Advice to College Students

I recently attended a Business Summit at Western Washington University, a school where I have been both an instructor and an MBA graduate. One of the discussions was on how students can go out and get jobs, an important discussion, especially in a time when it’s difficult to find jobs, and it made me pause a moment and think about what I would say to students nearing graduation. Here is a draft that I hope to re-visit and edit as I learn more, and I’m still working on my advice to myself, too:

Business is about relationships and solving problems.

Because business is about relationships and solving problems, focus on clearly communicating and looking for problems to solve as a way to start your day. Every great innovation starts with solving a problem. What good does it do to solve a problem and not be able to communicate the solution? In college, the best way to develop communication and problem solving skills is through practice, and you have plenty of opportunity to practice where the stakes won’t be quite as high as they will be post-college. So go out and practice!

To better communicate, assume the person you’re talking to doesn’t live in your world. Practice empathy by walking through a situation from another person’s perspective. Then, in your communications, avoid jargon and pronouns. Too often I see people entrenched in work who forget that other people are not in their worlds. The most successful people around me can communicate very clearly the complex world within which they live without intimidating their audience but also in a way that projects useful knowledge.

At Western, particularly in the College of Business and Economics, but in other schools, too, you have a great opportunity to engage with the so-called real world. And you should do that every time you get a chance. Do projects with local organizations, do internships, join clubs, participate in activities, especially those totally unrelated to business, and make sure to have an offline presence.

 At the marketing board meeting, a great deal of attention was paid to having an online presence. Great advice. Make a polished LinkedIn profile that is both professional and unique.Write a blog (only if you have something meaningful to say).  But in the professional world, the most important things happen in person. There are loads of techie start-ups that build apps and do fun digital stuff like that, and certainly having an “online presence” is essential for getting those jobs. But the reality is that most jobs are not digital or based on 140-character statements. There is no Google or Apple without the back-up power supplies that we make at the company where I currently work. We make completely unsexy products and though we have a Facebook page and a Twitter account (essential even for a company like us!), the products we make are not sold via Facebook or even via the web. They are sold by making deep and meaningful relationships with the people with whom we work. We know their names, their children’s names, we know if they like wine with dinner, or if they look forward to seeing their dog when they come home. And we learn these things not by reading their blogs, but by spending time with them face to face, where so much more can be communicated than by email, blog, phone or fax. It also bears remembering that most companies are not Google or Apple and not all digital. There are more companies, like where I work, for example, that make the basic, totally unsexy, but absolutely essential stuff we need in order to enjoy the Facebooks and the iTunes, etc., and these sorts of companies stick around a lot longer than the “hot” companies. Unless you’re totally set on working for a techie start-up, prepare yourself for making deep and meaningful relationships with people in person.

My point being: Although you need to have an online presence, don’t forget how to relate to people in person, where it’s even more important (even if you do work for a techie company). Working with people takes a lot of practice. Very few are the people for whom interacting with others comes easy. Most of us, like myself, a true introvert, need to practice. And in my experience, even those who are good at it, need to practice and reevaluate the message they are communicating to others. As my great Branding professor Ann Stone famously says: “Everything communicates.”

Master the meeting. A meeting should be more than a catch-up on where you’re at and what you’re doing. Time for meetings can be maximized when you focus on collaborating on new ideas. Which means even more preparation on being coherent when talking about where you’re at and what you’re doing.

Integrity. Integrity. Integrity. If you’ve got it, nothing else matters. If you don’t, well nothing else matters either. The world is small. It’s amazing how things come back to you, so just remember that the world is small and every touch you have with somebody else will have an impact.

Never send an email or post a Facebook status that you wouldn’t share with your mom, your boss, or the Supreme Court. Assume an email will be read by a court. Your email is owned by your company, anyway. And let’s be real. Privacy is a very recently invented and, dare I say it, artificial phenomenon. If you’ve lived in a small town or, even when I lived in Silicon Valley, where it’s like “Cheers” and  everybody knows your name, you know what I’m talking about. If you think you have privacy, either on your email, your social media, or in your offline life, you’re completely deluded and live in fantasy world that never existed and most likely never will. Bottom Line: Don’t be a dick. Or, don’t be a dick and think you’ll get away with it.

Be like Lincoln and master the art writing a memo or an email that you never send, especially when tempers are involved (see my post on Management Lessons from Lincoln).

Once you’re out of college, your grades don’t matter. Everybody starts tabula rasa. It’s amazing to see who rises to the top and how they rise to the top when you remember they were in school. A lot of those ones who got the good grades kinda disappear, and some of the ones who hated school start ruling the world.

I don’t regret for one second the time I spent not obsessing about my grades; it’s the time I didn't spend doing activities that would have differentiated me that I regret. It’s all about character. The best recommendation letter I ever wrote was for a student who got a B in my class. There’s a huge difference between being smart and being wise. Straight-A Ivy Leaguers are a dime a dozen, but students that are wise, have integrity, and are doing useful and interesting things are the rare charm that make being an educator worth all the sacrifice.  

Be reliable. Follow through. Even if it's the littlest thing. It's amazing how much relationship capital you can gain by following through with what you say you're going to do. Find a mentor. In fact, find multiple mentors whose views counter each other. See who you respect and why you respect them by observing what they do and pick their brains. Once you’ve figured out what you need to figure out, be a mentor.

Two of the most famous CEOs of our time are famously drop outs (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates), and it’s tempting to think: “Hey I didn’t learn anything in my academic career. Why don’t I drop out like they did?” This thought is terribly misguided. First of all, Jobs and Gates are meteors, titans that come along once in every 8 billion chances and they lived in a very unique milieu in which their sort of success was possible. I’ll go out on a limb here and state that there will never be CEOs quite like Jobs or Gates ever again.

I can’t repeat it enough: Do not look for direct knowledge at the university. There are some classes I took (Econ, for example) that at the time seemed entirely too theoretical. And even now, I can’t think of any direct use of Econ that I’ve done in my professional life, but having a good understanding of econ helps me to think like a more informed businessperson.  I can’t draw a quarter of the graphs I saw in econ classes, but because I’ve been exposed to them, I can understand the business fundamentals. 

Even if you’re not interested in politics, we live in a reality in which everything revolves around politics, and I’m referring not only to governmental politics but to interpersonal politics. Every company, organization, and institution has “politics” and a lot more than is detectable at first glance. The best advice I’ve heard about “office politics” comes from my current boss: When you are confronted with “politics” during difficult decision processes at the workplace, make sure you are guided by the tenet that you should always put the company first. Too often people are guided by putting themselves first, which might work out well in the short term, and certainly people make careers out of looking out for themselves first. Even if looking out for yourself first were to make you financially successful, is that how you want to be remembered? When you put the company first, you are ensuring that you are doing what the company is paying you to do.

Universities have a duty to prepare students not only for jobs, but for meaningful work and to be citizens that make valuable contributions to society. As you go through your academic career, take advantage of getting as much career advice as you can. I regret not doing this as an undergrad and felt woefully unprepared hitting the job market. But remember that universities shouldn’t teach you how to get jobs or even how to do things, but how to learn and think through decisions and then communicate these decisions. If you want to learn how to do things, go to a trade school or do an online course. There are plenty of online courses out there and they’re a lot cheaper than a four-year degree and in most cases they’re set up to more efficiently teach someone how to do a specific thing.

Too many of my students misunderstand this subtle distinction of learning how to do things versus learning how to learn. As a former language instructor, I’ll be the first to admit that there are much more efficient ways to learn how to speak a language than attend a language class. Language classes don’t teach students how to speak a language but how to learn to communicate in another language with a different group of people. A student leaving my class without knowing how to conjugate an imperfect subjunctive verb never bothered me. Students who left my class without realizing that the world is a large and complex beast and that there are many ways of thinking and communicating would make me revise my teaching activities. The same thing should go for an accounting professor. If you don’t believe me, go take a class with Steve Senge at Western, which you should be doing anyway.

Don’t get caught up in the idea that your education will directly teach you how to specifically do things. There is a great debate in academia about how close a relationship it should have with the professional world. This, I believe, is a healthy debate. There is a great amount that academia could pay attention to what’s going on in professional circles in order to better prepare students for their futures and great business schools are successful when they foster this relationship between university and industry. College is not all about just getting a job. It’s about learning how to be a better human being. Hopefully you’re getting good electives that are stimulating you to think deeper and think deeper not just about your potential future in industry. It’s not just direct learning (“Wow! I know what a value proposition is now. I know what cost accounting is. I can do financial projections now using the good Professor Fewings model.”) Certainly I can get this information off of Wikipedia or with a few searches on Google without spending a ton of money on a college degree. Wikipedia breaks down just about every business concept I’ve learned in class sufficiently well. What you are getting from your four-year degree, and certainly should be getting from your good profs at a school like Western, is a framework for thinking. And that’s where your real benefit comes. I get stuck every day and I go to Google or Wikipedia and I can quickly refresh my memory. Fortunately, the framework has stuck with me, even though my amnesia makes it difficult to quickly remember concepts from class.

A college education teaches you not how to do things but how to think critically, read and communicate. I use the word “read” here knowing that millions of first graders know how to read, but a university should teach someone how to read through the bullshit (not just print but things like people's gestures and different communication styles), and then communicate in a way that doesn’t get mired down with confusion.

There’s also a cliché piece of advice that you hear from professors and parents and just about all well-meaning people who say that you should follow your passion. In my more substantive conversations with successful people, none have said that they followed their passion, and I’d like to clear up the follow-your-passion piece of advice by making it known that it is a myth. Jobs don’t give you passion. You give passion to your job. And this is a subtle but important distinction. Remember: Passion is more than just what you see in the movies. Passion is blood, sweat and tears. Fear is passion, too, though it is misguided passion. You have to be able to give passion to whatever it is you do, and a lot of that passion is blood, sweat, tears and fears. Passion doesn’t magically appear from nothing. Passion comes from determination, commitment and action.

In other words, don’t do what you’re passionate about or, even worse, look for a career that you’re passionate about or where you think you’ll find passion. Be passionate about what you do. If you’re doing something that doesn’t make you give passion to it, get out of it. But don’t look for something you’ll be passionate about. Find something that you will give passion to. As Leonardo da Vinci said, “People of accomplishment rarely sit back and let things happen to them. They go out and happen to things.”

Lastly, a word about success. There are plenty of rich people who aren’t successful. Being successful isn’t driving a certain type of car. You should be the only one who defines what success means to you. If success means driving a fancy car, then go for it. But there are a lot of other ways to be successful. Personally, I feel most successful when I can bike every day to work. I’m successful when I have time to hike and travel and spend time with those who are important to me. I’m successful when I can leave a positive touch with everybody that I come in contact with and when I look for win-win situations for the people and organizations that I care about.  But you should define success for yourself.