Academics hate business, because they don’t recognize business skills at a high level — and they don’t recognize the lack of skill in themselves:
In any event, what I have noticed is that they lack a couple of key concepts — the first is that simple understanding of a concept does not mean that you can do it. While this is clear and obvious in the realm of sports and entertainment, it is not obvious in business. And that leads me to the other point.Really successful business executives are rarely, if ever, one-trick ponies. They must not only be successful in whatever their entry level occupation is, otherwise they could never be promoted, but eventually, they must shed whatever self-styled profession they had and embrace ‘business”. In many cases, the person we promoted was not the “best” in their group, but probably in the top 5. What they had was an ability to not only learn a new skill, but to fully embrace it. Somewhere in middle management, you lose your origin. You begin to hear things like, I started out as an accountant, or I came up through sales. But to be really successful, you have to be able to become a generalist at a minimum, and still be able to master new skills, especially political ones. The others are somewhat obvious, they include finance, legal, HR, etc. You never have to be the best, but, at any one time, one of these areas becomes critical to successful outcome.
Failure at a high level comes in many cases when, under extreme pressure, the executive returns to his roots. In the bullfight, after the bull has been severely wounded, he will pick out a location of the ring and return to it, defend it, and die in it. Its called the carencia. I have seen many otherwise successful people fail because under extreme pressure they attempted to solve the problem by doing what made them initially successful. Cost reduction, layoffs, opening new stores or factories; when overwhelmed they return to what brought them success early on.
Not only are academics specialists, rather than generalists, but they don’t recognize performance skills, which differ from academic skills:
They don’t make that connection that they could be lousy sales guys, I mean, they read the book and went to sales training classes! And they refuse to believe that some guy with just a Bachelors degree from a third rate university could not only be their boss but actually be critical of them! But numbers don’t lie. These people don’t understand or accept that the sales director has certain highly developed skills and can probably operate under pressure far more effectively than they can. This is when performance differences usually emerge. And what is really frustrating, is that the skill that the sales director has, he developed because he was the social director of his fraternity, learned to win at drinking games and was actually able to pass his courses with a perpetual hangover. This is highly critical to his job performance and success.The last point is that they don’t value experience and the judgment that comes with it. So, who would you follow into battle, the 30 year veteran or the smartest guy who just graduated from West Point? Where’s the test in that? I would say survival, but they prefer SAT scores.
This anecdote takes that sales-director bit one step further:
I’m sure you know who Lanny Davis is, he was one of the top white house lawyers in the Clinton admin. In any event, he was at Yale with Bush. He was one of the only ones on the left who warned everyone about Bush. He had seen him in action. Apparently Bush was the head cheerleader at Yale. According to Davis, he made the post more important than student council president. The story also goes that Bush was able to perform some very unusual feats of memory at his fraternity (ie, memorizing 40 some odd new recruits, name, home town, etc. after hearing them only once, and in order). While everyone on the left was saying how stupid he was, Davis was telling them he wasn’t. He had made a career out of having people underestimate him — and it apparently worked pretty well.
(Hat tip to David Foster.)