If you’ve been on twitter or Facebook over the weekend, perhaps you’ve seen the stories about Beam, Inc.’s decision to reduce the alcohol content in their Maker’s Mark whiskey, and the subsequent furor and reversal of the decision.

Economics and entrepreneurship are passions of mine, and I met the Maker’s Mark executive team many years ago, spurring my interest in America’s original spirit, so this story caught my eye. It’s a simple illustration of supply and demand, and of a failure in creative problem solving that led to the marketing scramble of the weekend.

During my days as a professor I did a lot of executive education. Maker’s Mark President Bill Samuels was at such a session. Initially he questioned the value of entrepreneurship education. I won him over, visited in Kentucky and now Maker’s Mark is a staple in the Spinelli cabinet.

Whiskey and bourbon are experiencing a rise in both domestic and international demand. Due to the aging process behind Maker’s Mark in particular, production of product that goes on the shelves today happened in 2007. This alone puts the company in a sensitive position as they gauge popularity and demand years in advance. They seem to have miscalculated the amount of product the world would be thirsty for today, and thus were faced with the choice to supply a shortage, or to dilute their product.

Their choice has been an unpopular one receiving passionate coverage both in the press and social media. While I applaud the outcome of the situation – the reversal of the decision shows that they listen to and understand their loyal customers – I return again to the lessons of both the company’s choice and marketing.

For any business, decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. What makes sense from a distribution standpoint may actually hurt the bottom line and damage the product’s reputation. What makes sense as a marketing decision might not be deliverable as a product. A well-informed company practices holistic problem solving to make sure that all disciplines feed into solutions that are true to the brand, and pleasing to the customer.

We are proud of our transdisciplinary education here at PhilaU, and of the Kanbar College of Design, Engineering and Commerce curriculum in particular. This is a classic example of why our students are taught to think in cross-disciplinary ways – so they can do so in the professional world.

I respect Beam, Inc. for listening to their customers and rectifying what could have been a damaging decision. I hope that in the future they are more creative in solving their market demand problems. I know some graduates who could help them out in that department.

When I speak with new students at the start of the year, I always share the same message: Go to every class, on time and prepared to work. Don’t skip class. If you’ve missed a class already, don’t ever do it again.

More and more, research is supporting what educators have long known – the measure of a student’s ability to succeed in the college environment has just as much to do with their tenacity and responsibility as their natural intelligence.

This idea that non-cognitive, soft skills are just as important as SAT scores and GPAs has a number of ramifications; both for college admissions and for the ways we educate our students once they arrive on campus.

James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winning economist at the University of Chicago explains: “test scores explain only a tiny fraction of the variability among individuals – who’s successful and who’s not – and that other factors are out there that aren’t measured – that aren’t even accounted for – in public policy that make a big difference.”

Paul Tough, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and author of “How Children Succeed” is also exploring the phenomena and labels these non-cognitive skills as “character.”

What research is showing us, and what Dr. Heckman and Mr. Tough are trying to explain, are phenomena educators see everyday in our classrooms. Success is, in many ways, about what you do with what you’re given. It isn’t easy; it doesn’t come easily to even the smartest among us. Successes are won. At Philadelphia University we believe that evaluation and enhancements of learning and social skills can leverage the students’ assets; whatever they are.

Our curriculum is specifically designed to teach professional skills, but in doing so it instills soft skills that lead to successes. The collaborative and transdisciplinary nature of our brand of Nexus Learning mean that responsibility for a product, and accountability to your fellow students, are a part of each project and assignment our students undertake. What they are learning runs deeper than testable academics. They are strengthening non-cognitive, but essential skills.

In the global market, a large part of the competitive edge the United States possesses is through an educated, skilled and knowledgeable citizenry. In other words: go to college and we’ll all get ahead. At the same time, the US boasts the highest drop out rate in the world. It’s soft skills – tenacity and grit – that help to close that gap. We need professional leaders who are persistent and will fight for their successes.

At Philadelphia University, our education philosophy encourages active participation with faculty, staff, and other students. It calls on students to be responsible and professional from the start of their programs. The nature of this learning process inherently builds non-cognitive skills – ones that will be assists both in our classrooms and in the professional world outside our doors.

Last week I met with a group of 20 women – alumnae, faculty, students, and local business leaders – to discuss the growing role of women in entrepreneurship. They were an engaging and challenging group and have left me thinking about the entrepreneurial world our female graduates leave PhilaU to enter.

As a fifty-something male, there are some areas of this conversation I’m less qualified to address, and ones where I defer to members of our faculty like Dr. Natalie Nixon, Director of the Strategic Design MBA Program, and Dr. Sue Lehrman, Dean of the School of Business Administration. Both Natalie and Sue are dynamic thinkers influencing and informing the female entrepreneurs currently in our student body.

What I am qualified to speak to are the demands of starting and owning a business, of the creativity and flexibility necessary to 21^st Century entrepreneurship. Here, we find examples of women leading with distinctive and diverse skill sets, and with exceptional results.

The face of this workforce is changing – in 2010, women became the majority of the U.S. workforce for the first time in the country’s history. 57% of college students are now women. While men continue to hold the majority in executive ranks and corporate boardrooms, women are making inroads in these areas as well, in some particularly high-profile ways – Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Ginni Rometty at IBM, Meg Whitman at HP, Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, Marillyn Hewson at Lockheed Martin – female CEO and COOs are leading innovative Fortune 500 companies.

There will be those who will over-generalize or compartmentalize men and women into crude gender stereotypes: to say that women lead as empathetic consensus-seekers and community builders, men as decisive leaders capable of bold and daring risks. To do so misses the point. Much more can be learned from the nature of the companies choosing female leadership than the supposed qualities women bring to the table.

A 2008 study from Columbia Business School and the University of Maryland sited in Hana Rosin’s Atlantic article on this subject found that, in 1,500 U.S companies studied from 1992-2006, “[f]irms that had women in top positions performed better, and this was especially true if the firm pursued what the researchers called an ‘innovation intensive strategy,’ in which, they argued, ‘creativity and collaboration may be especially important.’” Innovation intensive, creative and collaborative – those are words the PhilaU curriculum exemplifies.

Our students are being prepared to be professional leaders of innovative, forward thinking companies of the 21^st Century.  All of this requires a nuanced and pluralistic understanding of the world. I am grateful for the strong female members of our faculty, staff, alumni and student body who contribute to the culture of our community. I am also excited to watch the ways our female students, in particular, influence the face of the corporate world. The curriculum and faculty of PhilaU have given them the tools for success. I am eager to watch them achieve it.