Tales from the Top

In the words of James Ellis, Dean, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, The moment I chanced upon the short stories that Simon Ramo had composed for some lectures he was delivering on management, I knew they would provide the means I had been seeking for some time to improve the teaching of the human relations dimension of business management. New and attractive to me was Ramo s creation and use of fictitious tales that are actually designed especially to emphasize and illuminate human relating fundamentals. By careful choice and synthesis of plots, characters, issues, and situations, these fascinating stories can be convincingly real life based. They can be constructed so as to present extremely pertinent and useful basics for a new business school course. I felt this so strongly that as Dean of the USC Marshall School of Business I decided to introduce them into the course that I teach. I have offered this course now for three years and plan to continue, because it has clearly been a success.