This article is an appeal to incorporate systems thinking into topics and courses in business education and the social sciences. After reviewing the lack of systems thinking and systems theory in American education, its negative impact on decision making and risk analysis, the authors demonstrate how to weave systems thinking and systems theory into the existing curricula, and how to assess the effectiveness of such pedagogy on the decision making and risk analysis process.

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To prepare executives for the competitive and dynamic world of business, MBA and EMBA programmes have begun using executive coaching to develop high-functioning executives. Of the top 10 EMBA programmes discussed in the 2011 US News and World Report, all offered some form of executive coaching to their students. Despite this, many programmes are unsure of how to effectively utilise coaching with their students. This article presents a four-step method developed to facilitate student self-awareness and optimise matching with an executive coach. Because of the critical importance of the coach-participant match in coaching outcome, this method is presented as a way to optimise the efficiency and effectiveness of executive coaching with MBA and EMBA students.

This paper is intended to meet two objectives. First, we believe the current financial crisis demands that we assess how effectively our current curriculum develops our cost accounting students’ ability to think probabilistically and assess risk. This requires a paradigm shift in how they are taught probabilistic thinking. And second, we share exercises authors have used to expand cost accounting students’ ability to think probabilistically. In the current paradigm, cost accounting students are taught to think of cost and forces affecting costs with certainty. There is no probabilistic analysis of the risks and uncertainty in these costs estimates. Students have learned to do sensitivity analyses. However, this paper explores Simulation Modeling, in which cost and the forces influencing costs are treated as random variables. The student learns to think probabilistically. The resulting cost estimate is a distribution, which exposes the risks and uncertainty in this cost to a much greater degree than sensitivity analysis does.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.-Albert Einstein 1 INTRODUCrION U SING economic analysis, legal academics have challenged themselves to posit a rational explanation for a debtor's willingness to issue secured debt. These academics have questioned why a debtor would grant a creditor a security interest in collateral, given that the debtor's unsecured creditors, recognizing that "the pool of assets available to satisfy their claims has shrunk," will increase the price of credit they provide by an amount that precisely corresponds to the secured creditor's reduction in price. 2 Economic theorists contend that, because the debtor's overall position is not obviously improved by the issuance of secured debt, the existence of secured debt is a puzzle. 3