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Seth Godin came up with a good list of questions (read the blog entry)

Why ask why?

“Why?” is the most important question, not asked nearly enough.

Hint: “Because I said so,” is not a valid answer.

Why does it work this way?
Why is that our goal?
Why did you say no?
Why are we treating people differently?
Why is this our policy?
Why don’t we enter this market?
Why did you change your mind?
Why are we having this meeting?
Why not?

That’s a good set of questions.  Those are questions you ask inside an organization.  How about some questions that you ask about an organization and what it does.  Here are few that comes to mind, not asked nearly enough.  They are about positioning, structure, and assessment.

• Where is our industry headed?
• What are we / can we be the very best at?
• What should we invest in?
• What is the best operating model that supports this?
• Who are the best leaders to put in place?
• What are the best metrics of our success and how do we measure them?
• What compensation and incentive systems support this?
• How do we continually monitor our progress and make adjustments?
• ( rinse, repeat – often, according to the clockspeed of our industry/business – the world)

In Seth’s set of questions, if you hear “Because, I said so” it’s a clear giveaway that you are in an environment dominated by political decision-making.  In these environments it’s more important that someone gets their way as opposed to linking the decision to some measurable goal of the organization.  In short, it’s about the demonstration and exercise of power rather than making the right decision for the organization’s stakeholders. (Why do some people make decisions to their own benefit when they know they undermining the organization’s stakeholders in doing so?  Read some insights from clinical psychologist Martha Stout Ph.D regarding the “organizational bully” here. )

The second set of questions isn’t about political power, it’s about positioning.  These questions are not asked frequently enough in a world of continuous change and opportunity.  (One of my favorite answers from an entrepreneur when asked about his business model…. “You know that blind spot that you have when you’re driving.. that’s where we are”.  Perhaps Borders Books and BlockBuster should have paid more attention to their blind spot to discern the likes of Amazon and Netflix.  But now, this ability to see the blind spot or to “see around corners” is no longer needed by those companies – they are out of the race. Read more)

Teaching answers – not questions.

Today in schools we teach kids to show up on time, leave on time, memorize facts, be able to recall those facts on standardized tests, and to not question authority.  It seems the perfect factory process to turn out factory workers that … show up on time, leave on time, do their work and only their work, and not question the boss or the company.  The perfect factory education for the early 20′th century Industrial Age.

But what do we need now?  Perhaps a focus on a new set of skills.  What moves the world?

Can Innovation be taught?

Shouldn’t we be teaching our kids to be innovators as opposed to factory workers?

Gregersen and co-authors Clayton M. Christensen (professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School) and Jeff Dyer (professor of strategy at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School), believe that roughly two-thirds of the skills it takes to innovate can be learned. They point to historical research findings that concluded 25-40% of human innovation stems from genetics as evidence.

What are the skills for innovation?

In their own research involving hundreds of innovators and thousands of entrepreneurs, managers and executives from around the world, Gregersen, Christensen and Dyer boiled the formula of innovation down to five key skills:

• Questioning allows innovators to challenge the status quo and consider new possibilities;
• Observing helps innovators detect small details — in the activities of customers, suppliers and other companies — that suggest new ways of doing things;
• Networking permits innovators to gain radically different perspectives from individuals with diverse backgrounds;
• Experimenting prompts innovators to relentlessly try out new experiences, take things apart and test new ideas;
• Associational thinking — drawing connections among questions, problems or ideas from unrelated fields — is triggered by questioning, observing, networking and experimenting and is the catalyst for creative ideas.

The take

Do we teach any of the above in schools?

When I was a kid I used to watch Jeopardy.  At the time, me and everyone else thought that those folks on Jeopardy were the smartest people in the world.  But were they?  What they could do is memorize a vast collection of facts and recall them on demand.  Did we think that was intelligent or smart or showed a capability that would make them successful in the world?

What about today?  Today everyone has a vast collection of facts at their fingertips – for free – on demand.  We can ask Siri almost anything and get a raw fact-based answer (not an insight, not a deduction, not an induction, not a connection or association among facts) in a few seconds.  The ability to recall facts is not smart or intelligent.  You can imagine the trajectory of Siri and similar systems in the future of facts on-demand.  It can only get better.

Wouldn’t it be better to focus more on the skills above?

The fist skill in the list is Questioning… challenging the status quo and consider new possibilities…

Perhaps if we taught kids the skills above then the questions that Seth posed above would be asked naturally by everyone – and Seth would lose a posting idea.  The ability to challenge the status quo would reveal the power and political dimension of organizations the undermine outcomes for stakeholders and reveal the blind spots that exist in every organization that hide opportunities.  The unique capacity of humans is imagination and the development of the skills above.  So let’s use them.

Read more from Forbes

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericaswallow/2012/04/25/creating-innovators/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericaswallow/2012/04/19/innovators-dna-hal-gregersen-interview/

More from Seth on Education

Stop Stealing Dreams (free Audio edition)

Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teacher’s Union President, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have a testy relationship at best…

Lewis said she got her answer about Emanuel’s character rather quickly.

“In that conversation, he did say to me that 25 percent of the students in this city are never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything and he was never going to throw money at them.”

Source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Rahm-Emanuel-Concerned-About-Three-Fourths-of-School-Children-140617923.html#ixzz1o7aSFXl8

So, 25% of the kids in school in Chicago will never “be anything” and never “amount to anything”.  So let’s not waste our time or money.

Has anyone really thought about what we want our kids to amount to or become? Is the role of education and school in the industrial age of the 20′th century the same as the role of education in the 21′st century?  Perhaps the 75% of the students that do amount to something are really amounting to the wrong thing given the new opportunities of the 21′st century  Are we giving our students an industrial-age education when that age has long passed?

What has changed?  In the 21′st century we have an abundance of information rather than scarcity.  If we can look things up on the internet in a fraction of a second why do we force our students to memorize so much – what a waste.  In the 21′st century we are globally connected.  Why do students study in isolation?  The smartest person in the room is not a student, nor the aggregate of students, but the room itself.  The room is the network that joins the people and ideas.  What prepares students to collaborate in the globally connected world?  What will success look like in the 21′st century?  Who will be rewarded?  Show up on time, do what your boss tells you, do your job and only your job, wait for instructions on what to do next.  That will no longer get you anywhere.  The rewards will go to those who will take initiative, take risks, are not afraid to fail, solve problems, connect data to create information, collaborate, create, and move forward.   How does today’s education system teach this?

Someone who has given some thought to the role, purpose, and delivery of education in the 21′st century is Seth Godin

Check out his manifesto on education here – http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams

Here’s the impetus for this work …

I don’t know how to change school, can’t give you a map or a checklist. What I do know is that we’re asking the wrong questions and making the wrong assumptions.  The best tactic available to every taxpayer and parent and concerned teacher is to relentlessly ask questions, not settling for the status quo.

“Is this class/lecture/program/task/test/policy designed to help our students do the old thing a little more efficiently, or are we opening a new door to enable our students to do something that’s new and different?” School is doing the best job it knows how to create the output it is being asked to create. We ought to be asking school to make something different. And the only way to do that is to go about it differently.

The simple way to make something different is to go about it in a whole new way. In other words, doing what we’re doing now and hoping we’ll get something else as an outcome is nuts. Once we start to do schooling differently, we’ll start to get something different.

Read another perspective … from Prof. Walter E. Williams of George Mason University
Should we stop trying to teach the unteachable?
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2004/05/26/managing_a_disaster/page/full/

From a report by McKinsey (website):

The United States needs more college graduates. Opinions vary on exactly how many, but McKinsey estimates that the nation will need an additional one million each year by 2020 to sustain its economic health. That would mean increasing today’s annual total— 2.5 million—by 40 percent…

To meet this goal, universities and colleges would have to increase their output of graduates by 3.5 percent a year over the next decade. That’s a daunting task…

To meet the target without spending more, colleges would simultaneously have to attract additional students, increase the proportion of them who complete a degree, and keep a tight lid on costs. Gaming the target by lowering the quality of the education or granting access only to the best-prepared students obviously wouldn’t count. Not surprisingly, many people within and beyond higher education say that colleges can’t possibly do all these things at once.

But McKinsey research suggests that many already are, using tactics others could emulate. In fact, the potential to increase productivity across the varied spectrum of US higher education appears to be so great that, with the right policy support, one million more graduates a year by 2020, at today’s spending levels, begins to look eminently feasible. The quality of education and access to it could both improve at the same time.

Ok, I get it.  The US needs more college graduates.  But do we want a bunch of management consultants getting their hands on higher education?  When I read the McKinsey report  it seems to me that “college graduate” now means a vocational education and that the desired productivity will be achieved by turning higher education into a factory process.  It is an example of “Greater Taylorism” applied to higher education.  (read about Taylor and scientific management)

This caught my eye… the elimination of educational “waste”.  A sort of “lean manufacturing” approach to higher education.

Reducing nonproductive credits

Up to 10 percent of all credits taken by US students are in excess of the number required to graduate. True, such credits may expand students’ minds, but they add cost to a degree. Tracking students’ progress and skillfully intervening when necessary can help reduce that cost. Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), for instance, has a monitoring system that discourages students from embarking on redundant credits altogether: no bachelor’s graduate at SNHU completes more than 150 credits en route to a degree, while 20 percent of graduates at similar institutions have upward of 150. Better preparation for college work and a policy of allowing transfer students to conserve credits help reduce redundant credits too.

“True, such credits may expand students’ minds, but they add cost to a degree…”  And colleges will “monitor” and ”skillfully intervene” to stop such waste.  There will be no intellectual ”mind expansion” beyond what is required by the corporate market demand for labor at any point in time.  What year is this?

When I read the quoted paragraph above I thought of the 1984 Apple commercial created by Chiat/Day.  The US may need more “college graduates” but what is the nature of these college graduates?  What McKinsey may have in mind is education understood as a lean manufacturing factory stamping out undifferentiated marching armies of  “college graduates”  fabricated to uniform specifications (there will be no “unproductive credits”).  This will not lead to what  the US really needs most.  And that is people who can think out of the box (beyond the specification) in innovative, creative, and insightful ways.  This will not be a capability produced or enhanced by a factory education.

Would McKinsey hire a person with a factory-made education? – doubtful.  Can you win in a competitive job market if you can’t differentiate yourself from the other job candidates?  What happens, over time, when your factory-made education is no longer relevant to the job market?  Do you go back to get “re-fitted” or does a person fresh off the education assembly line take your place and you are placed on the trash heap?   Do companies hire people who are merely average?  Why be average if you can be remarkable?

Sometimes a person hurling a hammer is necessary.  Be that person.

Resources

Read the full McKinsey Report – Boosting productivity in US higher education
http://frrl.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/boostingproductivity_inhighereducation.pdf

Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford University
http://frrl.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/steve-jobs-apple-ceo-how-to-live-before-you-die/

A weak faculty operates a weak program that attracts weak students.
(Koerner 1963)

This is some interesting research based on  student data from the US Air Force Academy

This research has interesting implications for the ongoing debate over “teaching the test”, short-term vs long-term benefits of an education, and “deep-learning”.  The study found that the way introductory courses are taught may have a detrimental affect  on student study habits that may have to be “unlearned” for follow-on courses.

Finally, and most significantly … “our results show that student evaluations reward professors who increase achievement in the contemporaneous course being taught, not those who increase deep learning.”

So, if these student evaluations are used as input for promotion and tenure decisions of professors, are we rewarding and promoting less experienced and less qualified professors over highly qualified professors that position students for longer-term deep-learning even though their students perform less well in contemporaneous courses and provide lower score evaluations back to these professors?

Here is the conclusion from the research paper.  A PDF of the full paper is available at the end of this posting

Conclusion

We find that less experienced and less qualified professors produce students who perform significantly better in the contemporaneous course being taught, whereas more experienced and highly qualified professors produce students who perform better in the follow-on related curriculum.

Owing to the complexities of the education production function, where both students and faculty engage in optimizing behavior, we can only speculate as to the mechanism by which these effects may operate. Similar to elementary and secondary school teachers, who often have advance knowledge of assessment content in high-stakes testing systems, all professors teaching a given course at USAFA have an advance copy of the exam before it is given. Hence, educators in both settings must choose how much time to allocate to tasks that have great value for raising current scores but may have little value for lasting knowledge.

One potential explanation for our results is that the less experienced professors may adhere more strictly to the regimented curriculum being tested, whereas the more experienced professors broaden the curriculum and produce students with a deeper understanding of the material.

This deeper understanding results in better achievement in the followon courses. Another potential mechanism is that students may learn (good or bad) study habits depending on the manner in which their introductory course is taught. For example, introductory professors who “teach to the test” may induce students to exert less study effort in followon related courses. This may occur because of a false signal of one’s own ability or an erroneous expectation of how follow-on courses will be taught by other professors.

A final, more cynical, explanation could also relate to student effort. Students of low-value-added professors in the introductory course may increase effort in follow-on courses to help “erase” their lower than expected grade in the introductory course.

Regardless of how these effects may operate, our results show that student evaluations reward professors who increase achievement in the contemporaneous course being taught, not those who increase deep learning.

Using our various measures of teacher quality to rank-order teachers leads to profoundly different results. Since many U.S. colleges and universities use student evaluations as a measurement of teaching quality for academic promotion and tenure decisions, this finding draws into question the value and accuracy of this practice.

Read the full paper  from The Journal of Political Economy
http://frrl.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/does-professor-quality-matter.pdf

We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was.

Bernard Lewis, quoted in Teaching Religion, Washington Times, 23 Dec. 2008

If you want to hear the flak on the Texas Textbook changes – here it is in 7 minutes

Maybe the question is “who cares”?  Here’s why.

First, who are we trying to educate and for what purpose?  Does a chemist need to know anything about history?  How about a Physicist or an electrical engineer?  Do they need to know anything about any history – american history or world history – to do their job?  How about a factory worker?  Or a person that works at McDonald’s or Wal-mart?  Do they need to know anything about history to do their job?

Perhaps we are over-educating people.  Perhaps 4 years of high school is too much.  Why not simply “cut to the chase” and train people to do a job that larger society needs done?  Who needs history, philosophy, literature, and all the rest?  It would seem to simply “get in the way” of the task at hand of learning a marketable skill.

I recently read this: “Don’t have any economically unproductive  thoughts”.  No one is going to pay people in any of the careers cited above for their knowledge of American history – or philosophy or literature – for that matter.

Maybe Aldous Huxley got it right in Brave New World 

“Set out the books,” he said curtly.

In silence the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls the books were duly set out–a row of nursery quartos opened invitingly each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird.

“Now bring in the children.”

“Now turn them so that they can see the flowers and books.”

The Head Nurse, who was standing by a switchboard at the other end of the room, pressed down a little lever.

There was a violent explosion. Shriller and ever shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded.

The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror.

“And now,” the Director shouted (for the noise was deafening), “now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.”

“Observe,” said the Director triumphantly, “observe.”

Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks–already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.

“They’ll grow up with what the psychologists used to call an ‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably conditioned. They’ll be safe from books and botany all their lives.” The Director turned to his nurses. “Take them away again.”

With this solution it makes the whole Texas Textbook debate moot.  Rather than spending time teaching these folks history, philosophy, literature, and the rest why not use this opportunity to teach these folks to be good consumers of products and entertainment?  This would ensure a continued, and perhaps increased, stability of the economy plus people wouldn’t ask too many questions.

 from Howard Gardner
“Education is inherently and inevitably an issue of human goals and human values.”

I wish that this statement were mounted prominently above the desk of every policymaker. One cannot even begin to develop an educational system unless one has in mind the knowledge and skills that one values, and the kind of individuals one hopes will emerge at the end of the day.

Strangely enough, however, many policymakers act as if the aims of education are self-evident; and as a consequence, when pressed, these policymakers often emerge as inarticulate, contradictory, or unbelievably prosaic. How often my eyes have glazed over as I have read vacuous proclamations about “using the mind well” or “closing the achievement gap” or “helping individuals realize their potential” or “appreciating our cultural heritage” or “having the skills to compete. ” Recently, in speaking to ministers of education, I’ve discovered a particularly Sisyphean goal: “leading the world in international comparisons of test scores. ” Obviously, on this criterion, only one country at a time can succeed. To state educational goals in this day and age is no easy undertaking; indeed, one purpose of this book is to posit several more gritty goals for the future.

A first caveat: science can never constitute a sufficient education. Science can never tell you what to do in class or at work. Why? What you do as a teacher or manager has to be determined by your own value system—and neither science nor technology has a builtin value system. Consider the following example. Let’s say that you accept the scientific claim that it is difficult to raise psychometric intelligence (IQ). From this claim one can draw two diametrically opposite conclusions: (l) don’t bother to try; (2) devote all your efforts to trying. Possibly you will succeed, and perhaps far more easily than you had anticipated. Same scientific finding: opposite pedagogical conclusions.

Read the rest of this entry »

The advent of the internet and the rise of social networking has provided an opportunity we did not have before – the opportunity to construct multiple identities.  For some, the real world is good enough; for others, it is not.

A few years ago I listened to a program on NPR (National Public Radio) about the rise of local churches.  This was not so much about religion as it was about people who obtained papermill degrees in Theology, Ministry, or similar and then started a church placing themselves at the head of that church with their name prefixed with Doctor, Pastor, or similar title of authority.  In an institutional church, for example, Lutherans or Catholic, it takes many years to earn a degree with these titles.  But heck, if someone can send in $10 and get a degree – to get that identify – then why not?

People need self-validation.  For some, self-validation, a sense of worth, comes from inside – intrinsic.  For others, validation has to come from outside – extrinsic.  The challenge of extrinsic validation is that one needs to find an external environment, community, or organization where this can be accomplished.  If the door is closed in one environment, community, or organization you can always try to find another.  For example, a local condo or home-owners association can provide titles of President, Board of Directors, or similar titles and these can be filled by people who, in the real life of their jobs, have never  earned – or have been granted or entrusted with – any real management responsibility.  One night you’re on the Board of Directors at the home owners association – the next day you’re sitting in a fabric cubicle at work like Milton in the movie Office Space.

The real world is hard.  It does not comport itself to the easy wishes of those who desire extrinsic validation by titles or positions of responsibility in a real environment, community or organization where these titles and positions require a demonstrated competency and history of creating measurable results in order to get this positions or titles.

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In the April 8, 2010 issue of TIME Magazine there is an article about paying kids to get good grades in school.  In some cases it works, and in some cases it does not.  The TIME article (paper copy) shows graphics of the various cities in which it was tried and the outcome.

The results began to trickle into the lab last summer. In New York City, the $1.5 million paid to 8,320 kids for good test scores did not work — at least not in any way that’s easy to measure. In Chicago, under a different model, the kids who earned money for grades attended class more often and got better grades, two major accomplishments. Those students did not, however, do better on their standardized tests at the end of the year.

In Washington, the kids did better on standardized reading tests. Getting paid on a routine basis for a series of small accomplishments, including attendance and behavior, seemed to lead to more learning for those kids. And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests at the end of the year — and those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.

The kids had much in common. In all four cities, a majority were African American or Hispanic and from low-income families. So why did the results vary so dramatically from city to city?  (read more at the links below)

Read the rest of this entry »

On political questions therefore I still continued to read and study a great deal. But reading had probably a different significance for me from that which it has for the average run of our so-called ‘intellectuals’.

I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page, and yet I should not call them ‘well-read people’. Of course they ‘know’ an immense amount; but their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have gathered from books. They have not the faculty of distinguishing between what is useful and useless in a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if possible skip over the latter while reading it, if that be not possible, then–when once read–throw it overboard as useless ballast.

Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of his calling in life, no matter whether this be the elementary task of earning one’s daily bread or a calling that responds to higher human aspirations.

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Stumbled upon… from John Adams (1735-1826; US President March 4, 1797 – March 4, 1801)

I must study politics and war that my sons have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.  My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy , geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Adams wrote this during the development and evolution of the prosperity of the United States.  One generation studies “politics and war” to lay the foundation for the next generation.  What “must” be studied by one generation gives the following generation the liberty to pursue the next level of education and culture.

Adams quote in Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns

The research by Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright provides a taxonomy to understand why people are where they are in an organization and why some people get “stuck” at a certain stage.

The research placed the majority of people in the “I am great – and you are not” category (Stage Three – see March 7 entry).  This is a category where individuals are addicted to personal success at the expense of team goals and a “higher purpose”.

The distinguishing attribute of Stage Three is a group of individuals where there is internal competition and overemphasis  on “Knowing all the answers”.

Here are a few of the  telltale signs of folks in Stage Three  (read the book for the rest)

• They form a series of dyadic (two-person) relationships.  They get what they want by using some combination of personal appeals, charm, manipulating the truth, distorting information, trading favors, and selectively disclosing facts.  There is one set of communication from the above for each dyadic relationship.  As time goes it it may become a burden to keep track of which communication was used with each set of  relationships.
• They may say they support team goals, but their behavior  shows they discourage teaming – unless it is a situation where they can be the star.
• They hoard information – information is power.  To remain on top is to know more, and disclose less, than others.
• Spoke of relationships.  They must be the center and no communication can be made without their knowledge.  A manager in this position will ask they be CC’ed on all e-mail and/or that all communication outside the team should flow through them.
• They rely gossip and spies for information.
• They talk about values but these are always their personal values – not group values.  These “values” are not empowering to anyone but themselves.
• Managers in this position seldom hire people who they perceive as smart as themselves as these folks pose a threat to the managers “personal superiority”.  This is born out of insecurity.  Managers at this level hire people they can dominate  but can still do that work at a “Stage Two” (see March 7 posting) level.  In the movie Office Space, there is an employee , Milton…  he’s not even worth looking at.  You’re more interested in his space, and where he needs to get out of.  Milton ended up in the basement where his boss asked him to do his best to control the rat population.  This is someone Lumbergh, the boss, can dominate – the perfect hire.

How did folks end up here?  The authors of Tribal Leadership have an interesting take on the educational system…

For most professionals in the United States, Stage Three is the top of the mountain.  How did it get this way?

Between 1890 and 1920, along with the huge influx of immigrants , 80 percent of the rural population moved to the city to take millions of new factory jobs, and they brought their children with then.  On the farm, many children meant many helpers, but in the factory, many children meant many accidents and acts of exploitation.  Children s welfare and child labor practices became the issue of the age, and most people felt that something had to be done to protect and train the children while mom and dad worked in the factory.

The solution was to train a new generation of workers by teaching them inside a system that looked like a factory.  In school, bell rings, go to class; bell rings, recess; bell rings, go to class; bill rings each lunch; bell rings, go home.  At school, children with the right answers get a gold star, then an A.  A star pupil is one who does the homework and has the right answers.

The new system undid the classic liberal eduction, which said that the value was in the well-designed question, and this shift in focus made the worker exploitable…

In between bell rings, children learned what they needed to become effective workers, and that amounted to reading, writing, and math.

The system did not emphasize creative thinking, strategizing, leadership, or innovation.  Stars were smart conformists, and people who stuck to the pattern became model students.  That approach also bred the “I’m great (and you are not)” mentality, based on homework, grades, and knowing the right answer.  It did not emphasize empowerment, creativity, or individual satisfaction.

A star employee is one who knows that right answer to a factory problem, obeys rules, and doesn’t make waves.  People are encouraged to repeat this pattern until they retire.

Interesting.  A friend of mine with high-school age children told me that much of the time in school is spent on “teaching the test”.  The goal is to have the students, and the aggregate for the high school meet ( or exceed ) that expected scoring on standardized national tests.

Is “teaching the test” really an education?  It falls right into the observation above that this prepares children for question and answer rather than framing questions and critical thinking.  The “I am great (and you are not)” mentality and obsession with personal achievement “knowing all the answers” at the expense of others (alpha dog syndrome) and a higher goal beyond oneself  just may be a result of the industrial age educational system.  But, there are other options out there

Read about the Socratic Method of teaching and the value/advantage of a liberal education.

The cost of it all – the missed opportunity

So, what are the costs to a company with an abundance of individuals are at “I am great; you are not”?  One person can seldom have an impact on an organization – that takes teamwork.  But teamwork in a land of “big egos” and addiction to “besting others”, being a “star”, and a “sage on stage”,  does not promote teamwork.  Winning on a personal basis – is self-defeating.

A company with too many “I am great” players undermines the entire organization.  Individuals spend so much time competing with, undermining, and manipulating others, there is little incentive or time to focus on team goals (“We are great”) and tuning the energies of competition for competing with each other on an individual basis to competing in the marketplace with other companies.

And of course beyond competition in the marketplace is the desire to do something of historic importance .  This is best exemplified by a quote from Steve Jobs - “I want to put a ding in the Universe.”

Read more on the research - Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization and find out how to evolve a tribe from an over emphasis on personal achievement to team achievement with others and on to achieving a noble cause.

An intellectual is a master at manipulating ideas, concepts, and symbols.  What is in Obamas toolbox?  Who and what influenced him at Harvard and the University of Chicago?

Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of America’s leading public intellectuals. In this investigative feature he is on a mission to find out what Barack Obama is like as an intellectual.

Obama: Professor President explores the intellectual influences and ideas which shaped Obama the scholar, teacher and academic.

We go into the windy quads and tree-lined streets of the campus in Hyde Park on Chicago’s South Side, in search of the elemental Obama and ask those who worked with him, his mentors, academic peers and students, what shaped his ideas and how he thinks.

Listen – 22 minutes from BBC radio -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/01/090113_obama_prof_prez.shtml

This take on the University of Phoenix (UoP) is complements of Michael Gerber. Gerber has written a number of books targeted for small business owners.

Gerber is probably most famous for this concept of the E-myth with a book of the same name.  The E-Myth: Why Most small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It.

The e-myth is stated below- It is the “fatal assumption” and why many small businesses fail.

“E-Myth stands for the “entrepreneurial myth,” the end product of which is most often a business and life disaster.  The E-Myth says that technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure believe that because they understand how to do the work of the business they intend to start, they are automatically gifted with an understanding about how to build and grow a business that does that work.”

But enough of that – if you want to read Gerber’s E-Myth books – have at it.

I mention the E-Myth in the larger context of Gerber’s analysis of what makes a business successful.

Back to the University of Phoenix (UoP) and Gerber’s take on this.

Gerber uses UoP as an example of the clarity one must have in setting up a business.  That is, clarity of your business model – clarity in which category you compete; clarity of who your customers are; clarity in what product you are offering; clarity in what your customers expect, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The Chimera of the University of Phoenix

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