Reframing the Purpose & Value of an Education

When we were young students, we often remarked to our teachers: "This subject is useless to me. When am I ever going to use this knowledge in the real world?"  Teachers everywhere cringe at this comment.  Today, many people are questioning the value of higher education as a whole.  Schools are scrambling to demonstrate their graduates' return on investment.  Institutions should be focused on helping students prepare for a successful career.  Developing practical skills and capabilities is important.  Yet, the value of higher education extends well beyond learning concrete skills that are easily transferable to the first job after graduation.  

As a faculty member, I believe that I'm helping to form the whole person, to contribute to the personal development of young people.   As part of that formation, I believe that I'm responsible for shaping the minds of my students, not by teaching them what to think, but how to think.  We sharpen their minds not by giving them all the answers, but asking tough questions. We push them, challenge them, and ask them to do something perhaps they did not think they could accomplish.  Sometimes, it means making them uncomfortable.  

Employers need to be focused on understanding the quality of the minds they hire, not just the batch of immediately applicable skills that person brings to the table.  By that, I don't mean focusing on GPA or test scores alone.  I mean that employers need to assess how applicants think through tough problems.  How do they frame an issue, explore alternatives, analyze ambiguous data, and draw conclusions backed by strong supporting logic?

As I think about these issues at the end of this academic year, I'm reminded of one of my favorite movie scenes about teaching and education.  The movie is The Paper Chase, starring John Houseman as a professor teaching first-year students at Harvard Law School.  He offers a beautiful soliloquy about his approach to teaching during an early scene in the movie.   My favorite quote: "We do brain surgery here. You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer." 

Perseverance & Focus When Work is Hectic

As I teach college students, I notice that some cope with adversity with a steady hand, demonstrating calm and resilience.  They ask for help when needed, but they don't make excuses.  They push through difficult situations.  Others become overwhelmed when something goes wrong in one facet of their life, and they allow those challenges to disrupt other aspects of their life.  They struggle to compartmentalize and push through when their usual routines are disrupted.  They often make things worse by falling further behind on key commitments, and then becoming increasingly anxious about how behind they have gotten. Of course, many of us have found ourselves in both situations in life, sometimes coping well with adversity, and in other cases, becoming overwhelmed.  

Karina Mangu-Ward wrote a great column recently for Fast Company.   She examined how high-performing teams remain steady and composed during crises.  Specifically, I thought her point about tradeoffs bears emphasis. She writes, 

One reason teams get frantic is that they try to optimize for everything at once: speed and perfection, quality and scale, consensus and velocity, innovation and risk. In calm periods that fantasy is inefficient. In turbulent periods it becomes fatal. Strong teams make explicit trade-offs early. They decide what matters most when good values collide.

I believe the same can be said for individuals.  Identifying our priorities and making tough tradeoffs can help us when things get a bit hectic.  Think back to my example with students.  Sometimes, submitting the assignment that is less than perfect is better than repeatedly missing deadlines in a course. Coming to class on time each day can pay huge dividends during a crisis, even if you are perhaps missing some assignments.  Communicating clearly with your faculty members is critical, perhaps more important than the work you do.  After all, if you ghost your professor, they will be far less likely to exercise leniency or offer extra support.  In short, you have to pick your spots when times get a bit hectic.  Too many students simply stop everything when they become overwhelmed, and then they begin a vicious downward spiral in which it becomes more and more difficult to bounce back.   The lesson is clear: Choose how to spend your time wisely, prioritize well, and then focus on those priorities.  Communicate clearly to those to whom you are accountable. Show up even if you can't always complete every task.  If students learn these habits in school, they will be far more successful in the workplace.  

Asking AI Chatbots to Adopt an Expert Persona Doesn't Work

Conventional wisdom suggests that we should ask AI chatbots to adopt an expert persona to elicit better answers. According to this advice, prompts will yield better responses if they include statements such as "Imagine that you are a world class statistician" or "Think like an expert engineer." Some of the major models (such as Claude and ChatGPT) advise users to engage in this type of prompt engineering. Yet, new research suggests that asking the models to behave as an expert does not work.

Savir Basil, Ina Shapiro, Dan Shapiro, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, and Lennart Meincke have published a report at Wharton titled "Playing Pretend: Expert Personas Don’t Improve Factual Accuracy."  Knowledge@Wharton summarized their findings:

The researchers tested several ways of instructing AI to answer nearly 200 PhD-level questions in one test and a further 300 similarly demanding ones in another. Some prompts framed the model as a subject matter expert, others as a different kind of expert, or as a child or layperson. But the results were consistent.  Expert personas did not lift performance and in most cases were no better than a simple baseline with no persona at all, while less knowledgeable roles often hurt accuracy.  Any gains were small and tied to specific models, not a general pattern, and even matching the persona to the task — using a “physics expert” for physics questions, for example — made little difference.

New Case Study - Costco Wholesale Club: The Gas Station Strategy

I'm pleased to announce the publication of newest strategic management case study, Costco Wholesale Club: The Gas Station Strategy.  The case explores the company's business model and the decision to open its first standalone gas station in the nation.  The case study also examines the psychological principles at play when people shop at Costco.  The case study was published by the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan.  

How to Make Small Talk Effectively

Some people dread small talk. They just want to get on with the business at hand.  Why bother with the chit-chat about the weekend, the kids, or last night's episode of Rooster?  Research, however, demonstrates that small talk has value, helping us build relationships that facilitate more effective collaboration.  Moreover, small talk can enhance well-being.  

In a recent Inc. article, Henna Pryor speaks with writer Amaya Nichole about how to engage in small talk effectively.  Pryor offers three important and useful tips:

1. Focus on a specific detail.  It might be the photo on their desk, the screensaver on their computer, or the recent family celebration you know they attended.  Direct their attention, show them that you noticed, and inquire to learn more about that particular topic.

2.  Ask specific questions, rather than general ones.  Don't just ask how they are doing. Ask about a specific book, podcast, or TV show that they are enjoying.  Don't just ask how the family is doing, but inquire about a particular individual and a recent important event (birthday, graduation, wedding, etc.).  

3.  Finally, Pryor recommends that we "learn to leave a conversational thread."   Pryor offers an example of how to do this effectively: "This is less about the question asked and more about the response. Instead of answering 'how was your weekend?' with 'good,' try: 'It was good. It was really good. I finally checked out that new bookstore downtown and ended up staying for two hours. I did not need that many books.'"  

Why Movie Production Teams Do Not Learn From Failure

We love those wonderful stories about how people learn from failure. We champion the practices in certain industries (such as healthcare, the military, and commercial aviation) in which organizations improve based on systematic reflection. Yet, in a new study, Suresh Muthulingam and Kumar Rajaram find that Hollywood production teams do not seem to learn from failure effectively.  Perhaps we should not be surprised, as we have all witnessed highly publicized films, with top actors, flop spectacularly at the box office. 

Why is learning from failure difficult in the movie business?  The UCLA Anderson Review summarizes these scholars' findings: 

So why does failure appear to stick rather than teach? The researchers point to three structural barriers. First, fluid teams disband before the financial verdict arrives, so there is no collective moment of reckoning. Second, individuals tend to blame losses on external factors or other team members rather than examining their own contributions. Third, movie production lacks the kind of systematic post-failure review that exists in aviation or medicine.

The implications stretch beyond Hollywood. Any industry that relies on project-based teams assembled for a single engagement — teams that are dissolved afterward — may face similar dynamics. The research suggests that managers assembling such teams should pay close attention to the collective financial track record of members, particularly those in coordinating roles like producers who bring the group together.

These three points are right on point and consistent with my work and the research of other scholars about learning from failure.  First, stable teams have an opportunity to iterate, to reflect and learn.  Harvard's Richard Hackman once demonstrated the importance of stability, and the perils of instability, in his research on airplane cockpit crews.   Second, the fundamental attribution error is very real.  People tend to blame the person when others fail, but they blame external circumstances when failing themselves.  Finally, you learn effectively if you have a systematic process for evaluating, reflecting, and putting new techniques into practice.  The After Action Review used by the U.S. military is one such successful systematic practice, now employed by many companies, such as Royal Dutch Shell, as well as by many healthcare organizations.   

Why Might a Leader Fail in One Situation, But Succeed in Another?

Several months ago, I wrote about how many professional sports coaches do not win a championship in their first gig as a head coach.  Instead, they win in their second tenure, or even later.  I suggested that we don't see many CEOs in business get a second chance if they fail during their first tenure as a chief executive.  Today, however, I read about one leader who is thriving during her second opportunity to serve as a CEO.  Fortune's Phil Wahba wrote about Michelle Gass.  She served as CEO of Kohl's, which struggled during her time there.  Now, she's serving as chief executive at Levi's, and the company has been growing profitably with strong shareholder returns so far during her tenure.  

Why might Gass be succeeding after stumbling at Kohl's? Wahba offers two key reasons. First, he writes that the Levi's role "plays to all the strengths she's developed over her long career." In short, we have a better match between Gass' skillset and the demands of the job at Levi's than at Kohl's. Gass' background at Starbucks gave her a set of brand management skills that match well with the Levi's brand positioning work that needed to be done. Second, some chief executives may be more suited to growth scenarios than turnaround situations. The skillsets required in each situation are quite different. I certainly agree with both points, and I would add that the Kohl's situation was a tough one for any leader. Brick-and-mortar retailers of that type simply face a tough road with any leader at the helm; the economic and strategic headwinds are strong. I would also add that some leaders may learn from experience very effectively. Gass may have reflected on her first tenure and made key changes that helped her thrive in her second role.

Wahba makes one other key point though. He writes, "some might be in the right place at the right time and get too much credit for success, or, conversely, get blamed for being unable to fix an unfixable company." I think he hits the nail on the head. We often have a severe case of attribution error when it comes to chief executives. We typically give them too much credit when their companies succeed, and too much blame when their companies fail. The same goes for head coaches in sports. We need to consider all the factors that contribute to the performance of a company: the management team surrounding the CEO, the efficacy of corporate governance, the attractiveness of the industry structure, the macroeconomic conditions, and frankly, the good or bad fortune they may encounter during their tenure (to name just a few key factors).