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Monday, April 4, 2005

Teaching Entrepreneurial Skills

Earlier today I wrote about Dave Pollard’s essay on complexity and corporate dysfunction. I closed with the observation that while we need to find ways to sustain ourselves, entrepreneurial skills do not exist widely in our society – partly the result of apathy and partly the result of 100 years of The Organization Man. Shortly thereafter Pollard’s latest essay on teaching entrepreneurial skills came through my aggregator:

Meeting the Acute Need for Entrepreneurial Skills

The Idea: The New Economy will have an explosive need for critical entrepreneurial skills. Universities are not equipped or inclined to provide them. You can't learn them just by reading a book. We need to create a whole new 'channel' for entrepreneurial education. Here's how it might work.

[…] Here's the process I have suggested to several universities.

• Each 'session' would have as its theme one of the critical entrepreneurial skills in the mindmap above.
• Students would be given a set of pre-reading consisting of both theory and stories about great entrepreneurial successes and failures in applying this critical skill.
• Each session would be held, live, at the premises of a different entrepreneurial business, one with exemplary success at applying this critical skill.
• There would be no lecture. The session would consist of (a) a tour of the premises, (b) a brief story told by the CEO of the history of the company and how they'd learned to apply the critical skill, and (c) a Q&A session where the students would ask questions of the CEO. The course facilitator would jump in with answers and clarifications based on what other entrepreneurs had done. No 'large corporation' examples would be used.
• There would be no examination. At 'mid-term', the entrepreneurs who host the sessions would collectively grade the Business Plans prepared and presented by the students in one long Saturday session. The 'final' pass or fail would be based solely on whether the businesses proposed in the students' Business Plans had been successfully launched or not.
• Students would have access to 'coaches' on an ongoing basis. These could include existing entrepreneurs, course facilitators, legitimate entrepreneurial consultants […]

Dave goes on to highlight critical issues and barriers to success (an important one being the complete disinterest of the existing education bureaucracy), and issues a call to action to his readers to help flesh out a business model.

I’d love to see this work. I think it’s desperately needed. I’d volunteer as a beta customer. But I’m already entrepreneurial, and while people like me can certainly benefit from such a program I think it really needs to focus on those who think they can’t, or who never even consider they could, be entrepreneurs. There are countless thousands of people with useful, valuable skills that would love to make a living they enjoy but feel utterly overwhelmed at the prospect of going it alone. To them, entrepreneurship might as well be quantum physics.

Dave suggests getting to kids at the Jr. High/middle school level to get them used to the idea. Young people are far more risk tolerant than we older folks, and getting them connected to a strong entrepreneurial community early on is critical. Today most education systems still don’t teach basic checkbook balancing. And how can they? Kids don’t have any connection to a checkbook. They have no reality that says balancing a checkbook matters. Can we hook them into a system that engages, entertains, and educates at the same time? And if we can, can we do it in a way that starts them out creating a service or product that genuinely benefits their community?

I’m not talking about some charity event like selling cookies to fund a gym set, but something real, on-going, and meaningful.We need a program that engages boys and girls in equal numbers, builds something that, by the time they graduate high school, they can carry with them into the greater society. In the process maybe a lot of them will find they really like math or engineering or science or something and go onto university to specialize. But the rest would be useful and capable of something more than McJobs.

Adults are a different matter. The barriers here are apathy, fear, and risk aversion. Women are especially at risk of this once they’ve taken the “family track”. So I see a real need to get people excited about the possibilities, convinced they can do something more than mope around about their poor circumstances, and motivated enough to get up and try. To do that we need to take a lesson from the infomercial scam artists and find the catch phrase, the tag line, the simplistic metaphor that resonates with the fearful and makes them stand up from the sofa and say, “Yes! I can do that too!” But we can’t be too evangelical or we’ll be tagged with the same smarmy visage as televangelists. Can’t have that.

My point is that before we get to Dave’s vision of teaching we have to find a way to reach and excite all the potential students who really need it. Any ideas? 

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 7:31 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Learning, Strategy

Monday, March 14, 2005

Gladwell at SXSW

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 9:40 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Books, Learning

Wednesday, March 9, 2005

Business-oriented PODcast

I’ve just listened to my first PODcast – a well done series of project management interviews – pointed to by Frank Patrick. This was very interesting — good content, decent production, nice overall job. And new voices. I think this is a trend we’re going to see more of. There are lots of new voices out there, with interesting things to say, that are being ignored by the mainstream. If you’re a manager and you’re looking for an excuse to try out a PODcast you can do a lot worse than SoV.

The Sound of Vision - On Project Management -- With my 45-minutes-to-an-hour commute, I've recently been using my iPod for more than just Van Morrison, Manhattan Transfer, Mahler, Mozart, and Modest Mouse. The self publishing of weblogs has developed an audio counterpart in the form of Podcasts. (Think in terms of mp3s of talk instead of music.)

I used to think that public radio needed a business-oriented show, not on the news or finance side or for personal finance advice, but on aspects of the practice of management. It used to be a fantasy of mine to put such a show together. Now it's not only possible, but it's being done by Effern over at The Vision Thing with his Sound of Vision series. (I like that name.)

After an insightful introduction by Effern on objectives and assumptions, this particular show features coversations with folks that should be familiar to Focused Performance readers -- Hal, Clarke, and Johanna. If you'd like to put some voices to the names, check it out.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 11:59 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance, Learning, Strategy, Technology

Response to Cobb County Spend Fest

Emotions Lack Rationale

[...] Anyway, I am home with a sick wife and child, and decide to check around for any posts on the Cobb County Laptop initiative. I came across this post by, who I assume is, Terry Frazier. I can sense his passion and delirium produced by the idea of Cobb County spending $70 million for laptops for students (which was a part of a referendum that obviously passed voter muster). Fine, be passionate-- it is something that should be required for all bloggers... no one likes a boring blog. Try, at the same time to be objective and study up on a subject or the validity of the alternative solution proposed-- which is something else all good bloggers should attempt.[...]

• That Anne Davis is my tech messiah - Anne is a very nice lady and a great teacher. I blogged her ground breaking work with kids and blogs at a local elementary more than two years ago. I picked Anne because she's been in the trenches, taught kids, taught teachers, and has street cred far beyond what any outside consultant will have. Not because she's a tech guru. I don't think she is. I don't really know. But I know that when you start talking major change you have resistance and the word of a peer is worth the word of 10 outsiders.
• That I claim I can do the same thing as this program but spend only $18.5 million. I do not. I claim that Cobb County is doing the wrong thing and that doing the right thing will cost only $18.5 million (admittedly, I made this number up, but so what.) The one thing I would change is that rather than having only computer labs it's probably appropriate to equip more classrooms with computers, but they do not need to be in every class. And there is no way to justify giving one to every kid in the school district.
  
• That the paragraph in Cobb County's FAQ detailing training has it covered. Not hardly. This level of change is massive and the single biggest barrier to success is making teachers efficient, active technology users. I know lots of teachers. Not very many are active, effective tech users, nor are they all that interested tech for tech's sake. Once the new wears off and the drudgery of actually learning new stuff hits them it gets old. And a bunch of Apple consultants, however different they may think, aren't likely to get the job done with a few seminars and a help desk.
• Finally, that Apple Computer, Inc., the company that stands to make a $70 million sale to Cobb County, is in any way an unbiased source of info about the success of its programs in other areas.

Posted by:  Terry Frazier at 12:24 AM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Learning, Policy & Regulation

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