MU | N e w s
Grandin: Focus on what
children with autism can do
Why sales?
A sales degree is a natural for Manchester, whose Accounting
and Business Department is the University’s largest. About
a fifth of undergraduate degrees are earned through the
department’s programs.
“We anticipate that the new sales program will serve
Manchester students well regardless of the industries they
choose,” says Professor Tim Ogden, department chair. “The
sales function touches every organization, large and small,
for-profit and nonprofit,” adds Ogden. “There are not
many sales programs in Indiana, and we expect ours to be
distinctive in two ways.”
First, it will include a course that marries sales and
entrepreneurship. In his recent book, To Sell is Human,
Daniel Pink reports that “independent entrepreneurs may
grow by 65 million in the rest of the decade and could
become a majority of the workforce by 2020.”
Second, Manchester’s program will include a communication
course that focuses on the ethics of listening in sales
relationships. The course will explore, among other things,
the differences between hearing and listening, empathy in
a sales context, subtle nonverbal and verbal cues, and what
constitutes listening behavior in sales.
Manchester
University
regrets these
omissions in the
2013 Celebrating
Stewardship
Contributions to Memorial and Endowed Funds in 2013:
* The Wendell L. and Marcia L. Dilling Chemistry
Scholarship Fund
The world needs all
kinds of talents, Temple
Grandin told a capacity
crowd March 6 at
Cordier Auditorium.
An expert in animal
science, Grandin is best
known for advancing
society’s understanding
of autism and for
sharing her personal
struggles and triumphs
with the neural
development disorder.
Manchester named her
its 2012-13 Innovator
of the Year.
When children are
diagnosed with autism,
we need to look at what they can do, Grandin said. “We spend too
much time concerned about what kids can’t do.” There are undiagnosed
people (with autism) all over Silicon Valley, and Einstein didn’t talk until
he was 3, she added.
Grandin is concerned that hands-on classes such as art, woodworking
and mechanics are disappearing from schools. “We’re taking a very
narrow view of education,” she said. “If you don’t expose kids to
interesting things they don