Teaching on a Stopwatch
Inside the race to “cover” everything—and how it kills actual learning.
Business schools look impressively organized from the outside. Courses stacked neatly into two or three-hour blocks, nine or ten sessions per term. Everything scheduled to the minute, like a train timetable. On paper, it looks efficient. In reality, it’s a chokehold.
The whole system runs on the clock, not on learning. We start at nine, finish at noon. Maybe ten minutes to pack up before another professor barges in. Some schools don’t even allow that. The turnover is brutal. Students barely finish a thought before the next slide appears. And with twenty or thirty concepts crammed into a thirty-hour course, even a fast talker (I’ve tried) can’t keep up.
Add to that the way most schools actually run: around two-thirds of courses are taught by adjuncts (professionals) like me dropped in, sometimes with a week’s notice, to make the schedule work. We rarely see the exams, never wrote the syllabus, yet we’re expected to “cover” it all. And the syllabus? Same one someone typed up years ago. Frameworks stacked on frameworks that no real company has opened in decades.
Yesterday I did what I always do. I grabbed a chair, pulled it up to a team, and we dug into their VRIO grid. Ten minutes later, we were still wrestling with what “rare” actually means in their project company’s case, and whether it even belonged there. Then on to the next team, and the next. Eight groups later, eighty minutes gone. I could’ve done another round. That’s where the teaching lives. Not in the slides, not in the grading sheet, but in those chaotic ten-minute detours where students stop parroting the frameworks and start thinking through them.
But those windows are rare. Because we keep running out of time.
If schools were honest about learning, they’d start selling time. Every thirty-hour course should have another ten hours built in call it “ThinkTime” where small groups of eight or ten sit down with a professor and actually chew on one complex idea until it makes sense. No new content, no extra slides, just digestion time. Maybe a visiting professional drops in, maybe it’s student-led. Whatever shape it takes, it needs to exist.
And let’s stop pretending we can teach the entire strategic universe in one module (in my case). You can’t cover internal analysis, external analysis, and strategy design in thirty hours. Pick one, do it properly, and move on. An “Internal Analysis” course followed by an “External Strategy” course; logical, manageable, actually learnable. I know, a pretty “radical thought”.
My students this semester didn’t master every framework and I’m fine with that. What they did learn is that the point isn’t filling out a SWOT; it’s pulling something meaningful from it. That’s learning. It’s slow, sometimes messy, always human. And it takes time something business schools seem allergic to valuing. Because no company out there cares how neatly you color-code a SCORE Framework. They care about the story you can tell from it, the sharp insight that moves a decision forward. That’s the real value students could bring if only we stopped teaching against the clock.