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This Art Deco building in Miami Beach doesn't look like a laboratory for the future of business education. A pink neon sign that reads "Miami Ad School" buzzes all night long above the main entrance. The school's canine mascots, Fudge and Applesauce, make it a point to sniff distinguished guest speakers. And the school's founders, the husband-and-wife team of Ron and Pippa Seichrist, sometimes meet with students at a nearby sidewalk cafe, on South Beach's trendy Lincoln Road Mall.

But this ultramellow image is deceptive. The Miami Ad School, founded in 1993, is inventing a new way to teach students about the business of advertising. In the process, it is also creating a set of principles about teaching, learning, and changing that are relevant to almost any business.

Forget sitting through academic lectures. The Miami Ad School has created a microcosm of the industry in which its students want to work -- complete with tight budgets and fussy clients. Forget term papers. Students "study" by developing concepts, writing copy, supervising photo shoots, and producing print ads. Forget teachers with impressive credentials but no real-world experience. Students work only with instructors who work in the ad industry.

"It's all about the work," explains Mario Girard, who worked as a coat-check attendant, a ski-lift operator, and a sculptor before enrolling in the school. "The focus here is on doing advertising." During his time at the school, Girard has designed merchandise for MTV and created an underground marketing campaign for Fresh Cuts, a music store piloted by Blockbuster Entertainment Group.

What brings students to the school? Some are searching for a career that gets them juiced up. Others want to make a career change within advertising -- say, from being an account manager or a traffic coordinator to working on the creative side of the business. Tuition costs about $2,500 per quarter, and most students finish the program in two years. Graduation isn't about grades -- it's about growth.

Take Cliff Courtney's class on advertising concepts. Like most classes, it's held in the evening so that working professionals can come to the school and teach. Courtney is the creative director of a Miami agency called Courtney Watson, which handles advertising for such organizations as the Florida Marlins and Motorola Latin America. His assignment to the 20 students in the class: Create self-promotional packages that might win them each a job interview at his agency.

Courtney holds up a FedEx envelope and asks its owner, Kirsten Hampton, to come forward. She had dropped it off at his agency the previous day. The envelope contains a letter to Courtney from an exec at a big agency, telling him about Hampton, who had refused a job offer from that agency. This executive desperately wanted to hire her, but she had her mind set on working at Courtney Watson. Then the executive confesses to being a fictitious character -- and beseeches Courtney to give Hampton an interview.

Courtney says he read the letter three times before he realized that it had been written for his assignment. "This is a winner," he declares. "I want to meet this person."

Not all feedback is so upbeat. A guiding principle at the school is that students should not be shielded from criticism. Its literature asserts, "Our faculty tells it like it is; if your work is great, they'll tell you so; if your work sucks, they'll tell you why and how to fix it."