What can schools teach business?
I’m focused for this question on leadership and management. If we’re talking basic science or technology or even organizational psychology, there is plenty that business looks to scholarly research for. Some comes out of the corporate Skunk Works in R&D, but the Academy is still a pretty good place to do research and produce new knowledge. Also, business learns a lot about innovation from the Academy, but I think the Academy learned it first from breakthrough businesses and then fine tunes the theory and helps to spread the word.
When the question, though, is how best to run the business, it’s hard to find the corporate or start-up worlds looking to schools for the answer. Who says, “I’d sure like my company to run more like a school?” For the other side of the coin, schools do, and should, look to business for many ways to improve school operations.
But I do think some core competencies intrinsic to school leadership done well are profoundly important for good, effective, successful business leadership and management. I’ve picked out four to just mention quickly. They are lessons uniquely constituted to be best learned in a school environment, then transferred to the business milieu. I won’t pretend in this post to say how schools can teach business these lessons, but awareness of what to look for is a great start on getting there.
Creating Community. Certainly, many schools aren’t good at this, but school can’t be done well without it. Learning relationships are nurturing, not primarily functional. This is true at any age. Trust and connection are essential for the humility and receptivity needed by students to be led in learning. That doesn’t mean learning should be passive for students. Just the opposite. Students are released to strike out after their own learning, guided by those who have gone before, when they trust those who have preceded them to have their best interests at heart. And many schools do get the point that this sort of community must itself be nurtured; it doesn’t come without intentionality. When it’s present, the feeling of that shared endeavor of learning is its own positive feedback loop. It feels right and it works.
Business is so easily tempted to be instrumental and functional about the nature of relationships. What if we believe that employees are even more important to a business than its customers? Do we act on this belief through compensation, training, and bonus incentives? Though these have to be part of the package, if we have no shared vision and a sense of being connected in pursuit of a valuable objective, self-focused career management is still what will hold our employees’ attention. What if we want to make ‘raving fans’ of our customers? Quality and responsiveness are certainly essential, but if there is no invitation to belonging – as Harley riders or Chick-Fil-A diners or Nordstrom shoppers or Apple groupies -- then we’re still dealing with arms length transactions which encourage the next transaction but don’t build relationship.
Building a Learning Organization. In a classic Harvard Business Review article from 1993, “Building a Learning Organization,” David Garvin of Harvard Business School declares the necessity that “continuous improvement requires a commitment to learning.” Without it, change is only cosmetic. If we want to get better or if we want to innovate (certainly not the same thing but both common business objectives), then we need real learning in our businesses.
Just because school is school clearly doesn’t mean that schools know how to make learning happen. But school is a place where learning is the bottom line. We should expect to find there some good ideas for creating learning culture and experiencing learning growth. So, I don’t improve quality or innovate in business simply by applying a procedure; instead, I grow a culture which is fundamentally a learning one.
Human Scale. Does it matter to us in business? Do we lose sight of it in business? Sometimes, we miss the customer or the employee in managing our process of doing business. Whether it’s our assembly line or our organizational development plan or our product rollout or our M&A preoccupation, we can begin to erode the fundamental particle of business nature, the people involved, one by one and uniquely. Erosion is a helpful perspective because we rarely lose our atoms of business, our people who are serving or being served, buying or selling, in the aggregate, on average and all at once. We begin to lose them individually because we’ve lost the human scale of our actions and decisions.
School run from the central office or by curricular mandate is the same loss of human scale. But school is an environment where caring hearts can’t miss the one by one nature of our work. When a parent or a teacher or a principal cares for students by name in their uniqueness, the systems get adjusted to not just touch the individual but, ideally, to begin from the individual. Learning happening for each child is where I start my quality check and innovation and it comes back around to be the place where I check each one of my decisions by what difference it makes for each student. It’s harder to miss that fundamental value in school where there’s no widget or product transaction or profit motive clouding the perspective. And, conversely, business does business better – including profits – when the fundamental particle, the atom of the individual, is kept in focus.
User Experience. Related to the previous point but highlighting some different dimensions is the critical nature of user experience. This is not what’s done to the individual but rather, what the individual experiences from the school or the business. It’s a specialty in software, but doesn’t work if it’s only a box to check-off for design criteria. If it’s like Jobs and Apple, it’s a revolution and a run for the largest corporate capitalization in history.
What happens for students in school? It makes sense that this would be the key question for the entire endeavor. In practice, schools get it wrong a fair percentage of the time, though. All the attention goes to inputs for the process – teacher pay and credentials and training, equipment, pedagogy, curriculum, facilities – and it’s left to the assumptions that better outputs will emerge. The proverbial solution of throwing money at the problem. Of course it takes resources, capital investment, provision for R&D as well as the ongoing cost of doing business. What business would attempt to improve user experience with no money for the effort? What business would say we just need to try harder, and then the user will have a better experience? So, schools do get it wrong sometimes and political fights get it wrong other times in claiming schools should get something for nothing.
But school is a place where, if we’re paying attention, user experience is primary. A product – curriculum – or a process – pedagogy – prepared without the student in mind is fundamentally wrong-headed. In business, we might imagine that making the world’s best widget would bring a market. If we build it, they will come. But who, among those who care and are paying attention, would design teaching without learning first in mind?
We do have to be discerning about which schools we’ll look to as our models, but an organization designed for the purpose of end user experience should be the definition of a school. No mistake should be made that user experience is always about user preference. It is about making a positive difference for the user and can’t make much headway if it offers nothing of initial interest to the user, but it can offer dimensions of the experience which the user – the student – would not necessarily know to choose in an initial selection. Schools can be exemplars of building an organization for the purpose of creating the best user experience possible, not as one among many design check boxes along the way, but as the point of the endeavor. In that, great schools and great strategic thinking about schools do have something extremely valuable to offer to business.