The Business School "After-Sales" Void
Closing the Loop: Implementing a Scalable "After-Sales" Service for Higher Education.
Business schools are world-class at one thing: the hand-off. We teach a high-intensity module on strategy or innovation, grade a few “team exposés” that prove nothing but a student’s ability to format a slide deck, and then spit them out into the wild. The next time the school reaches out, it’s usually the Alumni Association asking for a donation.
If a student can’t deploy the strategy I taught them during their internship six months later, did they actually learn it? Or did they just “rent” the information for the exam? It’s a broken feedback loop that fails everyone involved.
Introducing the “Trackback”.
In tech, a trackback notifies you when someone links to your work. In education, we need a Trackback Module: a formal, post-course loop that occurs only after the student has hit the real world.
Think about the missed opportunity:
For the Student: They are left to drown in the gap between “textbook strategy” and “office politics.”
For the Parents: They’ve paid a premium for a product that has no warranty the moment it leaves the showroom floor.
For the Employer: They inherit a “finished product” that requires expensive recalibration.
For the School: We have departments full of researchers who rarely research the actual impact of their own “product.”
I can see administrators rolling their eyes, but this is where effectuation comes in. This isn’t a long series of lectures; it’s a surgical, scalable, two-session audit conducted digitally three to six months post-course.
The Evidence: The student submits a “Deployment Log”, tangible proof of a specific skill (e.g., a business model pivot) attempted in a professional setting.
The Employer Audit: We pull in measurable feedback from their supervisor. Did the tool work? Did the student know how to wield it?
The Pressure Test: A 20-minute deep dive with the professor to look at the “scar tissue”, why a theory crumbled and how to fix it for next time.
I currently offer this informally. About 25 students a year take me up on it. It’s the most honest teaching I do. We look at why a business model failed and how an employer actually reacted to a strategic proposal.
If we want to fix the “Unrecycled” classroom, we have to stop treating graduation as the finish line. A school that offers a formal “After-Sales” service isn’t just a school. It’s a high-performance partner.
It’s time we stop producing “graduates” and start producing “proven assets.” After all, we don’t need more credits - we need a warranty on the brain.