Outdated Apps, Outdated Thinking

We’re teaching Office, while the office has moved on.

Business schools still assume students can navigate Microsoft or Google tools. They can’t. And even if they could, it wouldn’t matter. The workplace has outgrown them.

The real world runs on Notion, Miro, ClickUp, Pitch, Figma, and Slack. These aren’t “nice extras.” They’re the operating systems of modern work. Yet most students graduate fluent in outdated software, then walk into offices built on workflows they’ve never touched. The productivity gap has quietly become a professional one.

And the fact that schools still run on the clunky Microsoft ecosystem only widens that gap. Faculty think they’re “in the game” because Outlook syncs with Teams, but modern companies don’t work like that. The workplace has moved from file-sharing to real-time collaboration, from version control to living documents, from email threads to transparent team spaces. Meanwhile, universities are still dragging files through SharePoint, thinking it’s innovation. It’s not. It’s institutional inertia dressed as productivity.

That doesn’t mean these modern tools have to blow up the system. Schools can keep their ERPs, LMSs, and all the other administrative plumbing—they serve a purpose. That’s not the issue. The issue is outcomes. Students aren’t being trained to produce tangible value on modern apps, using the same collaborative and iterative workflows that companies now live by. The goal isn’t to replace internal systems; it’s to graduate people who can thrive in modern productivity environments, not get lost in them.

In my classes, I’ve started closing that gap.

I’ve been running my courses on Notion and Slack for over five years. The course manual is continuously improved through student feedback, and Slack replaces 1980s-style one-to-one email — when a student asks a question, everyone benefits. My strategy teams build wikis, OKRs, and project trackers in Notion—no Word docs, no email archaeology. In my innovation labs, Miro is the canvas: sticky-note storms, service blueprints, and prototypes that evolve in real time. My entrepreneurship groups use ClickUp to plan milestones, monitor accountability, and experience what real teamwork pressure feels like. For presentations, everyone designs in Pitch—where tasks can be assigned, tracked, and iterated visually, because if you’re going to sell an idea, do it like the startups that actually get funded. And when it’s time to visualize future products, Figma and Frameo replace imagination with interface.

And I’m purposely not mentioning the wave of AI apps that I expect students to use constantly.

This isn’t “teaching apps.” It’s training fluency in the tools of the modern workplace. And that means I lead the way. So I’m constantly trying new apps and dropping in on SMB and Startups to see what’s cooking.

Yet every year that business schools cling to PowerPoint and Excel as their holy trinity, the gap widens. Students don’t just leave underprepared—they leave irrelevant. Companies don’t hire résumés that scream “competent in Word.” They hire people who can collaborate, visualize, and ship ideas inside real systems.

This means that employability isn’t about grades or case studies anymore. It’s about knowing how to work in the world that actually exists.