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One of my philosophies in life is that you have to get uncomfortable if you want to grow. If you’re comfortable, you’re not stretching yourself. You’re probably in a rut, and definitely not evolving as a person. That’s not just deadly in your home life (partnerships of all hues rarely thrive on dullness) but doubly problematic in business.
However, as I see it, one of the major features of business education, both undergrad and at MBA level, is making students comfortable with all aspects of the core curriculum — from marketing and strategy, to communications, leadership skills, and finance. I studied business at college, and this is the stuff I learned.
From day one, we were told that once you had all that knowledge under your belt, you could slot in as another cog in the corporate wheel and know what you were doing. Or, similarly, do what I did, and embark on entrepreneurship, knowing all the nuts and bolts of running a startup.
Yeah, well, that’s not how life works.
I have seen new recruits fall at the first hurdle because they don’t know how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Stuff gets thrown at you all the time and I love that. I thrive on not knowing what’s coming up next. But it doesn’t seem to be a skill being taught by business educators right now.
I’m not alone in noticing this.
Dr. Vijay Govindarajan, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and a Faculty Partner in the Silicon Valley incubator, Mach49, and his colleague Dr. Anup Srivastava, wrote a piece called MBA Programs Need an Update for the Digital Era for the Harvard Business Review (HBR). The authors pointed out that:
“The MBA has been the quintessential managerial education program and has supplied more ready and trained managers to U.S. corporations than any other graduate program [but] the pace of change must accelerate to keep the MBA degree future-proof. Otherwise, the danger is what Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, described: “When MBAs come to us, we have to fundamentally retrain them — nothing they learned will help them succeed at innovation.”
Yes. Exactly. Innovative thinkers are fundamentally good at dealing with the unknown, not the prescribed-by-decades-of-book-learning. Again, while not specifically calling out a need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, I feel the distinguished professors suggested it as a core skill needed to survive in a digital-first economy. As they go on to say, business education was designed for the 20th Century-era behemoths, not quicksilver-fast 21st Century digital upstarts:
“Some of the earliest business schools were started to fulfill the needs of industrial and automobile companies [and so] business schools have historically been organized into watertight departments, such as finance, accounting, production and operations management, marketing, and human resources [which] mimic that of a 20th-century automobile or industrial company. [But] digital businesses defy those [20th Century] rules [and] the dominant strategy then becomes to establish first-mover advantage, grow your market, and become the global market leader as quickly as possible.”
Companies that move this fast need people who are clearly good at navigating the unknown — and being uncomfortable, but okay, while doing it. These are my words, whereas the professors call this skill set: “creativity, empathy, leadership, conflict management, strategic thinking, understanding technological progress and disruption, crisis management, problem solving, and dynamic decision making.” I feel we’re on the same page there.
Plus people only really value stuff which is hard to obtain. The skills you have to really hone, to nurture, the get-bruised-but-carry-on type behaviors. These are the ones that forge real character, develop resilience and grit. These are the skills I recruit for at Apptopia.
What was your first car?
I bet you have a strong emotional connection to it, if you worked hard to get it. I know I do.
Mine was nothing to write home about. In fact, that’s exactly where it was — at my parents’ house — until I’d saved up enough money by teaching tennis for four long consecutive summers to pay 50 percent of the Blue Book value.
I’ve found myself in (or put myself in, to be more accurate) a whole lot of uncomfortable situations. But they were the making of me. You know, the big adulting stuff, from starting a company to raising capital, getting married, and then becoming a father. I was the first of my friends to get my own apartment. Living alone wasn’t easy at first, in fact it was really uncomfortable, but I learned fast, and enjoyed my new freedom.
Back to my first car. I really loved that red Volvo. It represented a large commitment on my part to being uncomfortable, showing up to the tennis court to teach, when my friends were out at the beach. Everytime I drove it, I felt a sense of pride and satisfaction. I’d earned the money to buy this car.
It was a statement of how much I was willing to work hard to get what I want. I like the hustle. I really like to work alongside people who like the hustle. There’s something truly great about people who can think on their feet, who thrive in unknown environments, are problem-solvers to the core. I know, from experience, that a lot of what makes people good at business, is not something they learned in Accounting 101. You need to put yourself into challenging situations to learn how strong you are. You can’t learn this stuff in a textbook. Diving in and being uncomfortable is, I believe, a mentality which engenders success.
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