Teaching in the Present Tense

• Business schools must ensure that students develop capabilities that transfer to varied and unfamiliar business situations, not just the ability to apply formulas.
• The CART method gives students repeated practice applying theoretical lenses discussed in class to carefully selected business news stories.
• This approach creates structured opportunities for analysis and reflection while generating direct evidence of students’ judgment and higher-order learning.

 
As business faculty, are we building skills or are we building capabilities? Graduates who can use a formula to calculate the value of a bond have a skill. Graduates who encounter an unfamiliar financial instrument, identify which theoretical lens applies, and make a defensible judgment under uncertainty have a capability.

The difference is transfer—the ability to carry learning from a known context into an unfamiliar one. And transfer isn’t built by presenting yet another framework; it’s built by asking students, week after week, to stress-test theory against situations the syllabus never predicted.

Generative AI has made this distinction urgent. Tools such as ChatGPT can conduct a risk analysis or summarize a case study in seconds. What AI cannot do (at least for now) is decide which lens to reach for when the problem hasn’t been framed yet, spot when data break a theory rather than fit it, and exercise judgment about what to do next.

These are capabilities. And they are the premium currency of a business degree.

Below, I introduce a reproducible, low-overhead method for building exactly those capabilities. It’s called CART, which stands for concept, application, reflection, and transfer. It uses the 24-hour news cycle to generate rigorous empirical material—without letting headlines hijack the learning.

Theory Leads. News Serves.

Using current affairs in class isn’t new. But without a disciplined filter, integrating the news in course discussion drifts into what I call “engagement theater.”

In other words, students are awake, but they aren’t building analytical muscle. CART fixes that by making the theoretical lens the operating system and the news item the data that the system processes. The method follows this sequence:

1. Concept. Before any headline appears, students are anchored in a theoretical lens.
2. Application. They discuss a news story deliberately selected to suit the concept. The right story isn’t the most dramatic; it’s the one that best represents the lens and sets up transfer.
3. Structured reflection. Students answer prompts that force interrogation: Does this event confirm, refine, or challenge the concept? What is the framework missing? If you were the decision-maker, what would the theory tell you to do next week?
4. Transfer. Students apply the same concept to a second, unfamiliar situation. That jump—from analysis to inference—is a capability that can be observed and assessed.

Underpinned by Kolb’s classic experiential learning cycle, a CART-based course rests on a set of theoretical lenses that are, by design, nonnegotiable. I deliberately use the term “lens”—not “core” course or “foundational” exercise—because it signals a strict hierarchy: No headline, however gripping, is allowed to displace the theoretical anchor.

Students learn to transfer knowledge by stress-testing theory against situations the syllabus never predicted.

The lens leads; the news serves. This prevents a useful current-events discussion from decaying into an opinion-based chat and keeps the capstone skill of transfer in view.

News as Empirical Material

The lenses below are drawn from a recent module of my postgraduate Strategic Management course at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. The framework, however, is discipline-agnostic. Whether a professor teaches finance, marketing, ethics, or operations, CART provides a chassis on which to build an approach for teaching in the present tense.

The weeks are spaced throughout the semester and sequenced to reflect the course’s logical arc from foundational analysis (purpose, environment) through competitive positioning and governance to international integration. I introduce each lens with a pre-reading and lecture at the beginning of its designated week, establishing the anchor before any headline appears.

• Week 1: Defining organizational purpose. Students identify the organization’s mission and vision—its “why” and “where to.” They learn to detect when a stated vision illuminates strategy and when it masks drift.
• Week 2: Environmental scanning and strategic analysis. Students use a PESTEL analysis to identify which specific political, economic, social, technological, environmental, or legal factors shift strategic logic in a given industry. This lens trains students to move beyond making generic checklists toward conducting macroenvironmental scans that separate structural forces from transient noise.
• Week 5: Business-level strategy. Students apply Porter’s Generic Business Strategies of cost leadership. They trace a cost gap to its roots—scale, proprietary tech, unique access—and test whether a competitor can replicate a price cut without destroying its own economics.
• Week 6: Corporate-level strategy. They consider whether a corporate parent adds more value than the businesses would capture alone. They must ask: What does the parent contribute, and will that contribution remain after a leadership transition?
• Week 8: Corporate governance. At this stage, students apply shareholder-versus-stakeholder theories to trace public multistakeholder commitments back to operational decisions. They must ask whether the rhetoric survives contact with shareholder pressure.
• Week 9: Internationalization strategy. Students explore modes and motives for entering foreign markets. Foreign entry becomes a stress test of the entire strategy.

The news articles that animate these lenses can—and should—change each term. The table below captures how I paired each lens in my strategic management module with a live business story to drive the full CART cycle.

The specific headlines will age, and that’s exactly the point. Students are building the habit of reaching for the right conceptual tool when the situation is unfamiliar, forming judgment AI cannot replicate.

Inside the CART Cycle

To see CART in motion, consider how students navigated the Business-Level Strategy lens, using Porter’s generic strategy of cost leadership. The news article, published that very week in the Financial Times, dealt with Vanguard’s announcement that it would cut its fees.

I selected this article because it would force students to test a claim—that sustainable cost leadership requires a structural advantage, not just margin sacrifice. I also selected it because financial services offered a clean, unexpected bridge for transfer across industries later in the session.

During the discussion, I emphasized the following:

Concept-first thinking. Students had already internalized the acid test: If a competitor can copy the lower price without destroying its own economics, reducing fees is not cost leadership; it’s a pricing skirmish. They knew genuine cost leadership is rooted in scale, proprietary technology, unique supplier access, or a business model that rivals cannot easily replicate.

Application. Students engaged in ten minutes of silent reading before marking every data point that could be explained—or not—by the lens. The article detailed how Vanguard was slashing fees across dozens of funds to squeeze competitors who rely on asset management fees to satisfy external shareholders.

Reflection. Small groups then worked for 12 minutes on three questions:

• Does this event confirm, refine, or challenge the concept of cost leadership?
• What is the lens missing?
• How would you advise the head of BlackRock’s exchange-traded fund (ETF) division? What does the theory tell you to do next week?

Early consensus was that the concept of cost leadership was confirmed. That is, until a student interrupted to point out, “Vanguard’s mutual ownership means no external shareholders. Almost no competitor has that structure. The lens should name the ownership model explicitly because it’s an enabler most rivals can’t copy.”

Another pushed further: “We’re missing service quality and digital experience. Cost leadership doesn’t capture value that isn’t about cost. Some clients will pay more for better tools. Is the lens only about price, or about total value?”

As students view current events through different theoretical lenses, they build the habit of reaching for the right conceptual tool when the situation is unfamiliar.

When the students explored how they would advise BlackRock’s ETF division head, the group split. “Match Vanguard’s fees,” one side argued. “Differentiate with advice tools, model portfolios, tax-loss harvesting,” the other side countered. “A cost war you structurally can’t win destroys value. Turn the conversation from price to outcome.”

The lens narrowed the strategic options without dictating one. For 12 minutes, students practiced distinguishing structural advantage from reactive pricing, spotting hidden enablers, refining theory under pressure, and making a defensible recommendation with incomplete information.

Transfer. Immediately, I handed out a one-paragraph news brief: “Ryanair to eliminate several ancillary charges.” In a short memo, students applied the same cost-leadership lens. They mapped Ryanair’s structural drivers—airport bargaining power, single fleet type, high seat density—and concluded the move reflected genuine cost leadership, not reactive marketing. A lens that focused on U.S. asset management crossed over to European aviation in minutes.

In the debrief, several students volunteered they were already using the cost leadership lens at work, including a logistics coordinator evaluating a supplier’s price cut and a retail manager dissecting a competitor’s “everyday low price” promise. Transfer wasn’t theoretical; it was crossing sectors in real time.

Later in the term, students tested corporate parenting advantage on a hands-off American conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway. Then, they immediately transferred this concept to a hands-on Anglo-Dutch parent, Unilever. The content changed; the capability-building structure remained identical.

What CART Asks of Faculty

This approach comes with two requirements for faculty. The first is to stay flexible. The right news story may break at 11 p.m. the night before a seminar. Faculty must be ready to swap a pre-selected article for a better one, reframing discussion on the fly.

The second is to be willing to engage in a dedicated search for transfer-serving headlines. Not every story fits. The best article powerfully activates a course concept and provides a clear bridge to another industry, geography, or context.

For example, when I chose the Vanguard fee-cut story, I already had the Ryanair announcement in hand. That forethought—which might require only 15 to 20 minutes of a professor’s time per session—transforms a case discussion into a measurable demonstration of transfer. The payoff is that students leave not with a memory of a case but with a capability they can deploy anywhere.

Assurance of Learning That Writes Itself

For schools navigating AACSB Standard 5, CART generates a quiet gold mine of artifacts. Every reflective analysis and every transfer memo provides direct, assessable evidence of higher-order learning. No end-of-program standardized test is required. Faculty can sample the work for:

• Critical thinking. Can students evaluate whether theory holds, breaks, or needs adaptation?
• Integration of knowledge. Do they draw connections across governance, strategy, and finance when the news demands it?
• Learning transfer. Do they use the “Transfer” step to take a lens from one context and apply it to a novel one?
• Contextual and societal awareness. How well can they identify and discuss theories that are embedded in real-time events that reflect institutional, regulatory, and ethical realities?

This is curriculum-embedded assessment at its most natural. It mirrors what graduates will actually do, which carries far more weight with accreditors than bolt-on tests of recall.

Teaching in the present tense gives students weekly practice in encountering something unfamiliar and asking, “What concept do I use to read this?”

The biggest barrier to pedagogical change is the myth that its adoption requires a committee, a vote, and a year of redesign. CART requires none of that. Any instructor, in any discipline, can pilot it in a single session with three ingredients: one nonnegotiable concept, one carefully selected news article, and one structured reflection question.

The concept can be the time value of money, brand positioning, moral hazard, or supply chain resilience. The article can be from the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, the BBC, a local business journal, or a corporate press release—so long as it activates the lens and enables transfer.

The Capability That Outlasts AI

AI can flood us with populated frameworks, but it cannot decide which lens to reach for when a problem hasn’t been framed yet. It cannot exercise judgment about what to do next. Those are human capabilities, and they are built one deliberate practice at a time.

Teaching in the present tense—using news as live data to support the syllabus—delivers exactly that kind of intellectual development. It gives students weekly practice in encountering something unfamiliar and asking, “What concept do I use to read this?” That’s not engagement theater. That’s durable, transferable capability. And it’s something every business school can start building next Monday morning.