Incoming! KaosPilots!

[The cadre of change. cb]

Dane MBAs reinvent biz school in poorest Vancouver.

"Stepping into the lobby of the KaosPilots' impromptu headquarters inside the Stanley, however, is like walking into a different world. Chic-looking European MBA students are talking on cellphones or huddled in laptop scrums discussing how to help a big union or small business go green, get city hall more sustainable, or make disabled people less lonely.

If you're a KaosPilot, this is business school. Peter Froberg is one among 30 of them living and working from an SRO in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Like his counterparts, Froberg, a 25-year-old Dane, beat out some tough competition for a chance to join the Denmark-based program and come learn in Canada's poorest postal code. He's also shelling out considerable tuition fees because he wants to learn how to effect "a merger between the business world and the idealistic world," as he puts it.

In three years of fast-paced projects and lectures, students like Froberg plan to become a troupe of organizational contortionists, equally at home in corporate, non-profit and public spheres. It's the kind of ambidextrous business acumen students hope will help them climb the ladder, and that the program's creators hope will plug Europe's troubling brain drain."