[This post concludes Strictly Confidential’s series, “An MBA Outlaw’s MBA Hit Parade,” a subjective review of classes and professors at three Twin Cities business schools. Please note our INTRODUCTION, which also compiles all 10 reviews in one place.]

University of St. Thomas Tuition: Full-time – $14,000/semester Part time – $885/credit. Website

St. Cloud University Tuition per credit (resident): $725. Website

Metropolitan State University Tuition per credit: $312. Website

University of Minnesota Tuition per credit (resident/part-time program): $1,172. Website

Cardinal Stritch University Tuition per credit: $525. Website

Augsburg College Tuition per credit: $556. Website

University of Phoenix Tuition per credit: $665. Website

Argosy University Total tuition for degree/full time/minimum 24 months: $23.046. Website

DeVry University Tuition per course: $2,225. Website

Bethel University Tuition per credit: $625. Website

College of St. Scholastica Tuition per credit: $445. Website

Globe University/Minnesota School of Business Total tuition for degree/24 months: $28,890 Website

Another Partial MBA School List, Including Online-Only Programs

Back To Web Version/Compiled Reviews

Are business classes your best next move? Read these reviews, then decide

The economy’s a river choked with loony tunes and dinosaurs. The jobless flail desperately, trying to make their way. Business schools from DeVry to Harvard dangle gilded lifelines to fertile shores.

Thinking about chasing that MBA rescue? And, if so, do you really know what to expect?

Maybe I can help. I spent much of the last five years in three part-time Twin Cities MBA programs, representing a rough continuum of what’s out there: upper-tier University of Minnesota, lower-middle-tier The College of St. Scholastica and, for “the rest of us,” Metropolitan State University.

I can also claim a thin slice of The University of St. Thomas after one of my professors later switched schools. That brings my total MBA exposure to a third of the classroom programs in the Twin Cities metro area.

Which, if any, might be right for you? Obviously, that’s a highly subjective question. But I think the following equally subjective reviews of 10 MBA classes and professors might help you make a better-informed choice. [Skip To Reviews]

Meanwhile, some important context and a disclaimer or two:

I enrolled in these programs, not for an MBA degree, per se, but rather for the practical business knowledge they offered. Make no mistake about it, I’m a happy, busy journalist here; I wasn’t after boardroom clout and excess — OK, maybe a little excess. Still, with the journalism profession in its own business free fall, I figured MBA training would at least broaden my on-the-job field of vision.

I was solely guided, then, by (1) the real-world value of each class; (2) how well the professors kept us engaged; and (3) how much bang each class seemed to promise for the buck — hence the shuttling among three programs with different price tags.

I wasn’t exactly forgiving either. If a professor routinely bogged things down in empty bluster, worthless meandering and/or gratuitous, small-group naval contemplation, well, let’s just say I didn’t waste much time stifling yawns and bird-dogging the clock.

Not the typical MBA approach. But I do think it gave me the freedom to call ‘em as I saw ‘em — not, for example, by how the professors saw me. Frankly, I didn’t give the grade game much weight at all. [Full disclosure: As of this writing, I was five credits short of a degree, with a cumulative 3.3 grade point average — a B-plus — across all three programs.]

Remember, though: One student’s gold is another student’s scrap iron — some, no doubt, saw our classes and professors very differently. So maybe it’s best to take each individual review with a few grains of salt and rely on the entire package for a taste of what the MBA experience is really like.

The professors: 10 whose classes approximate a typical array of MBA requirements and electives, rated for you on a maximum five-dollar-signs ($$$$$) scale. All are still teaching in accredited Twin Cities programs.

My reviews:

1. Organizational Behavior: “And This Ace Of Spades On My Head Makes Money How?”

2. Financial Accounting: “Dang, Those Sax Lessons Were Important After All!”

3. Financial Management: “Praise ‘The Packet’ And Pass The Ammunition”

4. Managerial Statistics: “If A Dude Runs Up A Stairwell 20 Times, Will Anybody Hear Him Pass Out?”

5. Human Resources Management: “How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love HR”

6. Marketing Management/Practical Research Methods: “Aerobics Burns And Small-Group Hustles”

7. Management Communication And Cultural Competence: “The Real Color Of My MBA”

8. Management Information Systems: “When Harry Met Linux”

9. Process Consultation: “Relax, Breathe Slowly, And Follow The Shiny Object”

10. Strategic Management: “Behold! The Silver Fortress Of Dreams”

Twin Cities Classroom MBA Programs 2011-2012

Why I Love Chicago: The Politics And Karma Of Snow

It’s been dark for almost seven hours, and I’m trudging through the worst blizzard since 1979, when a monster Election Day storm stole the Mayor’s Office from the mighty Daley Machine. Little pellets of sleet and snow tick madly against my glasses as I brace my shoulders against a furious, horizontal wind. The temperature’s gotta be at least 30 below.

I have no idea yet that a turning point in my life is on its way — or that it will begin with a shriek, not a whimper.

My L train didn’t show up on time this morning because of the weather — a rarity, I would learn, anywhere in this city — which meant I had to walk the 45 minutes to Evanston to get to grad school.

I’m lucky. I’ve got a great hooded down coat, so I was plenty warm the entire trip — past the shuttered “Chicago Red Hots” hot dog shop, past the North Side’s L train “graveyard” lot, past the Pamida and Dominick’s stores and, finally, the long trek along upscale Sheridan Road to my first class. I was actually drenched in sweat when I arrived — my coat is THAT good.

It’s now 15 hours later, though. My skin crystalized from head to toe as I dried out, and I’ve been itchy and sticky all day. It’s 11:05 p.m. when my train pulls up to take me home — right on schedule again, I might add. And I’m REALLY looking forward to a long, hot shower, followed by Pabst or two before I hit the sack. The entire city seems empty, still buried in tall, shifting drifts of blowing snow.

Ten minutes later, I’m alone in the train, underground at my station. And as I step off, I hear a faint, high-pitched noise off in the distance. The noise is dampened now and then by the droning clatter of street plows and tow trucks above. But it never quite stops, and it sounds for all the world like — could it be? — a woman’s shrill, anguished scream.

If it means that someone’s in trouble, it seems so far away that I don’t think I could possibly do much about it. A few seconds later, as I push through the first exit turnstile, I realize that it’s much closer than I’d thought.

Now I’m outside again in the long, slightly curved, ice-encrusted ramp that’ll take me up to street level, and the scream is PIERCINGLY loud and obnoxious: an unbridled, relentless, full-throated shriek, amplified now by a slight echo. I suddenly see that it’s coming from a shadow moving directly toward me from the ramp’s other end.

“SHRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!”

Quick, harshly drawn breath.

“SHRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!!!!”

Quick, harshly drawn breath.

The edges of the shadow dance a bit as the wind shakes the street lights, and the outline looms a little larger with every step, as if this were some horror-movie cliche.

A robbery or assault victim? A wandering, hostile nut case? I check for my wallet and keys, just to make sure I know where they are, and I’m hoping there’s a cop somewhere nearby up ahead. I tighten my right hand into a fist, tensing for a confrontation — maybe with the screaming woman, maybe with her tormenter, or, who knows, maybe even with both.

And then, there she is: a huge, lumbering African-American woman in grey sweat pants, a long black coat and a big red stocking cap pulled low on her forehead, with a silver purse flopping at her side. She’s caked head-to-toe in a thin layer of what would look like freshly sifted flour if the weather were warmer. And she’s throwing her head back and clenching her own fists at the sky every time she screams, as if she’s determined to shatter glass. I can see tiny frozen rivulets of tears down either side of her nose.

She notices me in mid-breath — and gasps, completely shocked and embarassed. I realize only now that with the cold and the hour, there probably weren’t any other people near the empty station who could’ve heard her besides me.

“Excuse me,” the woman offers, looking straight down at first as she tries to ease by me. “I didn’t think anybody was down here.”

I have to laugh — it’s just too funny. “Hey, no problem,” I tell her. For some reason, we’d both turned and faced each other as we passed, and we’re now half pausing, half walking backward as we talk, like new neighbors who want to get some kind of introductory words in before one has to answer the phone.

“You sure you’re okay?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, wiping her eyes, relaxing her shoulders a bit, now chuckling between sniffles. “Life just gets to you some days, don’t it?”

“Ohhhh, yeah,” I nod. “It sure does.”

And that’s it. We both just smile, exchange goodbyes, turn around again and keep trudging in opposite directions. We say — or scream — nothing more.

A few minutes later, I’m on my couch in my bathrobe with that Pabst in my hand, and I’m imagining the woman getting off the train she boarded right after talking to me. I’m wondering where that might be, and I’m hoping that she’s OK. I’m hoping, too, that maybe I’ll see her again tomorrow so I can ask her if her night got any better.

But years pass, and our paths never re-cross.

Many adventures would follow for me in Chicago, most far more dramatic than this one. I spent countless hours chasing stories in some of the city’s prime drug territory. I spent a night with a gangster’s family in the remnants of the infamous Cabrini Green housing project. I was the best man at a notorious stick-up man’s wedding before a judge in the Cook County Courthouse.

But I’ve always marked that blizzard encounter with the woman at the L stop as the time I finally relaxed and started seeing Chicago for all the one-of-a-kind humanity, grit and character that it constantly seems to provide.

I’d moved there from sheltered, lily-white, small-town Madison, Wisconsin only a week or so earlier.

I’ve never felt comfortable living anywhere but in a big city since.

The local cable company is what drives one of my friends crazy. I’d say he averages one enraged, hyperventilating Facebook post about it every week.

For me? It’s the AMC herd pleaser, Mad Men, which, God help me, I’ve tried my best to like for the last four-plus years. But I just can’t seem to do it.

Without fail, I last 10 or 15 minutes — max — before I have to flip the channel or leave the room in disgust.

Last season, I explained it to my girlfriend with the story of an African-American friend of mine who, while visiting me in Madison, Wisconsin from Atlanta years ago, was invited by a young white woman to her annual “Gone With The Wind” movie party.

“Uhhhh, no thanks. Never seen it,” my friend said. “No offense, but that’s definitely NOT one of most black people’s favorites.”

The woman persisted: “Really!?” But don’t you at least have to give it a chance? Tell you what, just stay until you actually see something that’s racist — legitimately racist. That’s all I ask. I’ll bet it’s not nearly as bad as you think.”

So my friend accepted — and, sure enough, the very first moving image was a group of singing slaves happily harvesting cotton in one of Tara’s vast plantation fields.

“That’s it!” my friend exclaimed, laughing. “We’re outta here!” And, literally, off both he and I went on the spot.

Which is kind of what I had in mind when I tweeted the following a few weeks ago: “#MadMen: Great, just what the world needs — MORE glorification of effete, narcissistic white people’s posing, whining and faux angst.”

Other would-be follow-up posts seem to pop into my head while I’m jogging every Monday morning:

“#MadMen: validating America’s self-important, consumerist, glitz-conformist jerks — one delusion at a time.” Or …

“#MadMen: Some people see innovation; I see a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie on barbiturates.” Or, more recently …

“#Madmen: Come for the retro aesthetics; stay because, deep down, you want to get away with being a smug jackass too.”

But I never post them.

Why?

Well, first, because it’s a dead-bang loser to diss the show these days, especially among members of its core demographic. (And if you have to ask what that might be, may God help you.) People LIVE for this show, man. They get nasty about it, too — and, admittedly, my fantasy posts … well … sometimes aren’t exactly models of civility either.

Second, I also have to admit that “Mad Men” really is a gem in many ways, overexposure issues notwithstanding. Its voice, tone and production value are still compelling; its characters are still unique and multidimensional; its scripts are still nuanced and tantalizingly unpredictable.

And, third, when it comes to TV branding, “Mad Men” is miles ahead of the industry pack. From a business standpoint, anyway, the show’s slick, boundary-crossing content/ad interface is true genius. Here, “Mad Men” might be changing the face of television marketing forever.

Then again, that’s also the very thing that repels me about the series while others — creator Matthew Weiner’s proving ground, “The Sopranos,” for example — continue to keep me engaged.

Those shows don’t do what “Mad Men” does like no other series in TV history: blur style, content and promotion to the point where it’s all one big, multi-channel package of homogenizing consumer manipulation.

And just when I thought the homogenization couldn’t get any more patronizing, “Mad Men” debuted a new African-American character this year that both the show and its fan base can now wear on their sleeves as a feel-good token of whitebread cultural correctness.

Uh … “Fun With Rhett And Scarlett,” anyone?

Don’t get me wrong: Some 3.5 million Americans seem to love being homogenized by the “Mad Men” juggernaut every week, so who am I to argue?

Forgive me, though, if I keep imagining 3.5 million yutzes with ears, all completely hypnotized by their own reflections in subtly distorted glass:

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” I hear them asking, “who’s the hippest sheep of all?”

This genuine, quintessentially Madison, Wisconsin Facebook post, complete with a slide show of 5-year-olds wearing real mortarboards and brandishing home-made “diplomas” for robed principal and gushing relatives and friends:

“Kindergarten Graduation! Proud mama of a Kindergarten graduate!”

Which man above is the bigger fop?

Now that I’ve lived for many years in two cities listed among Bicycling.com’s most “bike friendly” in America — Madison, Wisconsin and Minneapolis, Minnesota — my money says the guy on the left.

Not that I really know anything about either of them. They’re both just product models — one for a cycling-gear website and the other for a site devoted to pirate reenactments, of all things. They just happened to pop up when I searched “cycling apparel” and “fop” on Google Images.

Anyway, here’s my point:

Way too many chicken-legged, whitebread dinks seem to think they look as tough as Lance Armstrong on the bike path, when they really look like they’ve just been gang-sodomized with Day Glo paint.

I suppose that some of this here relates to what I wrote about “Emperor’s New Clothes” bosses previously in this space. That entry, though, involved delusional style over substance at work, not the leisure-time foppery I see parading around so often on two wheels.

You know … WORK — as in what Lance Armstrong is doing when he’s busting his hump over the Pyrennes in a WORK uniform that looks like it was designed by Liberace.

Because, like most uniforms, it’s BRANDING AND ADVERTISING — as in the gaudy stuff that’s necessary to pay real pro cyclists like Lance Armstrong, as opposed to amateurs like … well, … pretty much everybody else, including me and you.

My guess, anyway, is that when Lance Armstrong practices, he finds the whole peacock trip unnecessary, and that when some bike fop gives him the high sign somewhere on the road, part of him wants to shout back, “Dude, do you, like, wear a leotard when you watch ‘Dancing With The Stars’ on TV, too?”

Maybe I’m getting too intolerant. It could also be some playground-pack atavism from my youth, I suppose. But I just can’t seem to handle effete, privileged pseudo-athletes doing the “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” thing on $2,000 bikes in public anymore.

Especially when it’s so obvious that unlike Lance Armstrong — and many, many other true cyclists from Madison to Madagascar — these guys would never stop blubbering if they ever got into a real-world scrape.

So please, bicyclists and product-hawkers alike, why not just drop the sissified self-aggrandizement already and let a great sport’s genuine street appeal stand on its own – dirt, sweat, beat-up shorts and T shirts, skinned knees and all?

I guarantee you one thing: You’ll hear a lot less giggling in your wake if you do.

You finally find a silver lining. You finally believe that the world might have changed. You finally believe that the future might turn out okay, too.

Then you watch “Big Cat Diary” on Animal Planet.

That’s when you realize that no matter what species you’re talking about, the idea is basically to eat someone else’s young.

I just discovered the long-running TV series recently, and I was ready for the lions, cheetahs and leopards chasing down adult gazelles and wildebeests, and dispatching them with a sustained, focused bite through the neck.

We’ve all seen that before, and it’s grisly stuff. Still, the kill-or-die realities are something we all seem to accept. You know, the circle of life and all that.

What I wasn’t ready for was the fact that helpless little ones are almost universally the preferred real-world victims in Kenya’s Masai Mara game preserve, where “Big Cat Diary” is filmed.

Often, it’s same-species infanticide, too. Rogue male lions, for example, will lay waste to an entire litter of their own kind in no time, just for the chance it gives them with a suddenly available mom.

Then there are the water buffalo, hyenas and other menaces roaming around, among which the fellow-primate baboon packs seem especially gratuitous. Almost exclusively vegetarian, male baboons will typically ignore a terrified baby gazelle in the underbrush, for example — unless a competing suitor or a potential mate is nearby, at which point the male will coldly rip the little stranger into a limp, bloody snack for no other reason than machismo.

I couldn’t help thinking about “Big Cat Diary” last week as I watched all the politics of hate for hate’s sake boil over during the climactic scenes of the nation’s health-care drama.

I kept asking myself: Let’s say these histrionics actually motivate some trigger-happy loser. What, then, would the fundamental difference be between, say, the baboon predators of the Masai Mara and the packs of screaming, wild-eyed lunatics who poisoned the health-care debate with their scorched-earth death threats, propane-line sabotage, mob vandalism, crosshairs exhortations and all the rest?

Don’t get me wrong: I am no partisan. In fact, after working so close to the political process for the last 30 years, I’ve long since stopped believing in it as a viable solution to … well, almost any problem I can think of. So I can usually appreciate a good political knock-down, drag-out in the same way I appreciate a hard-fought football game between two teams I couldn’t care less about.

This is different, though. This is about whether we’re human beings or animals — and animals without the Masai Mara’s saving-grace survival excuse at that.

Hey, maybe when it comes right down to it, we’re all just one big Jerry Springer freak show after all: “He slaughtered my babies … but I love him anyway!”

Good managers know exactly who they are.

Not “Emperor’s New Clothes” bosses, who obsess first and foremost about only one thing: how to make people see them as they WISH they were.

The good boss wants the best staff for the job. The Emperor’s New Clothes boss wants the best enablers.

The good boss would rather BE an effective manager than look like one. The Emperor’s New Clothes boss is just the opposite — trapped in the delusion that contrived style can somehow pass, and blind to all the eye-rolling when he or she leaves the room. You know the type, right?

I’ve been lucky. I’ve had only two Emperor’s New Clothes bosses during my three-plus decades in journalism, both of whom, not surprisingly in retrospect, were rank-amateur publishers who’d spent their entire careers doing something far different.

First there was the terminally twitchy economist and failed politician whose brother died and left him a fortune, which he used to buy a left-for-dead weekly. I’ll call this guy “the Quacker,” and that’s exactly what he did — incessantly. Listening to him got to be an awful, tin-foil-chewed-between-fillings ordeal every time.

Most of his quacks were about an ever-changing list of perceived “enemies” — former employees and rivals, for example — that he was absolutely positive were still trying to stab him in the back. He’d insert barbs against these phantoms into any story he could, too — regardless of whether those barbs actually related to the story, or, for that matter, were even true.

Another of the Quacker’s tell-tale quirks: His most favored employee — by far — found a way almost every staff meeting to refer to him metaphorically as, “the king.”

The world heavyweight champion of Emperor’s New Clothes bosses in my book: the even twitchier longtime certified public accountant who used his nest egg to buy a trade monthly. His idea of good management: daily OCD fits of hovering, brow-beating and the same threats and lame maxims — over and over and over again. Anything could set him off. Nothing was ever his fault.

Mind you, he was as cordial as can be during the interviews. But I’ll never forget how palpable the learned helplessness was in the office on my first day at work. Everybody was so timid, so silent, so flinchy and so vacant-eyed. It was as if they’d been thrown into some weird reeducation gulag years before and had not seen the light of day since. And, of course, in many ways that’s exactly what had happened.

At least twice before I arrived — and once within the first three weeks I was there — employees who just couldn’t take it anymore stormed out of the office on the spot after tossing their office keys in the ultra-twitcher’s face.

That’s how it tends to go with Emperor’s New Clothes bosses.

Why? Because they’re too image-obsessed to listen; everything’s a power play; and they have no clue that they’re imposing their own insecurities on everybody else. Trying to do right by these guys is hopeless. You might as well try to quench a parched-desert thirst with warm brine.

And so, my friends, I implore you: Look closely for the warning signs of an Emperor’s New Clothes boss when you’re job searching, and be prepared to bite the bullet if you find them, even in vulnerable, slim-pickins times like these.

Be wary of lifelong amateurs in new top-dog positions. Watch for evidence of troops-blaming and hovering. Do your homework, ask around and coax out signals that you could be dealing soon with constant motivation-busters that’ll only keep your career more and more stuck.

Above all, listen well — REALLY well — to your instincts, especially if you encounter a sad, lethargic, vacant-eyed staff at some point before you’re hired that, well, just creeps you out way too much.

Sure jobs are scarce, but remember: With an Emperor’s New Clothes boss in your future, there but for the grace of God go you.

Another day, another nostalgia photo, right?

Well, kinda — except that this one’s full context is a bit more current than the last’s, as I’ll explain further in a minute.

First, though, an introduction. Above is a slightly belated Valentine’s Day shot from the past of my sweetie and official domestic partner, Kathy Heinricy, formerly of beautiful downtown Dell Rapids, South Dakota — that is, until she had the grave misfortune of meeting my monkey ass in late 2007.

Here’s the deal: Apparently my true love was a one-of-a-kind beast whisperer growing up on her family’s dairy farm in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

I am told, for example, that when the Heinricys’ barn cats would crack their legs in the milk-house fans, my Kathy could somehow get them to actually lie quietly on their backs in shoe boxes for the entire day while she was at school — trussed up in string-and-Popsicle-stick traction systems that Kathy researched and improvised completely on her own.

For the record, Kathy’s mother has confirmed — albeit in a fit of convulsive laughter — that Kathy did, indeed, make those little “cat hospitals,” and also that the cats did, indeed, actually heal as a result.

And so, with my own fond Valentine’s Day memories of my benevolent, Pavlovian spirit partner, I now reintroduce the photo above of Kathy Heinricy at age 12 or so — after she somehow did the cat-hospital thing with a Labrador Retriever, only now adding big glasses and a T shirt, and a strategically placed open book.

Sums it all up pretty well to me, my dear.

And what a lucky man I am to be one of the many creatures whose lives you’ve bewitched for the better.