January 12, 2005

BUSINESS. SCHOOL’S. OUT.

                   

🚀 Audacious Move of the Week

BUSINESS. SCHOOL’S. OUT.

Business schools and traditional business textbooks teach students the accepted rules of business.
But if you want to succeed in today’s brutally competitive marketplace, BE DiFFERENT or be dead teaches something far more important: how to win when following those rules makes you look and act like everyone else.

Put down the conventional business textbook; pick up one written from the battlefield.

I have a problem with the way we educate people for business.

We teach them what is already known.

Established models.

Accepted methods.

Proven formulas.

Case studies describing what somebody else did in circumstances that no longer exist.

Then we graduate students into a world that is changing by the hour and expect them to figure it out.

We’re preparing them to explain business rather than WIN at it.

That’s why I believe BE DiFFERENT or be dead should be the business textbook students actually follow if they want to succeed.

That’s a big claim.

I can back it up.

🎓 Business School Teaches What Already Happened

My textbook wasn’t born in a classroom.

It was born while I was helping build a startup into a business generating more than $1 BILLION in annual sales.

There was no professor standing beside me.

No answer at the back of the book.

No tidy case study telling me what happened next.

We made decisions with incomplete information.

We screwed things up.

We changed direction.

We tried things respectable business thinking might have considered ridiculous.

And we discovered something business education has fundamentally backwards:

Knowing what has worked is not the same as knowing what to do.

That gap is enormous.

📚 Real Business Doesn’t Come In Chapters

Traditional textbooks necessarily organize business into neat subjects.

Strategy over here.

Marketing over there.

Customer service somewhere else.

Leadership gets its own chapter.

Sales gets another.

Real business doesn’t arrive like that.

It arrives Tuesday morning at 9:17 disguised as a pissed-off customer, a competitor cutting your price, an employee doing something stupid, a technology shift nobody anticipated or a plan that suddenly isn’t working.

There is no Chapter 7 telling you what to do next.

You have to move.

That’s what BE DiFFERENT or be dead teaches.

Not how to admire someone else’s success.

How to create your own.

Not how to apply a fashionable formula.

How to think when the formula breaks.

Not how to become “best in class”.

How to make the class irrelevant.

Not how to reduce uncertainty until everyone feels comfortable.

How to make a call when certainty is impossible.

And certainly not how to copy the organizations business schools have decided are worthy of case studies.

Copying yesterday’s winner is a lousy way to become tomorrow’s one.

👊 The Market Doesn’t Give You An Exam

Business schools aren’t useless.

They can give students valuable knowledge.

But knowledge isn’t the finish line.

The test comes when the market punches your beautiful plan in the mouth.

What do you do then?

That’s where my textbook begins.

It contains the Audacious Moves we actually made.

Some worked spectacularly.

Some needed fixing.

Some violated conventional wisdom.

But they were forged in the only laboratory I ultimately trust: the marketplace.

That’s the fundamental difference between BE DiFFERENT or be dead and the traditional business textbook.

One teaches you about business.

Mine teaches you how to survive and win in it.

🚨 Learn The Rules. Then Stop Thinking Like Everyone Else.

So if you’re studying business, study the conventional textbooks.

Learn the language.

Understand the principles.

Know what everyone else is being taught.

Then open BE DiFFERENT or be dead and learn something considerably more dangerous:

how NOT to think like everyone else.

Because your future won’t be determined by how well you can recite what business already knows.

It will be determined by what you do when what business already knows isn’t good enough.

That’s the textbook I wish I’d had when I started.

So I wrote it.

🚀 Want more Audacious Moves™?

🎙️ Listen to Audacious Moves to a BILLION™ for practical, contrarian ideas for building an extraordinary business.

✍🏻 Explore more articles, ideas and proven tools at BE DiFFERENT or be dead.

Extraordinary businesses aren’t built by ordinary decisions.

They’re built one Audacious Move™ at a time.

Now go make yours.

Cheers,
Roy

• Posted 1.12.05 at 06:00 am by Roy Osing
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