Because it lays out his business principles tweaked so a person could build a personal culture that would assure happiness.
When the members of the [HBS] class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.
In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives.
The students had a front row seat to watch the economy go from hot to frigid, which taught them that careers weren’t everything.
On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.
Three simple questions, but three that few people, let alone MBA students, especially those at Harvard, focus on.
But what kind of life is it, if you are unhappy or have bad relationships with your family or cross the line, when with a little effort and planning you can avoid all three?
While Clay Christensen isn’t a silver life bullet, his thinking and approach come close.
Over the years hundreds of bosses have explained to me why top colleges and high GPAs were critical to hiring the best people.
They explained why hiring only from top schools assured top candidates.
They enlightened me as to the importance of high GPAs in their hiring decisions.
What they never did was convince me.
They blustered when I told them neither had much value when evaluating candidates.
And they got downright irate when I added that whatever value they did have dropped 20% a year, since much (most?) of what they learned was rendered irrelevant in the next five years.
Actually, the value probably drops faster now, since the world has sped up a lot since I said that.
If you find yourself disputing this and still putting your faith in ‘brand-name’ schools and high GPAs I suggest you pay close attention to Harvard’s grade inflation.
“It’s really indefensible,” Harvey C. Mansfield, a faculty member for more than five decades, said in a telephone interview. (…) “I thought the most prevalent grade was an A-minus, which is bad enough,” when I asked the question [about the most frequently given grade], it was worse.”
But even Mansfield goes along with it.
Mansfield described how, in recent years, he himself has taken to giving students two grades: one that shows up on their transcript and one he believes they actually deserve.
“I didn’t want my students to be punished by being the only ones to suffer for getting an accurate grade,” he said, adding that administrators must take the lead in curbing the trend.
While I agree grade inflation isn’t limited to Harvard, I’m willing to bet it’s more prevalent at brand-name schools.
Hopefully, the next time you find yourself dazzled by a combination of school and GPA, you’ll remember Professor Mansfield and take both with a pound or two of salt.
Education, at least higher education, is finally changing and moving forward. And like a jar of olives after you pull out the first one the rest come out faster and faster.
The exorbitant cost of a college education and the spiraling debt of new grads have led many to question the value of a college degree; what no one questions is the need for continual, ongoing education just to stay relevant.
The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers, well beyond the information technology business. Car mechanics, librarians, doctors, Hollywood special effects designers — virtually everyone whose job is touched by computing — are being forced to find new, more efficient ways to learn as retooling becomes increasingly important not just to change careers, but simply to stay competitive on their chosen path.
“Higher education will change; the system is unstable,” says Kevin Werbach, a Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor, who is teaching a MOOC on Coursera this summer. “It’s an industry that will be in severe turmoil in the next decade. There are so many schools in distress, and the student loan burden is [huge]. In that environment, online platforms like Coursera are an interesting opportunity.” (…) In April, Coursera announced it had secured $16 million in funding from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Udacity is also venture backed. MIT and Harvard contributed a combined $60 million to launch edX, which is overseen by a nonprofit, but program directors have said they plan to make the initiative self-supporting.
The new efforts dwarf the few classes that started being offered online about ten years ago. There are no actual course credits, but with major universities, such as Harvard and MIT jumping in things are getting interesting.
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.
In a new report, Moody’s Investor Service calls MOOCs a “pivotal development” that has the potential to revolutionize higher education. Questions remain whether these online courses can be profitable and whether traditional colleges will award credit for them. But if successful, MOOCs could lead to lower costs for families and access to higher-quality instruction for anyone in the world who has Internet access.
As to the grads, according to the media most of them want to be entrepreneurs or are still looking for riches on Wall Street, but not all. What other career path is attracting interest these days—would you believe farming?
For decades, the number of farmers has been shrinking as a share of the population, and agriculture has often been seen as a backbreaking profession with little prestige. But the last Agricultural Census in 2007 showed a 4 percent increase in the number of farms, the first increase since 1920, and some college graduates are joining in the return to the land. (…) “You don’t get into farming for the money. You do it for the love of the game.” –Calvin Kyrkostas, 25
There are multiple articles in two of today’s links, so you may want to bookmark them.
The first is from the IBM Institute for Business Value (to which you can subscribe for free) and offers links to several studies on social CRM. You can also participate in a short survey about how social is being used in your company.
We launched the inaugural Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation nearly a year ago. Today, we are so proud to announce the grand prize winners as well as the “Management Innovator of the Year” Award.
Facebook has agreed to make it clear to users that when they click to like a product on Facebook, their names and photos can be used to plug the product. They will also be given a chance to decline the opportunity to be unpaid endorsers.
If you are a manager and despair at the quality of people that fill your entry level positions, not their attitude, but their skills and basic education, prepare for it to get worse.
Perhaps instead of ranting and whining about America’s loss of global leadership we should look closer to home for the real cause—US education.
The ethnic groups with the worst outcomes in school are African-Americans and Hispanics. The achievement gaps between these groups and their white and Asian-American peers are already large in kindergarten and only grow as the school years pass. These are the youngsters least ready right now to travel the 21st-century road to a successful life.
By 2050, the percentage of whites in the work force is projected to fall from today’s 67 percent to 51.4 percent. The presence of blacks and Hispanics in the work force by midcentury is expected to be huge, with the growth especially sharp among Hispanics.
No, whites and Asians aren’t smarter, but they do have socioeconomic advantages that are lacking for these minorities.
Advantages that our educational system and politicians at all levels are doing little to address.
It’s not always about money, although that is a part of it, nor is it about standardized tests that do little to improve true education, it’s about innovation and educating outside the box.
Harvard Graduate School of Education is creating a new doctoral degree to be focused on leadership in education. It’s the first new degree offered by the school in 74 years. The three-year course will be tuition-free and conducted in collaboration with faculty members from the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The idea is to develop dynamic new leaders who will offer the creativity, intellectual rigor and professionalism that is needed to help transform public education in the U.S.
Creativity, intellectual rigor, professionalism; this leadership isn’t just about visions and influence, it’s about creating people who will roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty often toil in relative obscurity on the biggest problems facing this country.
Kathleen McCartney, the graduate school’s dean, explained one of the dilemmas that has hampered reform. “If you look at people who are running districts,” she said, “some come from traditional schools of education, and they understand the core business of education but perhaps are a little weak on the management side. And then you’ve got the M.B.A.-types who understand operations, let’s say, but not so much teaching and learning.”
Will it work?
Can the program make a difference quickly enough to change the current downward trajectory of our future?
Will other schools step up to the plate now or will they wait a decade or so and see how the Harvard program fares?
Does anybody care enough about what will happen in 20, 30, 40 years to accept a little discomfort now or should we just build more prisons?
Leadership Turn is ending; its last day is December 29. I’ve enjoyed writing it and our interaction since August 16, 2007 and I hope we can continue at my other blog where Leadership’s Future will carry on.
If you enjoy my views and writing, please join me at MAPping Company Success or subscribe via RSS or EMAIL.
What do you do when you are booted out of your business leadership position? Go into politics, of course.
Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard’s ex (to the great relief of people both internal and external) CEO is the latest to throw her hat in the ring, touting her corporate problem-solving skills; problem-making is more accurate.
So what do you do when you are booted out of your political position (or your term expires)? Go on the speaking circuit.
I realize that I may offend some of my readers, but to learn that George W. Bush is being paid $100K to speak for 40 minutes ($2500 per minute!) on “How to master the art of effective leadership” makes me ill. (Hat tip to Grant Lawrence at OEN for the heads up. I found his thoughts on the subject well worth reading.)
The next item is a great interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, who, unlike her predecessor, recognizes that communication is the most critical action when leading an organization “with enormously distributed authority and many different sorts of constituencies, all of whom have a stake in that institution” and have no tolerance for any top-down management.
Authenticity is cited by many leadership gurus as absolutely necessary, but Professor Jim Heskett, my favorite Harvard voice, solicited reader responses to this question earlier this month, “Can the “masks of command” coexist with authentic leadership?” Beyond his summation be sure to scan through the comments for significant insights both pro and con.
Your comments—priceless http://www.mappingcompanysuccess.com/seize-your-leadership-day-
In spite of the importance of Obama’s success in office, there is only so much I can read on a subject before I become jaded. As a result I try to make my sources as objective as possible, which is difficult when the subject is political.
I’m also not a political junkie, so in looking for ‘how’s it going’ information I tend to skip sources with rigid ideologies, since I pretty much know what they will say.
(I must say I find it amusing and satisfying that we finally have a president that both the far right and far left don’t like.)
I did find three articles to share, two short and one longer.
The first is a compendium of opinions from a varied group of Wharton professors, one phrase I really liked was when Obama was termed “short on ideology and long on pragmatism,” an attitude I wish the entire country would adopt. I also found it amusing that he was downgraded for attacking too many major topics at once—healthcare, the economy, two wars—as if he had any choice.
Boomers, the generation born between 1946 and 1964, have been in the forefront of everything that’s happened in the country from the time they were born and that’s not changing any time soon.
So what’s up with the generation that changed the world, marched to end a war, protested for equal rights, overturned sexual mores, ushered in consumerism and turned on to drugs and rock and roll?
Harvard believes they are still the future and to that end has set up the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative“to lead significant systemic change in education, health care, community development, and the environment.”
Ads may be targeted to 18-34 year old males, but marketers have always counted on Boomer buying power; since the meltdown they may have to rethink that market.
The Millennials love to count the Boomers as Luddites, incapable of embracing social networking in it’s many varied forms, but is that true or just wishful thinking so they can keep their edge.
Having watched them all my life there is only one thing about which I’m sure and that’s that the Boomers won’t go quietly into the night any more than they passed quietly through the day.
In a comment on my post Wally Bock says, “I do think there’s a “nature” part to people who turn out to be successful leaders, at least there are things that seem pretty much set for most people by their mid-twenties.”
But how much of leadership is the person and how much the circumstances?
As Nye reminds us, “In January 1940, Winston Churchill was regarded as a failed politician, but after the British defeat in France, he was seen as a charismatic leader who could rally the nation. Churchill’s traits did not change in 1940; the situation did.” (Bold formatting is mine.)
If you believe as I do that leadership is not a predetermined act or merely positional then it makes perfect sense that a person who leads in one situation won’t lead in others.
It also doesn’t matter.
If you perform at your personal best, doing everything possible to make a success of the immediate situation, then doing it as a ‘leader’ or a ‘follower’ has no meaning.
Nye says, “Modern leadership turns out to be less about who you are, or how you were born than about what you have learned and what you do as part of a group.”
So perhaps all the personal energy now expended in concern about how you lead or whether you lead could be better spent following the Boy Scout motto of “Be prepared.“
(I’ve finally gotten my act together to participate, which means I’ll know when they’re happening and that means I’ll have the link to share with you:)
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
Education, at least higher education, is finally changing and moving forward. And like a jar of olives after you pull out the first one the rest come out faster and faster.
If you are a manager and despair at the quality of people that fill your entry level positions, not their attitude, but their skills and basic education, prepare for it to 
What do you do when you are booted out of your business leadership position? Go into politics, of course.
become jaded. As a result I try to make my sources as objective as possible, which is difficult when the subject is political.
The first is a 
But how much of leadership is the person and how much the circumstances?
