Yet again, it's the soft stuff that matters most

An article by Yash Gupta, dean of the Carey School of Business at Johns Hopkins University appeared in the December 3, 2010, Chronicle of Higher Education and adds to a growing set of similar lists of "things students need to know".

Here are the bullet points:

• Intellectual flexibility, the scholarly ability to juggle a variety of ideas and place them in a broad context.
• Cultural literacy, a solid knowledge of the customs and history of societies all over the world, in the places and among the populations that are becoming part of the global marketplace.
• A strong grounding in ethics, and an understanding of the ways that the subtlest ethical conflicts, if not guarded against, can lead to an organization's undoing. In this way, business schools can join their counterparts in medicine and law, where increased emphasis has been placed on ethics training in recent years.
• The ability to communicate ideas well.
• Optimism, creativity, a collaborative outlook, the willingness to lead.

Increasingly, strong academics are a given.  It is whether and how well a school delivers on the above that sets it apart from the pack.