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Business Rule #29:
Learn Anywhere and Everywhere You Can
May 13, 2005
by Caroline Pfouts
Book Smarts vs. Street Smarts. Kendra vs. Tana. Now it’s getting personal.
In business, on the street, and in school, there are life lessons to be gained from almost every experience. To continue to grow as a manager and a person, learning should be a life-long pursuit. Of course, everyone learns at their own pace and some students are more attentive than others.
These are the three most important skills I learned in college:
1) How to cram for a test… or how to meet a deadline. Tana Goertz and Kendra Todd were faced with enormously challenging deadlines this week, and the ladies did a remarkable job of pulling their events together in a short period of time. Both deserve passing marks for their ability to meet a time cruncher of a deadline.
2) How to research information and write about it. On the written portion of her task, Tana fouled up horribly. Private notes on the athletes were mistakenly printed in the program. It is one thing to know that some of your honored guests are high maintenance; it’s quite another to distribute it in writing to everyone attending the event. This potentially huge disaster was narrowly averted by hiding the programs under the table. Yes, no one saw it…but by the same token, no one had a program either.
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Why didn’t Tana read the program before it went to press? “I assigned that to Kristen, and I assumed she’d handle it.” When Kristen Kirchner tried to tell her about the arrangement for the bottled water, Tana told her, “I don’t need to know that.” Apparently she didn’t want to know about the program text either. It was a costly mistake that caused Tana to fail her written test.
3) How to please the graders. Who judges your performance? In college, it’s your professors. In business, it’s your boss. On The Apprentice, it’s ultimately Donald Trump.
Tana was also being graded by the NYC 2012 organizers and the event honorees. When the Governor, the athletes, and other participants paraded into the arena, they carried the flags from nations worldwide—except, that is, from the United States. For an event like the Olympics, which promotes friendly competition among peoples of many nations and languages, something as universally understood as a flag takes on monumental importance.
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In business, on the street, and in school, there are life lessons to be gained from almost every experience.
