Tarek Salem had quite a shock in his first semester at Babson College. Mr. Salem had left Egypt to pursue a master's degree at the prestigious business school in Wellesley, Mass. But no one had told him that in addition to crunching numbers, he would also be required to start penning poems.

Salem, like all Babson MBA candidates, had to take a five-week creativity workshop early in his program. Students were randomly assigned to one of seven art seminars: poetry, puppetry, improvisation, painting, fiction, rhythmic movement, or nontraditional music.

Salem ended up in the poetry class, which introduced him to the basics of writing and the creative process – but this was no low-key diversion. In just over a month, the class would have to give a 20-minute presentation about what they had learned and produced. That would be followed by 10 minutes of questions. And, yes, the presentation would be open to the whole campus.

Creative writing and business might not seem like a natural combination. But business schools, where the norm has been classes in administration and analysis, are finding that students need more than that to succeed. They must also be able to think imaginatively and adapt quickly to new situations.

In fact, Babson administrators believed so strongly in the need for flexible business thinkers that they redesigned the MBA program in the early 1990s with creativity in mind. Other colleges have also begun to see how the arts can lend themselves in surprising ways to the world of finance.

Still, none of this was much comfort to Salem. He enjoys poetry, but he wasn't thrilled about having to write it – especially since his first language is Arabic. "It would be very difficult to force myself to express sensitive feelings in a foreign language," he remembers thinking. But despite Salem's best efforts, instructor Mary Pinard refused to drop him from her roster.

"There is a lot of ambiguity in the creative process, and that's hard for people who want answers," she says. "Business students like to decide on the first day what they are going to do for their presentation on the last day."

Yet successful entrepreneurs, she says, are people who can stay open to possibilities, take risks, and find new solutions to problems. "The nature of what entrepreneurs do is very close to what poets do."

Ms. Pinard and Salem made a deal: He would stay in the poetry workshop, and she would allow him to write in his native tongue.

"I want students to understand that poetry is expressive as language," says Pinard, "but it is also expressive as sound, as music."

Still, the class wasn't easy for Salem. "I had another difficulty to find the subject to write about," Salem says. "It's impossible to force yourself to write...; it comes like inspiration ... or magic."

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