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Tag: education

  • Is A Graduate Degree Keeping You From Getting Hired At A Start-up?

    Is A Graduate Degree Keeping You From Getting Hired At A Start-up?

    I came across this article, Why Start-ups Shouldn’t Hire People With Graduate Degrees by Penelope Trunk on bNet, and thought it was particularly appropriate for our Entrepreneurship Practice – having lectured at both undergraduate and graduate level and worked with a variety of students, I feel this rings true. Having worked with start-ups and started seven businesses in the last 30 years, I can relate to the pool of talent that comes out of b-schools over the last three decades – they need more resources, more management time and more seasoning than undergrads with 2 years of work experience ever did. They whined more and produced less than their less educated counterparts, too.

    See if you agree after reading Ms. Trunk’s words of wisdom . . .

    It’s likely that if a person attended graduate school, he will have a hard time translating his strengths into strong workplace performance — especially at start-ups.

    Most people who went to grad school did it to prolong adolescent needs for grade-based approval. (Note: This analysis comes from writers at the Chronicle for Higher Education.) This is because the grad school model is generally outdated for today’s workforce, and high performers see this before they enroll. But people who are scared of trying to hold their own in the workforce see grad school as a way around the inevitable difficulties of finding a job one enjoys.

    Here are three reasons why it’s a decent bet to stay away from candidates with graduate degrees when you need to hire at your start-up:

     

    1. Humanities are for people who are afraid of adult life.

    My experience with graduate school was for English. I tried it when I couldn’t figure out what job I was qualified to do.

    The answer, in fact, was that I was not qualified to do any job before grad school — but I was not qualified to do any job after grad school either. So I left early, without the degree, when I realized graduate school is stupid.

    It’s not just the field of English that is a dead end. One would have had a better chance surviving the Titanic than getting a job as any type of humanities professor. Humanities PhD programs suck up time and energy with little return.

    Most people who go to grad school for humanities defend their decision by saying they love their topic. But look, if you love your topic, you can do it after work. Just open a book and read it on your own.

     

    2. Business school is for people who lack ideas and initiative.

    The big question you should ask when business school graduates tell you they want to work for your start-up is: Why did these people just dump $100,000 into a business degree instead of dumping it into their own company?

    If they really wanted to work at a start-up, why didn’t they launch one? Clearly, money was not the barrier, because they had $100,000 to burn. So it’s something else.

    I think they don’t start companies because they do not have any ideas. Or, in the case where a person actually does have ideas, he doesn’t believe in himself enough to give his own ideas a shot.

    So why should you believe in this person?

    Take a look at how many smart people write about how business school is not a good path to entrepreneurship. The only reason we are even talking about business school in relation to entrepreneurship is that so many people want to be entrepreneurs that business schools had to launch entrepreneurship programs to attract those people.

    During my days as a journalist, I interviewed Saras Sarasvathy, from Dartmouth’s business school. She explained to me the research about the traits of a successful entrepreneur. And believe me, none of those traits requires a degree from business school.

     

    3. Law school is for people who lack creativity and will likely fail in the workplace.

    Yes, this is a generalization. But there is pretty good evidence to back up this generalization.

    For starters, most lawyers hate being lawyers. There are five, big myths about being a lawyer, but the main problem boils down to this: To get in to law school, you have to be great at school (reading and regurgitating back to the professors what they want to hear) and you have to be great at test-taking (the LSAT still rules admissions).

    So law school selects for people who are rule followers and like to be told what to do.

    But to be a successful lawyer, you have to be great at marketing and client relations. Otherwise you won’t make any money because you won’t bring in any business.

    People applying to law school ignore this problem. (And so do law schools, but that’s another story.) The reason law students ignore it is because they are so desperate to have a clear path to money based on the skills they have exhibited in school. The desperate need for a safe route makes people ignore the fact that law school is very, very high risk for an unhappy life.

     

    4. People with multiple degrees will be a pain in the ass.

    Why would anyone get two degrees? It’s like being a triple major. Anyone who is a triple major as an undergrad is likely to be awful to work with. A triple major is myopic in her knowledge, insecure with her own identity, and desperate to impress. There is no good reason to have a triple major in a world where it’s clear that an undergraduate education does not really teach you anything about your major anyway.

    The same can be said about people with multiple graduate degrees. It’s just that as an undergrad, the triple major is trying to find an excuse not to have to socialize. A graduate student is trying to find an excuse not to have to embark on adult life. And that’s not the kind of person who’s going to add a lot of value to your company.

    Which leads me to the best hire you can make: Someone who faces the difficulties of adult life head on and takes personal responsibility for building his own skills. Someone who makes time to develop social skills, test his own ideas, and take risks that are scary but necessary for growth.

    Those people often look messy. Adult life is messy. But it’s better to hire someone who has waded through the mess of growing up than someone who has avoided it at all cost.

    If you find this strikes a nerve, or if you think it’s spot on, and would like more, subscribe to this blog above – and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” 

     

  • Are Accuracy and Grammar Important in The Era of Social Media?

    Are Accuracy and Grammar Important in The Era of Social Media?

    OK, I’ve about had it with poor language skills being forgiven under the pretext that “as long as you can read it, a few mistakes are OK” on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

    If Social Media platforms are ever to achieve true legitimacy as a business communications and marketing tool, we have to learn to respect our audience, respect the medium, and respect the message, just as we would any other channel. Would you leave typos and bad grammar in your direct mail, or in a print ad? Production designers, copy writers, proofreaders spend hours poring over copy to ensure accuracy and eliminate errors, and just because it’s presented electronically, it’s OK to have mistakes published for the public to view? I don’t get it, can someone explain to me why this is so?

    If these errors, omissions and poor usages are a reflection of the use of language in this country, maybe we should cast a critical eye on the elementary education system. If our kids are being taught that this is the way to speak and write English, then some body’s asleep at the switch and should be replaced. If we as a society condone such poor talent, then we are to blame as well – silence is tacit approval, and as such, saying nothing out of some misplaced sense of decorum is doing us all a disservice.

    There are those especially in the previous generation to mine, who value their language, and prize it’s correct usage and accurate representation. When you read a book or magazine or newspaper and come across a mistake or a typo, doesn’t it downgrade your opinion of the whole publication, reducing it’s credibility, and altering your perception of the accuracy of the information being presented? If they missed the basics, how accurate can their statements or research be?

    I wasn’t an English major in college, not even liberal arts (whatever that means), but I’ve had my homework and essays and reports and papers corrected by a professional publication editor according to Chicago style manual since I was eight, and after swimming in red ink for years, finally realized the importance of accuracy and correctness in the use of our common language. After a while, the ink started to recede and become more rare, and now with that training firmly embedded, I could focus on the message and how to craft it effectively, and not on the mechanics of producing the work.

    If everyone had this level of training (and if our teachers were willing and able focus on it, rather than being glorified babysitters and disciplinarians trying to escape each day with their skins intact, we might manage it), then such things as poor word choice (their vs there), bad grammar (where are you at), lousy spelling and other grammatical gaffs wouldn’t be present or tolerated, no matter who the poster is – it’s up to society to set the acceptable standard for word usage and language skills.

    It’s time to raise the stakes, lower the tolerance levels of bad language use, and revive the love of language that is the hallmark of great civilizations throughout history. The US is already working on becoming a second world nation, economically, educationally, in the areas of business and scientific innovation – let’s not add language skills to that list as well.

    If you agree with this rant (or think I’m full of it) comment below or subscribe to this blog for more commentary like this. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Is Failure Life’s Greatest Teacher?

    Is Failure Life’s Greatest Teacher?

    As business people and entrepreneurs, most of us don’t like failure in general, and largely feel that failure is bad. True entrepreneurs, however, often tout great failure in the past as the driving force behind their current success. They’ve looked at their past objectively, dispassionately, and impersonally, and taken strong lessons from the failures and used the knowledge to fuel success. A very healthy approach, but one that is often difficult to adopt in other circumstances. If you’re not the boss, continual and ongoing failure in your work will not likely lead to a long career, unless you work at a Wall St. bank!

    Failure is a terrific teacher. It shows you when you should have zigged when you zagged. And often, the ultimate failure of a business enterprise is not caused by any single event or decision – its usually a cascade of seemingly small, inconsequential decisions and actions that take you down a path leading ultimately to collapse. If you could review any one of those decisions separately and out of context, you’d be hard pressed to find logical fault with it, taking into account it’s isolation and the information available at the time. But couple it with incomplete or inaccurate information that fills in or corrects later, and couple that with other seemingly innocuous decisions, and when you step back you can see a pattern developing. You can almost watch the slide in the wrong direction, but at the time you can’t see it and are powerless to stop it.

    Someone smarter than I once said, “it’s not what knocks you down, it’s how you handle getting back up that shows your true character.” I firmly believe that to be true, being an optimist, and believe that this kind of thinking is what powers the entrepreneurial spirit that makes this great country what it is. No matter what obstacles people put in your way, no matter how many times they knock you down, if you just get up, brush off, restore your dignity, regroup and come out swinging with a new action plan, you’ll eventually be alright and prosper. To do that repeatedly and not be insane, you have to examine the failures and learn from them to avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the failure.

    We closed down an ancillary business unit this year, as it produced insufficient revenue to be self supporting after 2 years of investments in time and money. The research told us we were right to launch it, the market should have been there, our advisers and others told us it was a great idea, but in the end, not so much. Now it’s time to do the autopsy, find out what went wrong, and file it away so we don’t repeat it in the future. Without this final, often painful, step, the failure has little positive value. Simply chalking it up to experience and loss without the analysis only yields negatives. Eventually enough negatives can weigh your efforts irretrievably downward to the point of being unable to recover.

    What’s the recovery plan? Once the analysis is done, the lessons learned, the mistakes and missteps identified, we move forward in a positive fashion, richer in the knowledge that we can apply that learning not only to our own endeavors, but apply it on behalf of our clients as well. That’s progress.

    In short, don’t hide from failures or hide the results when they are less than optimal. Own them, learn from them, use them to your advantage. Those who say they only succeed are lying or selling something.

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