Business School

If I was eighteen, and clueless about what I wanted to do with my life, I would do business school all over again.

I’m not eighteen anymore, so I would not go back to business school.  Not when there are many other ways of learning out there.

1. I’m not fit to give you any business advice

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine headed back to school in a remote community in interior BC.  She wrote to me, excitedly about her new surroundings.  She was also excited about a business idea she’s had: the campus was set up miles away from the nearest town, so why not start a grocery delivery service for the hungry students?  I was the only person she knew with a business degree, so it found me.

I started to write back somewhat vague and non-committal, than I stopped typing, hit the ENTER key, and wrote the following: “The thing is, a business degree is probably the least helpful to someone that wants to start their business, because in business school, all we got trained on was how to service someone else.”

I wrote this to concede that I had little practical advice for her.

I was not wholly clueless when it comes to entrepreneurship – I did get my hands dirty on a business for a couple of years during university, and that has proven to be one of the biggest confidence-booster of my life.  But whatever skills I had gained during this time became neutered in a classroom setting.

School trained us to become task-masters, one that is great at driving efficiency, expediency, and a razor-sharp ability to prioritize.  We become extremely proficient at functional tasks, but terrible at matters involving creativity and imagination.  It takes a smart and able person to answer a question correctly, but a non-conformist to re-phrase the questions posed in the first place. In face of the current crisis, I think that kind of out-of-the-box inquisitiveness might have been helpful.  Read more...