John Clavin ’84 (left) leads a case study on General Motors. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

For his first job out of college, Peter Bell ’86, an accounting major, signed on with a national accounting firm. He lasted all of two months. Bell realized that going in he’d known much about accounting practices but little about the profession. The field, he discovered, was a poor match for someone who enjoyed a fast-paced work environment and wanted a chance to move quickly up the corporate ladder.

Bell shifted to the high-tech industry and went on to run a data storage technology company. He then founded a venture capital firm, after which he joined the international venture capital company Highland Capital Partners. In 2002, he conceived the idea of teaching a new undergraduate business course at Boston College.

Bell spoke with his friend John Clavin ’84, who, like Bell, had washed out of his first job; Clavin too joined the technology industry, and then went on to become a partner in an investment management firm. The pair approached the then dean of the Carroll School of Management, Helen Frame Peters, with the idea for an annual undergraduate course called “Perspectives on Management.” It would feature the case method used in MBA programs—Bell and Clavin both have MBAs from Harvard—along with guest speakers who would discuss their work experiences and offer career advice. The goal was to give business students a taste of how business professionals—financial advisors, marketers, accountants, and CEOs—actually spend their working days.

Now in their seventh year teaching the course, Bell and Clavin devote each of its weekly three-hour class sessions to a single business function or industry; most sessions also feature a guest speaker—a Boston College graduate or parent working in a business sector related to that day’s case. Because Bell and Clavin want students to get an early look at possible career paths, the course is pitched mainly to sophomores. Current and former students in the class speak highly of the case method, which is rarely used outside graduate schools. The cases, says Mac Steenrod ’06, now an associate at JMI Equity in Baltimore, teach you “to deal with situations where you have to make a decision without perfect information—the way you do in real life.”

The February 12 class, led by the energetic Bell, focused on asset management, hedge funds in particular. Bell paced, fired questions, wheeled to scribble phrases on the board, teasing out details about the character and function of the funds: They’re lightly regulated; their managers are often paid lavishly; they use a wide variety of investment strategies, not limited to “hedging.”

That day’s case examined an investment strategy known as hedge fund activism, in which a fund buys a stake in a company and then organizes other shareholders to push for changes that will, ideally, increase share value. These changes may include spinning off a division; using cash or even borrowing money to pay dividends or repurchase shares; replacing managers or lowering their compensation. It’s a contentious strategy, Bell noted.

The case under review involved the troubled relations between an activist hedge fund and two fast-food chains. The broad question was whether hedge fund activism serves companies’ and shareholders’ long-term interests. The class discussion made clear the answer isn’t a simple yes or no. Hedge fund activism can discipline complacent or crooked managers, several students argued. But managers may know best how to run their own companies, another student countered. And, added another, even if shares do go up in the short term, “if you’re investing for the long term, you’re not going to like it as much.”

This level of ambiguity is exactly what Bell, now a University trustee, hopes to generate in the classroom discussions. “Students,” he explained in an interview, “are always looking for the [right] answer. . . . but in the business world there’s no such thing.”

Two weeks later, Clavin taught a very different case: John Hinrichs, a plant manager at General Motors, must convince union assembly-line workers to accept major changes in their work that will accompany a technological upgrade. At the same time he has to make decisions on the extent of the upgrade, taking into account factors such as downtime costs and the consequences of disruptions to employees’ work routines.

Toward the end of most classes, a guest speaker offers a personal perspective. On the day of the hedge fund case, David O’Connor ’86, who runs a real estate–based fund called High Rise Capital Management, described his unusual career trajectory. He started as a property manager in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he was required to unclog sewers and once had to retrieve a dead body from a rental unit. “It was the bowels of the real estate business,” O’Connor said, “but I learned an awful lot, including how to deal with corrupt governments.”

David Donatelli ’87, a divisional president at EMC Corporation, joined the class on the day of the assembly line case, and had plentiful advice for students. On the value of reading business publications: “When you go for an interview, you’ll be able to have an intelligent conversation.” On gaining management experience: “If you wait tables, you can manage your shift; if you belong to a ski team, you can manage a ski trip.”

In conversations outside the class more than one student called the speakers “inspirational.” “A lot of what he went through coming out of college is what I’ll be going through,” says accounting major David Lavander ’11 of Frank Mahoney ’85, a partner at Ernst & Young, who visited the class on February 19. The speakers, says Cole Boskey ’09, a history major with a job lined up in venture capital, “are extremely smart, ex-tremely ambitious, extremely dedicated. You leave the class feeling ‘I can be successful.’. . . They give you the dream that it’s possible.”

David Reich is a writer in the Boston area.

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