IB Business & Management Studies
For business and management students, "doing" is often better than "reading about." My approach to IB Business & Management has three core principles: 1. Case studies are awesome. 2. A non-linear approach is preferred. 3. Be relentless in approach (both student and lead-learner).
I create all of my own case studies. This allows us to focus on key elements of the course content while giving us the freedom to study businesses the students like and gravitate towards naturally. We study Kodak, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Space-X, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, Uber, Starbucks, Sephora, Amazon.com, Nike, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Netflix, Selfridge & Co, Wal-Mart and Samsung as well as local companies known to the students. I am always careful to conduct "case studies" on local companies as many times I have found mutual stakeholders of my school and the business being studied. With this in mind, we generally keep our study of local businesses at the surface level.
Some general rules students will encounter in my business class: 1. If you encounter a problem, find a solution. 2. Work smart. 3. Be relentless.
"Relentless" is perhaps the theme of our IB Business & Management course. We take this from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. During the creation phase of the company, one of the names Bezos considered was "Relentless.com." His friends and family advised against it as it sounded a bit sinister compared to the company's more friendly "The Everything Store" culture. However, Bezo's liked it so much he registered the domain. To this day, if you type in relentless.com to your web-browser, you will be taken to the Amazon.com homepage.
I create all of my own case studies. This allows us to focus on key elements of the course content while giving us the freedom to study businesses the students like and gravitate towards naturally. We study Kodak, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Space-X, Tesla, Apple, Facebook, Uber, Starbucks, Sephora, Amazon.com, Nike, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Netflix, Selfridge & Co, Wal-Mart and Samsung as well as local companies known to the students. I am always careful to conduct "case studies" on local companies as many times I have found mutual stakeholders of my school and the business being studied. With this in mind, we generally keep our study of local businesses at the surface level.
Some general rules students will encounter in my business class: 1. If you encounter a problem, find a solution. 2. Work smart. 3. Be relentless.
"Relentless" is perhaps the theme of our IB Business & Management course. We take this from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. During the creation phase of the company, one of the names Bezos considered was "Relentless.com." His friends and family advised against it as it sounded a bit sinister compared to the company's more friendly "The Everything Store" culture. However, Bezo's liked it so much he registered the domain. To this day, if you type in relentless.com to your web-browser, you will be taken to the Amazon.com homepage.
"The Ultimate" Bake Sale
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Actually, we made enough money to buy these additional business books. In all, we purchased 30 books for the school. The four below are specifically mentioned in our bus/man content.
Actual Data
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Curacao Port Authority Tour
During the first semester of 2017, we invited the Curacao Port Authority in to discuss one of the most important and relevant industries in Curacao. The government of Curacao had recently built a new "mega-pier" at a cost of $40,000,000 USD. The CPA representatives held a town forum with the IB Business & Management class at ISC and provided a detailed and poignant look into the tourism industry and the greater benefits of the port at large. Students were able to engage freely with the top management of the CPA. The presentation was capped off with a boat ride on a Pilot Ship later in the week. The experience had many direct applications to our IB Business & Management content and in my opinion spoke to the IB Learner Profile as a whole.
Examples of Lessons DeliveryI try to incorporate technology as much as possible. My students enjoy my "active" slide presentations. Slides are a nice way to deliver content. I also publish these on my school's portal website (student website). In this way, students can study the slides later. I try to make the slides colorful and I make en effort to keep the links "live." You should be able to advance or expand the slides by clicking on them. Please see below for some student led work.
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Student Generated Content (left and below)
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Class of 2018!
![Picture](/uploads/1/4/8/6/14866076/busman-2018_2_orig.jpg)