How to Get a Real Education

Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business, says Scott Adams.

By SCOTT ADAMS

I understand why the top students in America study physics, chemistry, calculus and classic literature. The kids in this brainy group are the future professors, scientists, thinkers and engineers who will propel civilization forward. But why do we make B students sit through these same classes? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make more sense to teach B students something useful, like entrepreneurship?

Scott Adams

I speak from experience because I majored in entrepreneurship at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. Technically, my major was economics. But the unsung advantage of attending a small college is that you can mold your experience any way you want.

There was a small business on our campus called The Coffee House. It served beer and snacks, and featured live entertainment. It was managed by students, and it was a money-losing mess, subsidized by the college. I thought I could make a difference, so I applied for an opening as the so-called Minister of Finance. I landed the job, thanks to my impressive interviewing skills, my can-do attitude and the fact that everyone else in the solar system had more interesting plans.

The drinking age in those days was 18, and the entire compensation package for the managers of The Coffee House was free beer. That goes a long way toward explaining why the accounting system consisted of seven students trying to remember where all the money went. I thought we could do better. So I proposed to my accounting professor that for three course credits I would build and operate a proper accounting system for the business. And so I did. It was a great experience. Meanwhile, some of my peers were taking courses in art history so they'd be prepared to remember what art looked like just in case anyone asked.

One day the managers of The Coffee House had a meeting to discuss two topics. First, our Minister of Employment was recommending that we fire a bartender, who happened to be one of my best friends. Second, we needed to choose a leader for our group. On the first question, there was a general consensus that my friend lacked both the will and the potential to master the bartending arts. I reluctantly voted with the majority to fire him.

But when it came to discussing who should be our new leader, I pointed out that my friend—the soon-to-be-fired bartender—was tall, good-looking and so gifted at b.s. that he'd be the perfect leader. By the end of the meeting I had persuaded the group to fire the worst bartender that any of us had ever seen…and ask him if he would consider being our leader. My friend nailed the interview and became our Commissioner. He went on to do a terrific job. That was the year I learned everything I know about management.

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• Turning the Classroom Upside Down

At about the same time, this same friend, along with my roommate and me, hatched a plan to become the student managers of our dormitory and to get paid to do it. The idea involved replacing all of the professional staff, including the resident assistant, security guard and even the cleaning crew, with students who would be paid to do the work. We imagined forming a dorm government to manage elections for various jobs, set out penalties for misbehavior and generally take care of business. And we imagined that the three of us, being the visionaries for this scheme, would run the show.

We pitched our entrepreneurial idea to the dean and his staff. To our surprise, the dean said that if we could get a majority of next year's dorm residents to agree to our scheme, the college would back it.

It was a high hurdle, but a loophole made it easier to clear. We only needed a majority of students who said they planned to live in the dorm next year. And we had plenty of friends who were happy to plan just about anything so long as they could later change their minds. That's the year I learned that if there's a loophole, someone's going to drive a truck through it, and the people in the truck will get paid better than the people under it.

The dean required that our first order of business in the fall would be creating a dorm constitution and getting it ratified. That sounded like a nightmare to organize. To save time, I wrote the constitution over the summer and didn't mention it when classes resumed. We held a constitutional convention to collect everyone's input, and I listened to two hours of diverse opinions. At the end of the meeting I volunteered to take on the daunting task of crafting a document that reflected all of the varied and sometimes conflicting opinions that had been aired. I waited a week, made copies of the document that I had written over the summer, presented it to the dorm as their own ideas and watched it get approved in a landslide vote. That was the year I learned everything I know about getting buy-in.

“Why do we make B students sit through the same classes as their brainy peers? That's like trying to train your cat to do your taxes—a waste of time and money. Wouldn't it make sense to teach them something useful instead?”

For the next two years my friends and I each had a private room at no cost, a base salary and the experience of managing the dorm. On some nights I also got paid to do overnight security, while also getting paid to clean the laundry room. At the end of my security shift I would go to The Coffee House and balance the books.

My college days were full of entrepreneurial stories of this sort. When my friends and I couldn't get the gym to give us space for our informal games of indoor soccer, we considered our options. The gym's rule was that only organized groups could reserve time. A few days later we took another run at it, but this time we were an organized soccer club, and I was the president. My executive duties included filling out a form to register the club and remembering to bring the ball.

By the time I graduated, I had mastered the strange art of transforming nothing into something. Every good thing that has happened to me as an adult can be traced back to that training. Several years later, I finished my MBA at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. That was the fine-tuning I needed to see the world through an entrepreneur's eyes.

If you're having a hard time imagining what an education in entrepreneurship should include, allow me to prime the pump with some lessons I've learned along the way.

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It's unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it's easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well. I succeeded as a cartoonist with negligible art talent, some basic writing skills, an ordinary sense of humor and a bit of experience in the business world. The "Dilbert" comic is a combination of all four skills. The world has plenty of better artists, smarter writers, funnier humorists and more experienced business people. The rare part is that each of those modest skills is collected in one person. That's how value is created.

Fail Forward. If you're taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you're doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. I failed at my first career in banking. I failed at my second career with the phone company. But you'd be surprised at how many of the skills I learned in those careers can be applied to almost any field, including cartooning. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. In my senior year of college I asked my adviser how I should pursue my goal of being a banker. He told me to figure out where the most innovation in banking was happening and to move there. And so I did. Banking didn't work out for me, but the advice still holds: Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Scott Adams

Attract Luck. You can't manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn't work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers. Readers of the Journal will find this point obvious. It's not obvious to a teenager.

Conquer Fear. I took classes in public speaking in college and a few more during my corporate days. That training was marginally useful for learning how to mask nervousness in public. Then I took the Dale Carnegie course. It was life-changing. The Dale Carnegie method ignores speaking technique entirely and trains you instead to enjoy the experience of speaking to a crowd. Once you become relaxed in front of people, technique comes automatically. Over the years, I've given speeches to hundreds of audiences and enjoyed every minute on stage. But this isn't a plug for Dale Carnegie. The point is that people can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. I took a two-day class in business writing that taught me how to write direct sentences and to avoid extra words. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

That's my starter list for the sort of classes that would serve B students well. The list is not meant to be complete. Obviously an entrepreneur would benefit from classes in finance, management and more.

Remember, children are our future, and the majority of them are B students. If that doesn't scare you, it probably should.

NEW DELHI — The difference between a road and a lane in India is that the lane is hypothetical, like the equator. So Indians change lanes at will, usually without using a turn signal. Running a traffic light is not a serious event either. In the middle of all this, pedestrians run across the road with glee.

India is a commotion. In Mumbai, people dangle from the doors of the local trains for a more ventilated ride, they travel on the roof, they risk death by crossing the tracks just to save themselves the trouble of taking the footbridges. Life goes on this way.

At the heart of this condition is an important Indian character — the uncompromising practicality of the individual, an untamed form of great personal freedom and informality. Every person, irrespective of his level of education or social background, will do what is most convenient to him in the short term. All rules and systems are subordinate to the sheer force of practicality.

Practicality is a crucial survival tool in a difficult nation. Many Indians who have managed to achieve comfortable lives today distinctly remember the poverty of their parents. The history of prosperity is India’s shortest history. The full benefits of economic liberalization that began in the early ’90s have only recently begun to materialize. And Indians who have seen the worst of socialist India attribute their success to how smartly they had survived the fetters of the old system.

An editor with a lifestyle magazine in Mumbai, who requested anonymity, remembers how, in the ’80s, she was “a child gold smuggler” working for her decent, law-abiding parents. India had severe restrictions on the import of gold, and the price of the metal was high in the country. Indians who worked or traveled abroad found innovative ways to bring back gold, some of which they could then sell at a good profit. One of the methods was to hide pieces of gold under the clothes of their children, who were usually not checked by customs.

Resourcefulness when the odds are against you even has a Hindi word for it: “jugaad.” In a recent column on jugaad in the International Herald Tribune, Anand Giridharadas described a rustic Indian invention, a truck “tossed together, saladlike” from scrap and wood.

The essay was much discussed by English-speaking Indians. More than the villagers, it is the Indian elite who talk of jugaad with fondness. They think it is cool. Jugaad has entered popular culture in India, and a day may soon come when English papers in the country will finally stop italicizing it.

But jugaad is overrated. In fact, jugaad is the problem.

The nation’s infatuation with its own practicality at every level has created a society that is unable to truly respect values. Values are important not because they are the rules of a supernatural force. They are important because they are good ideas in the long term.

The civil rights activist and lawyer Prashant Bhushan says that independent India did not get enough time to build the character of its society. While the value systems of Indian institutions were weak before the economic reforms of the early ’90s, the speed of privatization in the last two decades has exacerbated the situation. It has “increased the demand for corruption,” he said.

Indians do express anger over the financial corruption of their elected leaders, but at the same time, they tolerate it as a way of the world. A revolutionary march on the streets against the corruption of politicians is unlikely.

It is not surprising then that one of the most corrupt institutions in the country is the very institution that the people of India directly create — Indian politics.

The current union government that is led by the Congress party is caught in a scam that involves illegally underselling mobile telephony licenses to telecom companies. In 2001, when the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power, its president at the time, Bangaru Laxman, was caught on camera accepting a bribe. Regional political parties do not fare any better.

India’s self-interested practicality is a cultural smog that has spread far and wide, including the high places of traditional idealism — Indian journalism, for instance. The Indian media are among the very few institutions in the country that would discuss ethics without a guffaw. But commercial considerations have deeply infested journalism, too. In a country where the wink and the nudge of practicality triumph over idealism, editors find it hard to protect their journalistic integrity. Many of the most influential newspapers and television channels sell editorial space, some discreetly, others overtly.

But there is another form of Indian practicality, and it is not an opposing force of idealism. It is complex and unsettling. It is a way of getting on with life in the face of extraordinary circumstances — the harsh realities of Indian life that include natural calamities.

In 2001, hours after a major earthquake struck the western state of Gujarat, I visited the towns and villages that had been flattened. On the site of a collapsed building, an army operation was under way to rescue a man who was buried in the debris. As the hours went by, and the efforts seemed futile, a tired soldier told me that a relative of the trapped person had approached him to kill the man on humanitarian grounds.

In another instance, in a village near the town of Anjar, a man was sitting on the rubble of his house and trying to cut open a steel cupboard. Buried in the debris below him was his 16-year-old son. But the man was focused on removing his valuables from the cupboard. He had heard that the bulldozers would soon arrive to completely raze the fallen structure.

Among his valuables, he said, were perfume bottles.

Manu Joseph is the editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and the author of the novel “Serious Men.”

Why is your client acting like a shithead?

More often than not, it’s our own fault. At least in the sense that we can fix it, therefore we can take responsibility.

Very, very few people are naturally painful. They don’t go home and tell their kids exactly how to play with their toys, tell their partners that they are taking too long to do whatever or that their dinner guests need to move their plates a little to the left and down an inch.

(Alright, so there might be some people like this, but they really are shitheads and there isn’t much we can do about that.)

They’re nice people, just getting through the day, trying to get their work done. They have a boss they work for, a family they love, a book they cry at and a movie they laugh through. They have their own stresses and worries and don’t want us to add to them.

They’re normal. I know, I know, a whacky thought. But they’re human and nothing more nor less.

So why is it that they treat us so poorly? What did we do to insult them? Why do they ridicule us and force us to think unnatural thoughts involving the tearing of flesh from limbs by the teeth of angered hounds?

I’m thinking it happens when we don’t talk to them.

I’ve found that the best experiences I’ve had from clients is when we’ve spoken a great deal from the very beginning. Not just about the job but about anything that comes up — it helps develop a relationship and a better understanding of how they describe things, what their nuances with the English language mean and what they’re really hoping to get out of the job.

Children throw tantrums when they’re confused and out of place. Their mind doesn’t know how to handle all the new, unexpected stimuli so they just go nuts. Or they are just shitheads (not your kids, your kids are awesome).

But when they know what to expect and know they can trust you, then they’re happy little campers that are good for a laugh and great for a cuddle.

Clients are the same. (The real good ones might give you a cuddle, but be careful about how you go about it, lest you enjoy explaining to your spouse why there’s yet another HR meeting about some ‘sexual harassment thing’.)

Backing away from that tangent, back to talking to the client.

First — explain the process and desired result.

Let them know what to expect from you and what you expect from them.

Get them to open right up about what they hope the job will achieve, who the audience is, what you can and can’t do, the language the audience enjoys best (visual and written), what’s been done before, what hasn’t been done before and all those other things that are standard questions. It’s the most obvious thing to do, so it’s amazing how often this step is skipped.

Don’t assume they know anything
about your process

Tell them how you want the content (Word document, edited, approved, edited again and finalised) and how you don’t want it (in several emails, unfinished, unapproved by their boss and full of text in red that says “is this right? that’s kind of racist/sexists/idiotic/I don’t get it”).

Explain how you work when it comes to proofs, changes, finals, pricing, billing and so on. Don’t assume they know anything about your process unless you’ve been working together for a while.

Again, all basic stuff, but it’s wildly important that it’s explained to every single new client. Just because you’ve said it a million times doesn’t mean they’ve heard it once.

Second –  be devastatingly honest.

One of my favourite clients to work with is one to whom I once very bluntly said “No, not going to do that” when she made a request I didn’t agree with. Sounding shocked and hurt, her response was ” … why not?” to which I gave a proper, considered, educated response. “Oh, that makes sense.”

I’ve earned her trust

And what’s happened since? No more silly requests or, often better, the wonderful “what do you think?”.

Because of this, I will often make an aesthetic decision I’m not thrilled with but she is, just because she has earned it. It sounds condescending, but I’m in the exact same boat. I’ve earned her trust, so she does the same with me because we trust in one another’s honesty and knowledge.

Third — r-e-s-p-e-c-t

Pay them respect first, even if they don’t reciprocate.

There is a reasonable chance that the client might start the process of working with you with their back up and muscles tightened. They might not trust the process, they might have been burned before or they might not really see the benefit.

take their work seriously, their input seriously,
their concerns and thoughts seriously

In spite of this, be respectful.

This doesn’t mean say thank you and please and all those things you’d probably be doing anyway.

It means take their work seriously, their input seriously, their concerns and thoughts seriously. Don’t fob anything off. Explain when you don’t do something they ask for and when you do something they didn’t.

Above all, do good work. Do work to the best of your ability with your knowledge and your client’s message in mind at all times.

Fourth — ask, and answer, “Why?”

I’ve written about this before so I’ll keep this one brief.

If they want something and you don’t understand why they want it, then ask about it.

… your questioning should raise a flag

This is a great trick as it does a few things to improve the relationship you have with your client.

It shows that you’re paying attention and want to understand where they are coming from and where they hope to be. And even better — it shows that you want to help them get there as smoothly as possible.

If you’re asking why, it means that it might not be worth doing, and you’re the professional, so your questioning should raise a flag.

It also means they have to justify their reasoning, meaning that you’ll be getting into their head a little bit and understanding how they think (very handy). It also means if they can’t justify it, you can probably talk them out of it.

Even more importantly, be prepared to do the same when your client asks.

I said earlier that a lot of the tension that builds up in the client/designer relationship stems from misunderstanding or a lack of information. This is true of the designer as much as the client.

We must be able to give reason as to why we’ve done what we’ve done — why this colour, this shape, this typeface, this image—and how it works as part of a larger machine that the you’ve built into the design.

Just people

I’m sure there are many more things that can be done to improve the designer-client relationship, so I’d love to hear your ideas.

These are just few things that have worked for me, in my experience.

Clients are people, who probably have a head full of stress and a heart full of worry. Help them get past all this and earn their respect — just because they’re paying us doesn’t mean they trust us.

And once they trust us, they won’t be the shitheads we all loathe.

P.S

Also worth another mention is that, yeah, some people are just grumpy moles.

They have a little bit of power and they love to abuse it, they have the bosses ear and love to whisper sweet nothings or they just don’t know how to deal with people. These are the true shitheads to whom you simply smile, nod and try to avoid working with – their dollars don’t shine brightly enough to ignore who they are.

Why We Need Technology: Life in the Villages.

Posted: August 27th, 2010 | Author: Andrew | Filed under: Op-Ed's, Random, Technology | Tags: Op-Ed, Technology | 1 Comment »

Not to long ago our ancestors were, using a more modern expression, hunter-gatherers.  Hunter-gatherer means that our ancestors either hunted their food or gathered it from the surrounding area.  Essentially our ancestors were hunter-foragers.  There were no endless fields with perfect rows of corn or big ranches with thousands of cows being readied for slaughter; We did things differently back in the day- we crept through the bush until we found the lone bull or the bushel of strawberries.  Our hunter-gatherer existence did something incredibly important: it limited our population growth.  Without large populations disease like the flu weren’t rampant or widespread because of low population densities and societies were relatively egalitarian because government structures were not necessary as there was no giant food production, distribution, and resulting trading system to monitor and tax.

Life was definitely more simple, but it could definitely be harder as well.  Most people didn’t reach 40, food shortages and cold fronts posed serious threats and a common cold could be a killer.  Essentially, like all life is, the hunter-gatherer existence was a give-and-take existence.  People got the chance to enjoy simple living with close-knit communities and meaningful relationships and a large amount of independence from a formal government but in exchange were susceptible to the will of nature, disease, and maybe even a bit of cabin fever.

But then somebody decided to plant a seed and everything changed.  Fields of food meant a larger population because there was less of a worry of a food shortage.  With more food and it become specialized other trades like a blacksmith or cobbler could be born because instead of spending time foraging and hunting people could purchase their food and spend their time building and developing new things.  The combination of craftsmanship (which spawned innovation) and a lot of food led to cities and high population densities.  High population densities meant greater communication of ideas, knowledge and education but it also meant the rapid spread of disease and a decline in community.  As I mentioned with more food meant government which in turn led to a great divide in wealth, corruption, and favoritism.  The time of the egalitarian society was disappearing.

Eventually with all this free time, the industrial revolution was born which led to greater population densities and eventually medicine.  Medicine became the answer to the disease that now effected high population densities.  With medicine life expectancies rose and with all the effects of planting a seed in the ground, the quality of life drastically increased, some would believe.  There was less of a worry about health, food, and personal freedom, but a greater burden of social climbing, getting ahead, and what society would call a “great achievement.”  Today, people spend to much time sitting at their desks away from their families, obesity is rampant because of the ability to lead a sedentary life style, and communities are dissolving with the greater push for individuality and less community growth and achievement.  But with technology we’ve been able to answer the problems of the sedentary lifestyle, build online communities, and working from home.  But this is not the technology that TCP promotes, we do not believe that these problems should be solved with technology, but we do believe technology is necessary for many, many things.

Last summer I went to Kenya and Ethiopia for a two and a half week service trip.  What saw me astounded me, both for good and for bad.  But I’m an optimist so lets look at the good first.  I have never met happier people in my whole life than when I was in Kenya and Ethiopia.  I repeat, I never met anyone happier than the people I met in Kenya and Ethiopia.  These were people who didn’t have cellphones, laptops, cameras, espresso makers, cars, running water, heat, or electricity and the hundreds of other modern conveniences we all seize upon in the developed world.  What these people did have,  I realized over time and with much observation, were incredibly tight-knit communities and families with few worries about social climbing, social status, and the accumulation of material goods.  Happiness and fulfillment came from the few things they did have and the little things in life like kicking a homemade soccer ball around or helping to milk the cows or perhaps mending the roof of a hut, or talking to clearly confused and shocked white people like myself.  I was recently reading a book that found a study that showed the happiness levels of those from Masai villages in Kenya vs the happiness of Americans was the same and sometimes higher*.  Please don’t think I’m playing martyr for a technological relapse spawning hundreds of years, I am most certainly not, I am simply laying out fact and observations.

The negative must be addressed as well.  The people we visited were in constant fear of starving or losing their crops to the drought or to wildlife foraging, they had no access to medicine because of a lack of money, access, and a ability to travel.  Women who cooked for us in their huts were susceptible to multiple lung diseases because of poor ventilation and if anyone needed to get anywhere that wasn’t in the village it required a multi-day walks or catching rides miles away from the villages.  Water was filthy and the villagers had no way to clean it.  Life in the villages was beautiful and horrible.  Beautiful because the people gained happiness and fulfillment and enjoyment from the most simple things in life, without the help of modern technological conveniences, but life was horrible because I saw problems that could be fixed with a  very simple application of modern technology.  The cities were worse.  The cities were filthy, disease infected place with no modern public services needed to get rid of them.  The largest slum in Africa, Kibera, located in Nairobi, Kenya and home to over a million people was a horrible place.  No running water or electricity, close quarters, human feces everywhere, and naked toddlers running around.  Kibera was a place trying to live in the modern world but with the access to technology of the stone age, the two do not comply.  Africa is a beautiful place, but it’s a horrible place as well.  Africa is a place of Give and take.

So the point of that whole story was to show how we, as human beings, living the way we choose to live with big populations, need technology.  We need technology to heal disease, to grow enough food, to get things done efficiently, and to connect people with ideas, information, and other people.  These 4 categories are where technology are needed for humans to thrive and be happy.  Those are the 4 reasons I started TCP.  I wanted to promote technology that could change the world for the better, to make us happier and worry free but not the excessive amount that most of us have in the developed world.  We all can be happier, in the developing and the developed world, we just need to choose what technology we need and leave the rest alone.  Studies have shown that the average level of happiness an American feels is going down and rates of depression and anxiety are going up.  Clearly our excess hasn’t done much for us in terms of putting a smile on our faces, so lets simplify things.  With food, health, efficiency, and connective technology, we can make the world a better place, and a happier one to boot.  TCP wants to boost the awareness and use of these necessary technologies and put a bigger smile on every one’s face.

Much Love,

Andrew

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