Professor Daniel Mulligan of the intelligences studies program has created an exciting educational opportunity for students in his Introduction to Competitive Intelligence course.

Twenty-six students are now published authors of a paperback book edited by Mulligan titled “Insights and Analysis in 10 Minutes (or Less).”

Instead of assigning each student to read a business book, write a paper summarizing it and deliver a report to the class, Mulligan decided to motivate students by creating a more exciting opportunity.

Letting it be known that the results would be published, Mulligan hoped students would put forth more effort.

The book summarizes and analyzes 26 different books on leadership, business and motivation. Students were expected to go beyond a regular summary by researching and analyzing the book’s contents and its author.

“I think I may have enjoyed this report slightly better (than a normal intelligence presentation) because I really got into the book I was reading,” said Mitchell Mahfoud, one of the student authors. “Aside from the assigned reading, I did extra research to learn about the author of the book, who was also the CEO of the company the book focused on, and also looked up the company online.”

Mulligan provided his students with a list of books to choose from. Based on which book they chose to assess, he then determined when the analysis and presentation were due.

Students appeared to enjoy the project and were excited that the publication would be available for them to keep both as a reference and as something substantial they could produce at future job interviews.

“I thought it was a great learning experience,” said Mahfoud. “The book I chose, “Leading for Growth,” by Ray Davis, was very insightful and helped me to better understand the development process of a company. It was interesting and had concepts that applied to what we were doing in class.”

Being part of a project like this is beneficial to students in the Intelligence Studies program because they now have an experience collaborating on an actual published work, though only a few dozen are actually printed.

“The books are essentially ‘vanity press,’ but my goal is to go back and compile the best of all three volumes and possibly make them available for free through our department’s website,” Mulligan said.

The new book, completed at the close of winter term, represents the second volume in a series. Students in Mulligan’s current Intro to Competitive Intelligence course are working on Volume 3.