Baker Scholars

The top academic honor at the Harvard Business School is the designation of Baker Scholar which is given to the top 5% the MBAs in each graduating class. The honor is named for the late George F. Baker, a leading financier and philanthropist, who believed in cultivating business leaders who are intellectually inspired and socially conscious.

But on a more mundane level, I want to talk about real baker scholars in the context of training and educating students in real world skills.

La Petite Boulangerie was an American bakery chain in the 1980s.  It was originally a two-store company which was eventually purchased by Pepsico 1982 and franchised to various operators in major markets.  At its peak, La Petite Boulangerie had at over 140 locations coast-to-coast.

I knew La Petite Boulangerie's director of manufacturing.  He once told me a story about an executive level meeting where it was debated whether it was easier to hire skilled bakers to train as store managers or experienced managers to train as craft bakers.

From the perspective of a Harvard MBA, I might be expected to argue that a skilled manager can be trained to do virtually any production level task.  But, as an avid avocational baker, I know that it is very difficult to train people in the art and craft of fine baking.

There are many things that one can learn from a book or from the text, pictures and animations on a web page.  But baking involves working with the variability of living yeast and with wheat flour’s characteristics that change with the slightest variation in temperature and ambient humidity.

Baking is a skill which is taught by apprenticeship.  There is no textual or visual substitute for the touch and feel of living dough; no replacement for using one’s hands to shape the dainty elegance of croissants or a rugged loaf of peasant rye.

When one considers what can be taught in a simulated online environment, one needs to consider those dimensions which electronic media do not do especially well:  dimensions of the touch, texture, smell and sound.  (Yes, you can hear the sound of dough rising as the miniscule bubbles of carbon dioxide produced by the yeast burst and fracture the thin brittle layer which forms on the surface of the dough.)

Baking is a paradigm for the limitations of existing technologies in teaching a craft.  The very simplicity of baking challenges the complexity of online instruction. And that paradox should inform any decision about the use and applicability of instructional technology.