If you ask 20 random graduates to explain why they went to business school, a large majority will list networking as one of the top reasons. Makes sense, too, since the connections one makes in business school can be useful down the road in finding jobs and excelling at them. Which is why it’s all the more curious that if you comb through the course curriculum of 20 random business schools, you’d be hard-pressed to turn up more than a handful that actually teach their students how to network. An article by David Kahn, chief revenue officer at the Wall Street Journal Office Network, complained the fact that most businesses do a poor job teaching their employees how to network, especially those workers who are not directly connected to obvious revenue-generation functions.By any name—"networking", "relationship capital", "social capital"—the sum and substance of one’s connections and networks has value far beyond job searches. They are essential to all sorts of organizational priorities—not only sales, but also recruiting, lobbying and various types of "sourcing", from partnerships to acquisition targets to industry experts. A few business schools take networking seriously—most notably the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School, where a growing number of academic professors have started to research social networks from a variety of angles. But most business schools and pretty much all undergraduate institutions ignore networking as a discipline entirely or give it passing attention in modules embedded (嵌入) in broader leadership or management sections. Why For two primary reasons. First, the idea of trading on one’s personal relationships for professional gain continues to strike some academics as unseemly. Networking still has something of a bad reputation to some. Second, even those who understand and value relationship capital’s role in commerce often think of it as a collections of so-called soft skills, with which some small percentage of fortunate folks were born and the rest of humankind can only admire. But while there’s truth in the first notion, the second is just plain wrong. Networking, Kahn says is a learnable skill. Why do most business schools ignore networking as a discipline