"Business; Emotional Striptease, and Other Paths to Ethics"

In a school where most of the 200 or so classes are Wall Street-centric, Dr. Rao's course, called Creativity and Personal Mastery, is as unbusiness as business school gets. To Dr. Rao, 52, who has been teaching the course at Columbia since 1999 and first taught it at Long Island University in 1994, it is a forum for self-exploration, meant to help future business leaders define their personal ethics and goals.[...]

Although not every student converts to what some half-jokingly call Raoism, applications for the course have grown steadily. Last fall, Dr. Rao accepted 35 of the more than 90 students who applied. For the current semester, which began in January, he took 80 because he had more than 140 applicants.

To some people in the business school, Dr. Rao's popularity reflects a need for training in ethics and values that has become all too obvious with the deceptions carried out by executives in the last few years.[...]

At a recent class, students performed emotional stripteases, discussing topics including depression and marital problems.

Dr. Rao offers his students what he calls ''mental models,'' ways to think about situations that will confront them, and ways to deal with them, like how to see a bad boss in the best light. His sayings include, ''When the flower blossoms, the bee will come,'' and ''Good thing, bad thing, who knows?''