The Attack on Ivy-ish Education

One of the things that I have been most challenged with in the last few months is hiring and managing people. As anyone can attest to -- it's damn hard.

A standard recruiting playbook would say, "Scour Harvard, Yale, Stanford and a number of other elite institutions for the next 'rock star.'" The problem is that most of them (and I want to stress that this is not all) ... ahem ... well, how do I say this ... are jerks. (I say this as a recovering "jerk.")

The more politically correct recruiting parlance is to say that they are "not a culture fit." But there is a selfish immediacy to the way that I see a lot of recruits approach their work. As if they are too good for the work that they may get. And while I think entrepreneurial vigor is to be admired, there is something that has been offputting and I think there is something to the way that elite institutions educate.

Basically, we are taught analytical skills but business is really a synthetic exercise. To put it another way, an Harvard grad can give you a Hoopes Prize thesis on why Humpty Dumpty shouldn't have fallen off the wall (or been on the wall in the first place!), but business requires us to think about the quarterly project plan on how to get him back (or outsourced overseas for 1/10 the cost!).

This is the attack on Ivy-ish education.

Causes? Well, I think it is how we are taught. That is, we are taught to try to deconstruct these great theorists we read about as part of our formal education. Say, pick apart Descartes' proof for the existence of God. Most of what we are taught is how to pick things apart. Pick. Pick Pick.

Fast forward to work, what happens when you take your first entry level job? Your boss is a ten year veteran with a BS from Ohio State. Surely, I must be smarter than that him, no? And so begins the professional picking ... pick pick pick. But this time, no A's are given. You are most likely laid off or opportunistically downsized. (I was ... though the CEO of a former employer actually wanted to fire me for being a smartass, but I made it to the next round of layoffs).

One of the things that I am proud of at kasina is our Book Club and weekly book reports. Each week we present a book and figure out what we can learn. They have been invaluable to me in my development as a businessperson and a person in general.

However, one of the common criticisms is, "This book is crap." "They are not that smart." Or just ..(cover your ears) ... "Bullshit." It takes an inordinate amount of retraining and reprogramming our people to see the value in these works in a way that doesn't reduce to picking at them like an academic work. But should we be surprised given how we educate at the elite institutions?

We need more synthetic tolerance in our higher education. Personally, I've found the more effective approach has been to really force yourself to think about how do you apply this concept to what you are doing today. What is the unique thing that someone else can teach me? The Ivy arrogance has got to go.

Some of the work that Malcom Gladwell's work around persitence and cooperation is instructive (10,000 hours to mastery, regardless of field). Also, Dan Pink's work about A Whole New Mind is as well.