Daily Beast writer, Tim Mak, picks up on youthful mistakes and does some serious investigation into the havoc I caused. Oh well …
Today a long-lost friend from high school “friended” me on Facebook. In response to her question about how I am doing, I wrote: “My life is not what I might have predicted it would be in high school. But I am astonished by how rich and happy it has become.” It was only after I wrote it that I began to consider what those words really meant.
I have been a professor for 25 years – most of my professional life. Even when I had full-time corporate jobs, I always took salary cuts to be able to maintain my professor role … because teaching has given me about as much joy as anything in my life. Watching students learn, improve, and gain confidence is an amazing thing! But, last spring, for the first time in three decades – since I first imagined emulating my favorite high school teachers – I realized I have no compulsion to ever be in front of a classroom ever again.
Attention, the most critical resource in the business world today, often escapes unused. In many cases, people just aren’t paying attention to the right things often enough, and are paying attention to the wrong things way too much.
“If you can get into Harvard, you should go.”
That is the advice I have given to everyone who has asked for the last 30 years. The program does not matter; if it says Harvard on it, it is worth enrolling.
There are three big reasons for my recommendation:
1) You will never have to explain yourself
Accreditation in education is a joke – but it is a joke with teeth, and that is where my concern lies. And while only some students care about accreditation itself, almost all students care about business school rankings – and to be ranked, a school is required to have accreditation.
Helping students to understand how to cope with the ambiguity and uncertainty that will inevitably surround them as leaders should be the goal of all business school professors. But it is not. Instead, we discuss case studies that have “right answers” and are drawn from long-past business environments; we teach from textbooks and administer exams on mathematical models with defined datasets; we require students to “turn off the internet” when they are in the classroom because we don’t want them distracted by the real world. We do everything we can to limit the issues we discuss in class to our own academic disciplines.
When I was in my early 30s with three young kids at home, I renounced my childhood religion – Mormonism. My father tried to talk me out of it by asking how else my children would learn moral behavior: “How will you reinforce what is right and wrong without going to church? I don’t know how I’d have raised you kids without Sunday school and the youth programs.”
About six months ago, I learned that the most important characteristic corporate executives want from business school graduates is “integrity.” Since then, I’ve spent a part of every day thinking about how integrity can – or should – be taught in business schools. I hit a practical wall every time.
If you suspect things just aren’t clicking in your organization, your managers may be suffering from too much negative attention. Negative attention can reduce productivity and cost your company lots of money in the long run. Finding out what is causing this negative attention and reevaluating your organization’s processes around it can make all the difference between a focused and productive workforce and a distracted and bitter one
