Should we balme the teachers?

photo by katiew

The last few months have started a debate about the responsibility of business schools and MBA programs for the GFC. You can see a summary of some of the opinions in the online debateon the Harvard Business Review blog. In the same blog, a few weeks ago, David Champion suggestedto blame lawyers instead of the MBAs for the GFC. As someone who was a lawyer until a few weeks ago and is currently in the middle of an MBA degree, I don’t know if to laugh or to cry. This got me thinking about what I am trying to get out of the MBA. What kind of manager do I want to be in the future?

When you are doing an MBA after you have already done an undergrad in business you don’t really learn new things (unless one of two occurs: (1) you had a bad professor in your undergrad and now you have a great one in your MBA or (2) you take some electives that you did not cover in your undergrad).

Still, the fact that you don’t learn new things officially does not mean that there are no educational gains from doing an MBA. In theory, the level of the class is different and thus, the discussion in class supposedly represents the knowledge and experience of the classmates, which is relatively higher. The problem is that most of the times, this is only true in theory. In order to utilize the knowledge of your fellow classmates, you need a professor that leads the discussion accordingly. Finding such a professor is no easy task.

What I found to be the main educational gain from my limited experience with the MBA so far (a few months now), is that even if you are covering the same formal subject, your own experience allows you to look at the same subjects from a different perspective. Which means?

• You are able to be much more critical in each course because you are more aware of the limitations the course suggests.
• You are able to draw on your own experience since the undergrad degree and that influences whatever is taught in class.
• You are able to draw lines connecting ideas and thoughts across different subjects, thus developing a more integrated thinking about each subject. This is very important due to the fact that the professors themselves tend to see things from their own narrow viewpoint.

All of these are great things and the more you can bring into the process, the more you get out of it. connecting back to my opening thought about the GFC, I think the last point is the most important one. Surprisingly, I thought about it after last week, my accounting professor, Professor Kevin Clarke said in class (the quote is not accurate, as it is from my memory):

“The worst managers I know are managers who mange with the accounting systems instead of using is as a tool. In the past I used to think the soft skills are not that important. Now, after a few years, I know that in order to achieve the business success, you need to know how to get people to do things. And that does not is on the numbers”

I think that realizations like these that take a moderate view and recognize that there are a number of facets to each situation should be the lessons we take from an MBA. As someone who sees himself as a future manager (and maybe a leader) I believe that is the main lesson I should take. Integration and moderation as a management style. Some more of that and less thinking with only one side, could maybe have prevented the GFC. Am I ready to do that? Are you? Do I have the sufficient Knowledge? Do you?

The main lesson in my opinion is this: it does not matter what they teach us. It is what we bring to the table. All the finance, accounting, organizational behaviour, marketing and such courses are only tools. Important tools. Useful tools. But just tools. It is our own thoughts and our own legacy that will use them in the future for good or for bad. If the pupils fail, the easiest thing to do is to blame the teacher. Are they to blame?

“The teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom but rather leads you to the threshold of your mind” Khalil Gibran

Elad

Which team member should get most of your managerial attention – the weakest or the strongest?

Photo by woodleywonderworks

I was reading an article from the Harvard Business Review Blog yesterday called: “Four Ways to Improve Your Team’s Performance “. As it names suggests, the article deals with ways to improve team performance. The “Four Ways” are derived from the suggestions of Tom Donnelly, the men’s track and field coach for the past 34 years at Haverford College. Now, I am the last guy who can say anything against using sports to describe important concepts in other disciplines or life in general, but in my opinion, at least one of the suggested ways is not applicable in both worlds.

The first tip the article tries to import from the track field to business teamwork is setting is:

Spend as much time with the slowest runner as with the fastest. To improve a team’s performance, focus on its weakest members. As long as a team member is working hard, he or she deserves your attentive, careful coaching.

Now, this sentence has two parts and it is important to take both of them in consideration when dealing with teamwork. I kind of agree with the last part of the sentence.  If somebody is trying hard, he should be acknowledged. But, we should be careful. If somebody is trying hard and he is still weak, this might be a sign that he is not talented for that role. Now, this is one place where the difference between teamwork in a business setting and teamwork in a college comes to into play. In a college, I guess, part of the job of a coach is to get everybody to participate and to encourage the cohesiveness of the team’s spirit. In a business setting, the role of a manager is to help each team member find the best ways to make the most of his talents in order to improve the overall team performance and use of the team members’ comparative advantages. And that means, letting people who are not good at what they do go (or moving them to a different role).

The first part of the sentence is even more interesting. On one hand I like it. Because in contrast to the conventional wisdom, it does not say – spend most of the time with the weakest members, but says to spend equal time. But the middle sentence says the opposite that is, focus on the weakest link. Maybe this is true for the track team, but I actually believe that a manager should spend more of his time with his best people. Now this is surprising. They are doing fine – why do they need the managers time? Exactly because they are doing fine. The manager’s role is to help them do great. Help them to excel. Help them make the most out of themselves. Doing fine is not enough. With the right guidance, people who are good can become great. And their improvement will drive up the team performance more than any change in the weakest people ability.

In addition, people crave for attention, recognition and development. And if your best people will feel they don’t have enough of those they will be frustrated and they will leave. But even worse than that, they won’t be able to realize all of their potential. And that is the true role a manager. If you don’t do that, you fail as a manager.

I think this is true not only in the business setting, but also in other settings. So much attention goes to weak students, the troublesome soldiers, for those who fail that we forget those who succeeded, those who do everything right and those who are on the verge of excelling. I think, for example, that in any school, there should be at least an equal number of hours and resources spent on the most excellent students as those who go into those who struggle. How many times did you sit in class and felt that you are not being challenged because the teacher was going slower so the weak students could catch up. Now what would have happened if you were challenged.

Now, I am not saying that we should abandon the weak or ignore them. in the business setting we should find a better role for them or let them go. In education, we should also create ways to help them better themselves. But, if we want excellence and high performance (in the most wide interpretation of the word that includes intellectual performance), we should not forget those who succussed. With a little help, they could do so much more.

Elad

 

Conventional Wisdom

Photo by Kevin Hutchinson

Today I finished something that was well overdue for me. I read “First, break all the rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. As I already mentioned in this blog a few times, I am a keen reader of Buckingham’s books and I talk a lot about the strengths thinking in my e-book. So, I can’t say that I really discovered new things when I read the book. But as always, many ideas wear fine-tuned. Off course this is a book that any person that is a manager of people must read.

I think the interesting thing for me in this book was the systematic way that the book attacks the conventional wisdom. This is something that most of the books I read in the last few weeks did. “Outliers” and “Billion Dollar Lessons” are just two names that pop to my mind. All of these books show us how the commonplace thinking regarding success, excellence and human behaviour is fundamentally wrong.

“First, break all the rules” was written I 1999. Almost ten years ago. It is an international best seller. And still, the misplaced conventional wisdoms that are described in the book are commonplace. I am sure that all of you felt them at some point.

And the question that comes to my mind is: “how can that be changed?”. How can me make these conventional wisdoms become obsolete. How can we make the idea that everybody can excel in any job if they only get the right opportunity and training disappear? or the idea that if you work hard enough you can success no matter what disappear? These two ideas represent a romantic but false stories should be changed. But they don’t.  Because these stories are so fundamental and are so intertwined into our thinking they affect decisions and polices. And when your basic assumptions are wrong, the chances that you will make the right decisions seriously drop. And we still can’t change them.

There is a dire need to create education systems which will eradicate all these wrong notions and that will create, over time, new conventional wisdoms, ones that work. I am not sure our current education systems are up to the challenge. In three weeks I will be starting an MBA course at AGSM. I am quite sure that these conventional wisdoms will be the curriculum. But I am more afraid there will be more misplaced conventional wisdoms that I will be taught and I will never know they are wrong.

Elad

Outliers

Photo by shashiBellamkonda

 A few days ago I finished reading “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. Usually, the day I finish a book is the day I start to write (and usually publish) something about it in my blog. But this book was so overwhelmingly new and interesting that I guess it took me a few days to digest everything. I am still doing it.

I really don’t want to ruin it for you, because no matter what your field is, this one is a must read. And if you are in business or education and/or are parents to young children, you should do everything you can to read it.

The main thesis of the book is that the way we measure success is totally wrong. Gladwell tries to explain that the glorified story of the man (or woman) that came from nowhere and did it on his own is false. We are actually deriving the wrong lessons from these stories.  Great successes are usually a result of two things – opportunities and social legacies. Not that Gladwell is trying to say that talent or hard-work are not important for people’s success. Quite the opposite. What he tries to say is that we put too much importance on these factors and totally ignore other important factors – especially, opportunities and cultural heritage.

As usual, just a number of my thoughts after reading:

1. Education – It is amazing to learn how much our education systems are a result of old habits and inertia. I already mentioned here that I think schools are not doing enough in order to tap into the strengths of students. What I discovered after reading the book is that in the US and it is the same in Israel, the education system is built in a way that actually hampers successes. Gladwell puts a lot of the blame for the failure of these systems on the long vacations. I humbly agree and think that the stories in the book illustrate that our schools are teaching our kids the wrong process (and something I had as hunch turned out to be true after reading the book – check out my post in Hebrew – the effect the home environment has on our education is profound). But it is more than that. Our education systems is so focused on developing analytical thinking (OR IQ) that they neglect to teach the kids practical intelligence (or what some call EQ) – how to communicate, how to speak to authority, how to imagine, how to speak publicly, how our day to day economies work (Hebrew link) and much much more. In Israel and in Australia there are worries these days about the scores of children in the Standardized tests. I think the problems lie much deeper.
2. Are you recruiting only from the best schools? – One of the messages in the book is that you don’t have to be the smartest in order to succussed. You just have to be smart enough. In contrary to what we think, Harvard and Yale graduates, even though they are much smarter IQ wise, don’t succussed more than graduates off other good and sometimes even mediocre schools. I think that coming from a university which is not the best in Israel I can vouch for that. My friends, most of which were not able to get into the good faculties (because of money or just childhood neglect of their studies) are doing just a good as any group form any university, and even more so. What does that say for business recruitment? Where should the hireling come from? How much should a company insist on recruiting from the best schools? Maybe a better strategy is to find the people that are just smart enough, but have better complimentary skills, including people skills, in order to really succeed.
3. Processes – If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I am firm believer in processes. One of the chapters of my e-book is dedicated to the importance of processes. The book just reaffirms my view. I think one of the most powerful chapters in the book is the chapter where Gladwell explains why ignoring the cultural differences and heritages intertwined into people behaviour is so dangerous that it can actually make plains crush. We don’t all work the same and it is important to understand that people from different countries act differently just because they are from a different country. The example is of Korean air which was one the most dangerous air companies until it acknowledged that only by making their pilots act in opposite to their culture will improve the rate of its air collisions. The ways to achieve that are by creating processes that hinder the effects of these cultural heritages. The same is true about creating greater pools of talent. One amazing example in the book is that all the best hockey players in Canada were born between January and March. All of them. By recognizing this pattern and creating a process that will give a chance to more talent, we can actually quadruple the talent pool. It is all in the process.
4. Don’t be too polite. We are different – One last thing. Next month I will be starting an MBA program. This MBA gathers people from more the 40 nationalities. My intuitive, polite, politicly correct approach was to treat them all the same. Now, because of the book, I am thinking a little differently. What are the cultural heritages these people bring with them to the table? This is something that should be discussed. If someone is giving an example from his/her country, shouldn’t it be analysed taking into account the characteristics/cultural heritage of that country. Carefully, politely, but it should be on the table. Not only of individual people different, but the world’s peoples are different and we should recognize it.

 Elad