Many instructors use experiential learning techniques to link students’ academic experience with the reality that awaits them professionally. Careful planning and reflecting on experiential activities usually take place prior to implementation to ensure that prescribed student learning outcomes are met. Hence, management educators’ confidence soars when outcomes meet or exceed their expectations, and there is the intrinsic reward of seeing students succeed. Subsequently, effective application of activities can lead to overconfidence in implementing routine as well as new activities. What happens, however, when an activity goes awry? Can it be salvaged? In this article, we explore overconfidence as the shadow that can disrupt a faculty’s well-meaning activity, leading to something unexpected with unintended learning consequences for the instructor and students. Then, we analyze several of our activities gone awry as a result of overconfidence. Finally, we suggest humility as a spotlight that can help us move out of the shadow cast by overconfidence, thus helping faculty deal with the dark side of experiential exercises.
The story of Prometheus and Pandora serves as an apt analogical device through which to demonstrate the impact that publicly traded corporations, and the shareholder primacy approach to corporate governance has created unintended consequences. Prometheus’s benevolent gift of fire led to the collateral damage of Pandora’s Box unleashing ills on mankind. Similarly, incorporation was a positive development that supported businesses lasting beyond one generation of owners, and led to businesses thriving and creating innovations that improve our lives. However, with these innovations and the related consumption has come a figurative Pandora’s Box of ills to society, including but not limited to widening income inequality, greater personal debt, and environmental degradation. In this critical essay, Greek mythology and classical philosophical approaches to happiness are intertwined with corporate approaches to stakeholder and shareholder optimization.
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