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The Monday Morning Memo

Of Course You Can Figure It Out!

December 22, 2014

| Download
https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/5daa4a56-8fbd-45ce-9b2e-3b1cd8cd5bfb/MMM141222-UCanFigureItOut.mp3

Beagle_School_740

You don’t need to go to college to become successful.

What Americans call education is usually just the passing along of traditional wisdom, which, when you think about it, is essentially a deepening of the status quo: conformity, indoctrination, groupthink.

When students can imitate their teachers perfectly, we claim they have achieved excellence. But aren’t they just imitating the norm, the average, the standard?

If this is excellence, where will we find progress?

I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Laszlo Bock is the head of people operations at Google.

In a conversation with Tom Friedman of The New York Times reported by Max Nisen at Quartz, Bock made a startling series of statements about what Google has learned from studying its own employees:

  1. Graduates of top schools often lack “intellectual humility”

“They commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved.”

  1. People that make it without college are often the most exceptional.

“When you look at people who don’t go to school and yet make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people…. What we’ve seen [at Google] is that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.’”

  1. Learning ability is more important than IQ

Succeeding in academia isn’t always a sign of being able to do a job. Bock says that college can be an “artificial environment” that conditions students for one type of thinking.

Want to hear something silly?

Professors in American business schools usually have no experience in running a successful business. They’re just repeating what they were told by someone else who was taught it by someone else who learned it from an endless string of bloodless people holding chalk in front of blackboards in drab little rooms.

Why do we revere the graduates of these places? It would seem to me that the very definition of mediocrity would be, “a highly developed ability to repeat what you were told.”

But you don’t just repeat what you were told. You think for yourself.
Mistakes don’t frighten you. You learn from them.
The smell of mediocrity does not follow you.
You are not average.

You have imagination and courage and humility and a marvelous sense of humor.

You, my special friend, are a wonderful and valuable brand of crazy.

Merry Christmas.

Roy H. Williams

PS – 12-song album update!

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 Indy’s Addendum: “I Apologize for Mr. Williams.”

I tried to convince the wizard not to publish today’s memo because education is a very ticklish subject and I was sure that his position would cost him a lot of friends. So I showed him all the vitriolic, vicious and venomous blog posts that were aimed at Thomas Friedman after he published the results of his interview with Laszlo Bock in the New York Times. The wizard responded by showing me what Professor Cathy Davidson* wrote about that story: “If I have one quibble with Friedman and Bock, it is that they are too kind towards higher education in its general, present form.  They do not push it enough.”

Professor Davidson goes on to say, “In far too many courses ‘mastery of content’ is king, when the real need is to create an understanding of why the content is significant.”

Davidson is worried that we’re teaching students what to think instead of teaching them how to think for themselves. Frankly, I’m worried about that, too.

CathyDavidon_Thumb2*Professor Cathy N. Davidson served for 8 years as Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University, where she worked to help create many new programs, including the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience as well as the much-heralded program, Information Science + Information Studies. She has written 20 books on education and is the co-founder of HASTAC (“haystack”), a network of innovators dedicated to new forms of learning for the digital age.

Drew-Bartkiewicz_ThumbDrew Bartkiewicz is the creator of Lettrs, a social messaging app that was just named by Google Play as one of this year’s best. Considering the fact that Lettrs has already been used to make 750 million impressions on recipients, it’s no wonder!

Lettrs brings the art of personalized letter writing – complete with postage stamps and original signatures – into the digital age. It’s changing the promotion of products and services and quickly revolutionizing how nonprofits raise money. Join Roving Reporter Dean Rotbart as he gets the story behind the story at MondayMorningRadio.com.

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