Title: What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School

Recommendation: 7.5/10

Summary:

It’s good to be aware of deficiencies. Successful entrepreneur Mark McCormack, a graduate of Yale, highlights an important area that academics, students, and aspiring entrepreneurs should be aware of.

“Business demands innovation: but business schools are condemned to teach the past.”

In the past 12 months, we’ve seen a spectacularly clear demand for innovation. Businesses pushed to identify methods to socially distance, minimize health risks, and change the customer experience in ways that have simply never been done before.  

Solving real-world challenges often requires forming new solutions which, by definition, wouldn’t have been taught to you. 

Although there seemed to be a lack of insight on how to innovate, there’s a sprinkling of general sound business advice from negotiation to management best practices.

Highlights:

Perspective is the second easiest thing to lose in business, profit is the first.

Far more pervasive than burnout is job boredom. Boredom occurs when the learning curve flattens.

Data 1) won’t take the place of intuition 2) won’t make decisions for you 3) is only as useful as your ability to interpret it.

When a crisis occurs or is occurring, don’t react. Say you’d like to think about it.

“I don’t know.”
“I need help.”
“I was wrong.”

These phrases are all often falsely associated in our mind with “I’m inadequate.”