This post from Assistant Village Idiot is an important discussion of theory vs real life experience and the role of academics in business. We see a situation in the Obama administration where people with Ivy League degrees are trying to run a national economy. The whole thing is worth reading but I will post a couple of excerpts.
I have had the pleasure and frustration of working with extremely bright people over the years, both at AT&T and at Imagem- my partner and fellow founder, inventor of the technology, is a retired professor with 5 degrees. Through the years a couple of things have struck me. That not only do academics get angry that they aren’t running things, this includes a lot of the Bell Labs guys, but that a lot of the problem lies in definitions. As a recovering operations research junkie, one of the most important lessons I ever learned was problem definition. In many ways, it has been critical to my success. How to correctly define the problem, in most cases when it presents itself as something else, is key to a successful outcome.
This applies to the Atul Gawande post above. A Harvard professor assumes that physicians in private practice are “wolves” and patients are “sheep.”
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.
I won’t reproduce the whole post here but will post one last excerpt.
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.
That’s an interesting observation. Here is another.
As for Palin, I agree, she has a much better operational resume than any of them. I don’t know if she has the “persona” that is required. It would have been far better for Bush to have been elected before television or radio, he reads much better than he sounds(ie, his speeches, when read, are actually not bad- he’s no Churchill, but then neither is Obama). And to that point, Obama is so obvious in his “speechifying”- I am reminded again, of that line in Blazing Saddles uttered by Slim Pickens to Harvey Korman about the $10 dollar whore and his tongue.
The generalist with a modest education but more experience may be far more effective than the theorist who has never run anything.
Where have I heard that before ?