Who Are You Going to Blame When Your Straight "A" Student Doesn't Do Well?

The Corporate Executive Board is one of the most respected business think tanks in the world. The Corporate Leadership Council is the arm of the CEB that deals with HR issues. In 2005 the CLC conducted a study called "Realizing the Full Potential of Rising Talent: A Quantitative Analysis of the Identification and Development of High-Potential Employees". While the study is only available to CLC members, it should be required reading for every educator, academic and business person.

The study is long and contains much interesting information. For instance, the survey behind the study found that 78% of CFO’s were focusing on revenue growth over cost control. At the same time, the study found that 74% of respondents to the survey indicated that “skill / leadership gaps have a negative impact on product innovation.” A Chief Human Resources Officer in the study is quoted as saying that the skills gap is troubling because:

“These are the people we will call upon to lead us to stronger business performance over the years to come. They will launch new businesses, they will find new ways to strip out costs, they will build better customer relationships, and they will drive innovation. Really, the future of the organization is in their hands.”

The study went on to say that “Employee potential grows when employees are pushed outside their comfort zones in news, personal (and at times painful) ways.” The study examined which of these "growing experiences" had the most beneficial impact on the employee’s ability to grow. 22 factors were sited. Of those, only 4 were factors that are learned or reinforced in education institutions:

• Using specialized skills for daily tasks
• Engaging in business forecasting or planning
• Understanding markets, competitors or customers
• Designing new products (which I would argue is actually a creative exercise)

Only one of those factors ("Using specialized skills for daily tasks") makes into the top five (number 5, actually).

And the top three experiences that have the highest impact on employee growth?

• Modifying work to adapt to changing circumstances
• Creatively solve problems
• Persuading senior managers to take different actions

All three of these capabilities are actively and purposefully destroyed in K-12 education. Students are penalized for changing assignments with diminished grades (as my previous example about my son’s homework shows), penalized for solving problems in new ways (try telling a math teacher that you got the right answer by solving the problem in a different way and see what reaction you get), and teachers almost always discourage students from engaging with them openly about things that could be done differently in the classroom.

So let me frame this for you directly:

The Corporate Leadership Council asks it’s members (which include most of the Fortune 500) "What is important to your business?"

The members overwhelmingly say “Growth.”

The CLC then asks its members “What’s stopping you from growing?"

The members overwhelmingly reply “Lack of people who can innovate.”

The CLC then asks “What experiences would help the people who you most rely on (your high potential employees) to grow so that they could help you innovate?"

The members reply “Unlearning what they learn in school.”

Most kids show up to school creative, curious and brave. Most kids leave school programmed and afraid. As a parent you might be able to rationalize this destruction if it helped your kid live a healthier, happier and more productive life. But as this shows, it doesn't. It actually does just the opposite: if your kid is getting straight A's there’s a good chance they won't be a high potential in a world that demands innovative approaches and innovative thinking.

Think about that the next time you tell your kid the only thing that is important is getting good grades. Who are you going to blame when they eventually get bad reviews at work?

Comments

[laurence haughton]

I don't disagree. In fact (after reading Taleb's "Black Swan") I see you two are on the same page. But schools are no hotbed of change leaders. Can we realistically expect them to do anything?

Who, among the members who said our problem is "Lack of people who can innovate", is doing anything radical about it. Seems like we've got a lot of CEOs who say, "Change is critical... you go first."

[Lance Knobel]

I agree completely with your criticisms of both the standard education system and (in the earlier post) with the attitudes of most hiring managers who seek high GPAs from Stanford or whatnot.

I'm disappointed, however, that you seem to present the purpose of education as furnishing the right workforce. That may be a product of a good education system, but I don't think it should be the purpose. Let's have an education system that results in ethical, creative, good people and everything else will flow.

Howard Gardner's most recent book, Five Minds for the Future, is quite eloquent on this point.

Incidentally, however poor the US system may be in producing adaptable, creative minds, most other systems internationally seem to be worse.

[Colin Kingsbury]

David Gelernter (who is nothing if not one of the more creatively stunning intellectuals of our age) has a piece in the current or most recent Weekly Standard talking about how public education is basically obsolete because we as a nation no longer truly have a shared communal notion of what schools ought to provide. While he's coming at the issue from a right-of-center perspective, you can hot-swap his value points with left-of-center ones and the essential logic of the article is equally sound.

There is an interesting issue here in that prior to the 19th century, education was entirely a function of class, and not much more systematized than the way people learn golf or tennis. Parents hired tutors for their children, who learned in a direction and at a pace largely of their own choosing.

The problem, of course, is that this model was not scalable, and it's in the 1800s that we begin to see education as something other than a luxury, like downhill skiing. Education became something that cultivated individual virtue (with strongly religious overtones), which ultimately made better citizens, and now you needed a way to mass-produce education at lower cost.

In some senses, now ought to be a great time to be a 10-year-old autodidact. As a kid, I had a skinny set of Golden Book encyclopedias that were falling apart from being read through so many times. Now an old PC and an Internet connection gives you the wealth of the entire world. And yet, on some level, kids of 200 years ago (if they were male and upper class) perhaps had a lot more practical opportunities at their fingertips. Children were viewed a lot less sentimentally, and were accepted into what we consider adult-level responsibilities much sooner. John Paul Jones began his naval career at 13, and this was not unusual for the time.

We don't need to go back to the horrors of child labor in textile mills to see that a lot of young people would probably be happier getting out of school a lot sooner. My only concern with Jeff's line of argumentation is that I fear replacing our current system with something every bit as costly and bureaucratic but which accomplishes even less. To paraphrase Chesterton, "the old man is always wrong, but the young man is always wrong about what ails him."

[John Sumser]

My thoughts:

http://www.recruiting.com/edumacation