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ed ethical discussions into their basic lec- tures for more than a decade, Useem admits that these issues have taken on "a certain degree of salience in the past 18 months, particularly in terms of character and integrity." Hesselbein, too, believes that recent corporate scandals have increased overall interest in hard-to-pin- down qualities of values and principles. "Ten years ago, people who would While many schools have incorporat- have said, 'Oh, those are nice concepts but they don't apply in the real world' are very interested in that kind of leader- ship," she says. "As times grow more tenuous, people tend to examine not just what they're doing, but why." The Impact of Leadership While today's business schools are deter- mined to share all the concepts of leader- ship with their students, many of them aren't content to stop there. For instance, at Virginia Tech, the emphasis on leader- ship permeates the entire campus and spills over into com- munity outreach programs. Through its Institute for Leadership in Changing Times, Virginia Tech shares resources among business, military, and women's leadership programs. It also teaches leadership concepts to executives and police officers, who need to learn management skills on top of pure technical skills to advance in their careers. In addition, the school runs a program, co-sponsored by the Virginia Police Chiefs Association, designed to teach lead- their problems," says Tichy. In addition, during Tichy's tenure there, teams of executives were trained in concepts of market- ing, finance, and geopolitics, and then sent to southeast Asia to look for new joint business ventures that would work for GE. Tichy says that programs like Michigan's Multidisciplinary Actions Projects take steps in the right direction of providing real-world experience to MBAs. Nonetheless, he believes most schools only take students "one quarter of the way" to full development; they can only go the rest of the way through sig- nificant, practical experience. If programs don't become more grounded in real-world problems, he says, business schools will exist merely to screen candidates for corporations looking to hire "smart people interested in business." ership to high school students. The local police associations identify and rec- ommend the students for the program, which is run by Virginia Tech under- graduates, giving them a chance to prac- tice their own leadership. "The high school program, as you graduate scholarships. "We look at students' leadership involvement in church groups, athletic teams, or honorary societies," says Sorensen. "We think that student participation in development activities at the high school level will lead to student participation here on the Virginia Tech campus. This in turn predicts their job participation when they graduate." Such an unrelenting focus on leadership skills has an ulti- Leadership is also one of the criteria for granting under- might expect, is also a way to try to interest these students in applying to Virginia Tech," says Sorenson—and the school finds other ways to stress the value of leadership to potential appli- cants. Brochures about the leadership program are mailed to all students offered admission to Virginia Tech, and the school's Web pages are filled with information on the topic. "We focus on the whole issue of leadership so we can get a higher percentage of students with that background coming to Tech," says Sorensen. mate benefit to students once they graduate, says Sorensen. He believes that recruiters will "increasingly look for some kind of validation that students have experiential skill sets, rather than just looking at what students earned on the CPA exam and grade point average." To give students a tangible credential to show prospective employers, Virginia Tech has developed a leadership minor that shows up on student tran- scripts. Sorensen says that recruiters are highly interested in this proof that students have such skills. "We find that it amounts to a $2,000 salary differential. That's certainly an attraction to students participating in the program," he says. As leadership centers proliferate and books about leader- ship crowd the shelves of bookstores everywhere, both stu- dents and corporate executives have many opportunities to further their understanding of this critical business skill. It's a skill that virtually everyone in the workplace, at every level, will be expected to exercise at some point—and those who have practiced and prepared for it are the most likely to suc- ceed when faced with their first real-world chance to lead. ■ z BizEd NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2003 35