I’ve often thought about what makes a professional successful, what makes one good at one’s job. Starting out as a technical writer with a degree in English Literature and “literary” writing, I had absolutely no training in my profession. I looked with envy at the schooling of some of my colleagues, wishing I understood professional writing as well as they did.
I just read the article The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart (subscription required) from this month’s The Atlantic. The gist of the article is that business schools primarily churn out MBAs who know the heuristics and tools of business management, but few of whom have been taught to actually think rationally about business. They learn formulas and systems, but none of this prepares them for the reality of business, that the formulas cannot be merely applied to a business problem like a template solution. So MBAs (good ones, anyway), end up learning 90% of what they need to know on the job. This passage goes to the core: