Business Schools Create Curriculums Custom-Designed for Companies.

Byline: Robert Weisman

Aug. 17--They called themselves the "white rats," after the experimental nature of their program. Two dozen of them huddled in a classroom at MIT's Sloan School of Management in June, but they weren't typical students. They were middle-aged oil executives from around the world, all top project managers for British Petroleum, and they were the first class in the "Project Academy" that Sloan had crafted for BP.

Their mascot, a stuffed rat found at a toy store, occupied an honored place near Sloan deputy dean Donald R. Lessard at the front of the classroom. "At one point, Don picked up the rat and cleaned off the projector screen with its butt, which prompted a chorus of boos," recalled Eleanor Westney, a Sloan international management professor. "One of the participants returned the next day with a stuffed MIT beaver, and said, 'If you have to wipe that screen again, use this.' "

So began the largest custom-designed executive education program in MIT's history, a multimillion-dollar contract it had won in a five-way competition with some of the world's top business schools. BP's first team of 25 executives arrived in June to study management for such mammoth BP projects as running a $3 billion oil pipeline from Azerbaijan to Turkey.…