Entrepreneurs Can Learn What Future Founders Need to Know
April 4, 2005

By Margot Carmichael Lester

When it comes to teaching entrepreneurism, many people think you can't. These people reason that you just can't teach all-important intangibles like drive, interpersonal skills, courage or creativity.

But entrepreneurs -- who make a living thinking differently than the rest of us -- say you can if you create a classroom environment that's closely related to the real world and a curriculum that emphasizes both academic and emotional intelligence.

"You have to be able to understand the big picture," says Arvind Malhotra, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School, which was recently ranked the number 3 school in the country for entrepreneurial education by Entrepreneur Magazine. "That requires a multi-faceted thinking approach, yet we tend to train people in silos or boxes."

Generally, schools focus on individual achievement, favoring memorization and mastery of static bodies of knowledge over original thinking and the ability to deal effectively with rapidly changing situations.
Today's programmed scope-and-sequence curricula aren't making the grade as more and more students enter college and the workforce unprepared for real work and unable to meet real-world expectations.

Results reported in Rising to the Challenge: Are High School Graduates Prepared for College and Work?, both employers and graduating high school seniors indicated that our educational system is not helping students develop the traits necessary to build a successful life after high school.

"I'm not sure how to do it, but we need to better teach children how to get their points across verbally and in writing, listen to others and realize that subjects aren't discreet," says Heather Hesketh, president and CEO, Raleigh, N.C.-based hesketh.com/inc, a web design and development agency.

"We can teach you a technology or process. We can't teach you to want to learn one," she continues. "What I can do is create a corporate culture where it's OK to both learn and teach, regardless of how senior you may be in your profession."

Emphasis on Soft Skills
Despite a complete reworking over the last 15 years of the K-12 curriculum in all 50 states, there are few standards that support the development of interpersonal skills. Yet, "Knowing how to relate to people and get things done is the most important aspect to being a successful entrepreneur and person," says Aruni Gunasegaram, president of Babble Soft, LLC, the Austin-based developer of software solutions that help parents manage the activities of newborns.

Enter emotional intelligence, or EQ. Research on emotional intelligence shows that it's a much more valuable predictor of life success than traditional academic measures. Yet the development of emotional competencies has never been a stated goal of our educational system -- even now, after unprecedented reform, emotional competencies are not an explicit element of any state curriculum standards. More and more however, business people are recognizing what researchers like Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, have been saying for years: EQ matters more than IQ.

"The successful entrepreneurs I've encountered don't necessarily know everything themselves," says Steve Kaplan, Chicago-area author of the upcoming book, Bag The Elephant: How To Win & Keep Big Customers (Bard Press). "However, they do possess the characteristic that drives them to know how and where to get the knowledge they lack. They seek knowledge when they develop their business models. They involve others in the process when they focus on landing big clients. They seek knowledge on how they should operate culturally and make their decisions."

Christopher Faulkner, CEO of Bedford, Tex.-based C I Host, which provides an economical hosting solution for small- to medium-sized business, says schools need to do a better job of developing students' confidence and tenacity. "It required thousands of failures for Edison to finally invent the light bulb," he notes. "He said each 'misfire' was an important step, necessary to get those thousands of failures out of the way to move on to the actual solution. If you don't believe in yourself and stick with it, others will not believe in you."

More Relevant Schooling
Most of these skills gaps can be closed by immersing students in authentic learning, coursework rooted in the real world, not the school world. In fact, a whopping 95 percent of employers and 97 percent of non-college students responding to the Hart survey said that real-world learning and more relevant coursework would create better-prepared graduates.

The challenge, then, is creating a deeper not wider course of instruction so students can develop specific skills and authentic competencies.

"Specificity is the key," says Carol Vecchio, co-founder and executive director of Centerpoint Institute for Life and Career Renewal in Seattle. "In terms of planning for a career that we will be successful in and satisfied with over many years, we need to define and clarify our passions first and then find ways to further develop the skills we will need to succeed in that career."

Historically, we've thought of a well-educated person as someone who achieved a basic level of knowledge across a wide range of subjects. But that model no longer fits the reality of today's competitive workplace. Today, career success depends on attaining high levels of authentic competence in specific areas that most closely fit an individual's unique talents and temperament.

"If a student has an interest and aptitude for music, then they should look at music business projects," Faulkner notes. "Or, it could be the same for sports or art or computes or whatever. Find out what the
kids enjoy and inspire them so they are prepared to make a good living in that category."

But recent state and federal reforms which have been targeted principally at standardizing the curriculum and increasing the importance of standardized testing may, ironically, be making it more difficult for students to develop high degrees of skill in particular areas they're best suited to.

"There are some basic skills that we all need to develop," Vecchio allows. "We all need to read and be able to write and speak and understand numbers. But our school system isn't really doing its job if it only produces students who can pass tests that indicate minimum competence in a general set of subjects. This is only half the task that's needed to help people find meaningful work in the future."

Margot Carmichael Lester is a freelance writer and COO of Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc., an education consulting and reform company in Chapel Hill, N.C.
© copyright 2005 by Teaching That Makes Sense, Inc. Used by permission.

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