate different disciplines, such as psychology, history, and math. “The excellent manager,” Jim wrote, “needs to be able to identify a cause, whether it be sociological, physical, or even managerial, and then have the tools to know where to turn to address the problem.”
“Large nuggets of problem-solving gold lie on the ground just on the other side of the academic fence,” he said.
Jim sees the implementation of his idea as a semester- or year-long program embedded in existing curriculum. The program would immerse graduate business students in the major problem-solving models from other disciplines with help from guest lecturers. Incorporating an outside consulting problem would help students apply their multidisciplinary training to a real business issue.
Multidisciplinary thinking has appealed to Jim since his undergraduate days. Reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a collection of written speeches of Charles Munger, helped focus his approach for this challenge. “Following the motto of the famous mathematician Carl Jacobi, ‘Invert, always invert,’ Munger not only points out the advantages of multi-disciplinary thinking for business, but also the pitfalls of not thinking this way,” Jim said.
“Multidisciplinary thinking isn’t just for the few,” he added, “but needs to be a part of how we educate the management talent of tomorrow.”
Read more about Jim’s idea on gmac.com.
Profiles of the other second-place winners will appear here over the next few days—check back to find out more!
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