大学急需开设的10门商务课

    我敢肯定，在商界打拼几年之后，几乎所有人都能后知后觉地说出几门当初读大学时原本应该学习的课程。而更令人担忧的是，许多课程从来没有进入过大学课堂，越来越多的毕业生还没有做好充分准备，就一脚踏入了现实社会。

    当然，我所说的课程并不涉及个人生活，比如个人财务与信用管理等。以下是我希望大学提供、但据我所知尚未开设的实用商务课程：

    1. 办公室政治基本处理原则。任何公司，不论大小，都存在办公室政治，其中涉及到错综复杂的“权利地位网络”。谁不希望有人能提前告诉自己，如何解读肢体语言、如何理解办公室里的闲话，以及在自己的电子邮件中，哪些话该说，哪些话只能烂在心里？

    2. 电子邮件商务写作。商务写作不同于学术论文。在学校里，我们受到的教育是为了达到文件页数要求，可以将一个不完善的观点进行扩展。但商务写作则截然相反。需要在一页纸内表达清楚自己的观点，并能迅速完成交易，不需要冗长的幻灯片演示。

    3. 掌握盲打技术。一位职业人员或者高管，每天平均花多长时间，弓着背弯着腰，盯着电脑键盘，用“一指禅”打字？再纵观整个职业生涯，你就能明白学会盲打所带来的回报。

    4. 成功的着装诀窍。与在高校一样，“穿什么是什么”的原则同样适用于商界。但没有人会告诉你商界的着装准则，所以许多千禧一代上班时穿着牛仔裤，戴着棒球帽，露出纹身，脚蹬拖鞋，还希望自己能得到高管级别的待遇。

    5. 揭开商业逻辑的神秘面纱。其实，换种说法，就是如何做一名怀疑论者。人们可能通过数字、糟糕的逻辑和修辞，有意或无意地误导你，所以，你得看透他们的行事方式。人们对你说的话中，99%都是谎言。你能发现谎言背后那1%的真相吗？

    6. 商业预算与收益。重点是了解在公司里如何进行预算以及得到经费。它会给你带来巨大的好处，比如可以为你最中意的项目得到资金支持，为自己的工资水平提供佐证，或者协商奖金额等等。

    7. 销售技巧。大学里有数不清的“营销”课程，但肯定所有人都认为“销售”其实平淡无奇。销售是一门复杂的学问，需要综合人际关系、劝导技巧、谈判能力和专业知识。

    8. 追根究底的问题分析。专业商务人士需要从大局着眼分析问题。大学里大部分课程关注的只是狭隘的兴趣领域，只教学生透过一个层面看待问题。正是这个原因造成了不可预见的结果。

    9. 如何实现工作负担最小化。在办公室里，工作永远干不完，时间永远不够用。所以，你要学会通过组织和优先排序，明确不去做哪些工作，以及怎样才能摆脱这样的工作，同时还要用你的全盘视野打动你的老板。

    10. 求职基本常识。不论找什么工作，对于需要为之付出的努力与时间，人们要有符合实际的预期。糟糕透顶的个人简历和在社交网络上的古怪举动都会毁掉一个人的职业生涯。职位描述与个人成就的区别似乎让大多数人为之头痛。

    I'm sure that every one of us who has been out in the business world for a few years can look back with perfect hindsight and name a few college courses we should have taken. What's more disconcerting to me is that I can name a few that weren't even offered, and more than a few students who graduate ill-prepared for the real world!

    I won't even try to cover here the ones you didn't find for your personal life, like managing personal finances and credit. But on the business side, here is my list of useful courses that we wish existed, but as far as I know, still aren't generally available:

    1.Basic Office Politics. Office politics involves the complex network of power and status that exists within every business, large and small. Don't you wish that someone had prepped you on how to read the body language, interpret office gossip, and when to hit the delete key on your email rather than the send key?

    2.Business Writing for Email. Writing in business is not the same as in an academic environment. In school, you're taught to stretch weak ideas to reach your document page limit. The business world expects exactly the opposite. The challenge is to communicate your idea in one page, and close the deal quickly without a big slide presentation.

    3.Touch-Typing for Dummies. How many hours a day does the average professional and executive today spend hunched over a computer keyboard "hunting and pecking"? Throughout a career lifetime, just think of the return on that investment.

    4.Dress for Success. "You are what you wear" works in business, just like it did in high school. But no one tells you the business norms, so Gen-Y'ers come to work in jeans, baseball caps, tattoos, flip-flops and expect to be treated as executives.

    5.Demystifying Business Logic. Another term for this is how to be a skeptic. Understand the ways people can mislead deliberately or accidentally with numbers, bad logic and rhetoric. There's some untruth hidden in 99% of everything you're told. Can you find it?

    6.Business Budgets and Benefits. The focus here would be on the actual nuts and bolts of how things get budgeted and financed in business. This will pay big dividends in getting your favorite project funded, or justifying your own salary, or negotiating a bonus.

    7.Business Sales Techniques. We can find tons of "marketing' courses in colleges and universities but everyone must think that "selling" is intuitively obvious. The art of selling is complex blend of relationships, persuasion techniques, negotiation, and knowledge.

    8.Root-Cause Problem Analysis. Business professionals need to analyze problems from a big picture perspective. Most classes in college focus on a narrow area of interest, which just teach students to focus on problems through one lens. That's how unforeseen consequences go unforeseen.

    9.Minimizing Business Workloads. In the office world there's always way more work than there is time to do it. You need to be able to figure out what not to do, and how to not do it, by organizing and prioritizing, and still impress your boss with your thoroughness.

    10.Job Hunting Basics. People need realistic expectations about how much effort and time it takes to get just about any job. Atrocious resumes and social network antics will kill your career. The difference between job descriptions and accomplishments seems to elude most people.