Stretch Beyond What You Can Hope to Succed at to Learn the Most
By :
Donald MitchellCategoryCareerPopularity
Date Published :
2008-09-21 13:55:29
Number Times Read :
8
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
--Yogi Berra
At age 21, I was blessed with a great mentor, legendary Harvard Business Review, Ernie Frawley. He continually listened to what I was trying to do, advised me on when I needed to make a shift, and encouraged me to take on new challenges. As a result, I found out a lot about business that I could never have learned from theoretical studies.
Let me share the story as a way to encourage you to find a mentor who will push you into challenges you are ready for, but don't realize that you can handle.
On his own initiative, Ernie persuaded me to start taking courses in the second year of the Harvard MBA program in marketing while I was a second-year law student. I asked Ernie why I should study second-year marketing. He responded that there was almost no discipline-specific content in the marketing courses, and no one could tell the difference between a first-year and a second-year marketing course. The courses just looked at different case studies. As a result, I would be at no disadvantage over other students in the second year curriculum.
I would have preferred taking the first-year version; but in the first year, the marketing course was held on an unscheduled basis that created unavoidable conflicts with regularly scheduled classes elsewhere.
Curious, I complied with Ernie's suggestion and immediately made a big mistake. Not understanding that the business school and law schools operated with different length classes, I signed up for two courses that met at the same time. And the two schools were a brisk 20 minute walk apart!
Gradually, I figured out that I didn't have to go to my tax class at the law school. I could just read the materials on my own. The tax code and regulations are pretty straightforward if you can understand bureaucratic language.
So I spent my class time on those days south of the Charles River listening to MBA students say the most illogical and foolish things imaginable in class: They always wanted to abandon what was working well in favor of dangerous new directions, such as the student who wanted to drop the brand name for Heinz Ketchup in favor of a new name that no one had heard of before. It was irresistible entertainment.
I began to notice that discussing business was a lot of fun while combing over the law was always deadly dull.
For the following semester, I signed up for a class that was the culmination of a marketing MBA: providing a consulting service in marketing for a real business. Wanting to be conservative due to my inexperience in business and limited business education, I picked a magazine-related project (I had worked at Harvard Magazine for several years).
My MBA student teammates were impressed with my experience, so I was asked to help organize our work. Since I knew few of the analytical techniques that MBAs learn, I relied on my teammates teaching me the various methods we could employ before we picked one. It was a great learning experience for all of us.
Three days before the final presentation, our adviser happened to mention that we were expected to deliver a 100-page written report at the presentation. We had planned to write the report later.
In a panic, I hired one of my law school secretary friends to type and started writing the report on a legal pad. Another team member was writing the presentation, but he needed to see the written report to do that.
I would write for 12 hours at a stretch and snooze for a while on the couch in our shared office while my secretary friend typed. She kept clicking away until she couldn't see straight and would then return a few hours later.
Twice a day the presentation team came to read what she had typed and to ask me questions. We finished with six hours remaining before the deadline.
After that experience, I felt like I could do anything.
To me, the most amazing part of the course was that our advice turned out to be uncannily accurate, even if that point wasn't clear until later to anyone but our team.
The presentation seemed to go well. Our client was polite and attentive. But after we ended, he asked us over a few beers if we really meant that the magazine would stop growing its circulation in six months. Yes, we meant that.
He told us we had missed the boat. He argued that the magazine was serving less than 5 percent of its eventual readership. We explained why we thought that he was wrong, but he was complacent enough not to be offended. Needless to say, the magazine stopped growing six months later.
That client and I bump into each other from time to time, and he's still puzzled by how we figured out that circulation was about to stop growing. It was actually pretty simple to figure out, and we explained our method to him at the time.
We surveyed the people we assumed knew the most about the magazine and looked at the rate whereby they purchased the magazine versus a key competitor's magazine. We assumed that ratio between the two publications would be a limit on growth potential across the country as awareness expanded.
Looking at the ratio, we simply took the current growth rate forward until that limit was reached. It would happen in six months. The publisher simply didn't realize that others didn't love his magazine as much as he did.
That kind of short-sightedness is a key reason why many businesses underperform. It was a good lesson to learn at a young age: Optimism pursued solely on faith, rather than good thinking and hard work, could be a disadvantage.
But I remained optimistic. I could see what the magazine could have done differently to grow larger . . . but its leaders weren't willing to consider those changes.
Three owners later, all of the changes were in place. The first set of owners cost themselves a fortune by being stuck in the wrong mind-set.
That observation was very interesting to me. Since then, I've seen the same pattern repeated hundreds of times. Many people would rather fail with their own approach than look around and shift to a better one. That inclination leaves a lot of opportunity for mentally and emotionally flexible people.
Do you have mentor who pushes you to take on the challenges you ready for?
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