The Zany Business of Teaching Management The International Herald Tribune's latest education section looks at some of the zanier ways to teach management. Christopher F. Schuetze gets down and dirty with some students at Saint-Cyr, the famed French military academy. The students scaling walls and leaping over pits are not cadets, but directors and managers enrolled in an executive M.B.A. program at the ESSEC Business School and the University of Mannheim in Germany. Christopher had previously written about female M.B.A. students whose program at the Rotterdam School of Management had them climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Meanwhile, D.D. Guttenplan talks to Julia Hobsbawm about her inaugural address as the "professor in networking" at the Cass Business School at City University in London. D.D. had previously followed McGill University's "anti-M.B.A. guru," Henry Mintzberg, on the poetry-reading, hike-taking segment of his International Masters Program in Practical Management. Do these group activities teach what's needed in the business world? Or are they just fancy extracurriculars, particularly for professionals enrolled in pricey executive programs? Are problem-solving and shoulder-rubbing really postgraduate level skills? What do you think is the best training for being effective in business?