This trend is also in direct conflict with the concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell that it takes 10,000 hours of mindful practice to be a world-class performer in any area.  Bill Gates spent those hours programming in high school, and violin virtuosos spend that much time playing before becoming recognized as first-class.  Unfortunately, this principle has been shortened in popular usage to “it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert,” which I don’t believe is true.  This version prevents people from realizing how quickly they can increase their perceived value.  Depending on the context, you could become an “expert” in your organization in a few weeks or months.

What Gets Recognized As Expertise?

So the upshot is that people set the bar for themselves a little too high when they think of expertise as a grueling 5 or 10 year endeavor.  That’s probably true for becoming world-class, but I prefer to think of expertise as being recognized for a scarce and valuable competency.

Scarce:  If everyone in your group can do a task well, it’s just table stakes.  Those skills are still important to learn, but they won’t help you stand out.  Pick something that other people are bad at, relatively speaking.  It could even be something the company does every day.  I’ve seen consultants gain recognition as experts in project planning for more systematic and effective ways to do it, despite the ubiquity of project management in consulting.  Likewise, a marketer could develop expertise in effective competitive intelligence or customer needs analysis, common but not always well executed tasks.  The key concept here is information asymmetry – you should be knowledgeable about something that your peers are not!

Valuable:  Becoming an expert in Call of Duty unfortunately won’t bring any rewards at work.  Neither will anything else that’s not important for the organization.  If you work at a software company, becoming an expert in healthcare probably won’t mean much… unless you’re about to develop a healthcare application.  What’s valuable is always changing.  New processes and technologies, from the web to Net Promoter Score, elevate people to expertise in droves.

There’s a market timing aspect to this, which is one of the main reasons so few people build expertise proactively.  “I could learn this now, but I’ll wait until I’m sure it’s valuable.”  By the time the need is obvious to everyone, it’s much harder to stand out.

Competency:  You have to be able to do the work autonomously.  Knowing the concepts or practices isn’t enough if you still need to rely on someone else.  That’s why hands-on experience is important.  Also, try to find outside resources for questions to avoid torpedoing the perception of competency once you’ve built it.

How to Build Expertise?

Read – The key is to pick in-depth resources like textbooks, trade journals, and manuals.  Business Week, the Harvard Business Review, and CIO magazine are good publications, but they’re too high-level to help you become an expert in much beyond shop talk.  External training is a good alternative if you’re less self-motivated, at a greater cost in money and often time.

Talk to people – Once you have a basic grounding in an area, you need to talk to a variety of people in the field to understand how practice differs from theory.  Most written sources gloss over tacit knowledge and implementation complexity – these are the areas to focus on in talking to people.  Resources like LinkedIn and alumni associations are invaluable for this purpose.  Come up with a list of questions as you do your reading, and go through those questions with multiple people.  Conferences can also be helpful, although the actual information density at events is often low because they’re intended as much to entertain as to educate.

Use it – Make sure you actually use the knowledge, whether at work or an outside project, perhaps through a site like eLance or oDesk.  At some point, you’ll have to convince someone that you’re really an expert, and if all you have to talk about is a book you read, it won’t be enough.  Once you have one or two real pieces of work under your belt, you’re off to the races.  This is one reason why consulting is such a good environment for building new competencies – new projects come up all the time.

Market it – Finally, you need to let people in your company (or your clients) know that you have the expertise.  Training presentations, conference talks (keep information asymmetry in mind!), blog posts, and informal conversations can be helpful.  Or consider volunteering to develop a marketing piece or talk to a client.

We live in a time when most information is no longer really scarce or expensive if you bother to look for it.  Expertise, in contrast, remains much rarer because most people aren’t willing to invest the time to acquire it.  It’s one of the most important investments you can make if you don’t want your career to consist of punching the clock.

I was hoping for an insightful analysis, but I was disappointed overall.  The authors spend a great deal of effort on describing the data they gathered (when you have a hammer…), and not enough on coming to a strong conclusion.  The book suffers from some of the same challenges as business school in general, with too much analysis and not enough innovation in terms of solutions.  Perhaps part of my problem with the book is due to the over-reaching title.  A better title might have been “refining the MBA.”

In a nutshell, the book focuses on eight areas where b-schools need to provide students with better preparation.

• Global perspective
• Leadership skills
• Integration skills (i.e., integrating different types of thinking to solve complex, multi-functional problems)
• Organizational execution (i.e., how to get things done in a real company)
• Creativity and innovation
• Communicating clearly
• The roles, responsibilities, and purpose of business (i.e., business ethics and social responsibility)
• Limits of models and markets (i.e., an appreciation for risk and the imperfection of business school models)

B-school incrementalism

These points don’t really constitute rethinking the MBA.  They’re valid incremental steps towards addressing criticisms, but on the whole they betray a lack of focus.  Good strategy requires defining what you won’t do, not just what you will do.  Any organization that tries to be all things to all people ends up being mediocre in most respects.  Burdening a two-year MBA stint with even more requirements and expectations runs the risk of making it more of a broad survey that does not provide people with enough depth in their areas of focus.

This issue stems partly from the organizational structure of the typical business school.  The consensus-based academic model results in lots of stakeholders for every activity the school performs – different groups of faculty, students, and alumni will all support the aspect they like the best.  It can be very difficult to solve one problem extremely well because everyone has a different set of priorities, and there’s often no good tie-breaker unless the dean is quite politically skilled.  As a result, most established business schools have a hard time being really innovative.  The best schools rely on continuing to improve what they already do, and lower-ranked schools often play follow the leader.

Doing versus knowing

The book does cover what I consider the biggest challenge for business schools, preparing students for the actual practice of business management rather than just understanding it conceptually.  Interestingly, this problem comes from business schools’ attempts to address an earlier wave of criticism.  Reports from the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation in the 50’s indicted schools for not being academically rigorous enough and curricula for being too anecdotal.  The resulting move to a more research-based approach has led to the material becoming more theoretical and perhaps less relevant to the practice of management, and faculty are most often recruited based on research than on management experience.

Disruptive approaches

Because of the organizational challenges of existing schools, I’d expect more innovation in business education to come from up-starts or for-profit schools.

What would disruptive approaches look like?  I don’t necessarily know, but here are a couple of ideas:

• Creating a true on-the-job MBA with company-specific content, job-specific coaching, and potentially internal job rotations tailored to candidates who want to excel within a company, not necessarily change jobs
• Offering specialist MBA programs that prepare you to be a specialist, not just to use their work (this is one area where many schools are actually innovating, providing more targeted degrees)
• Going beyond the 1-2 year time frame with coaching and mentoring to address management challenges that evolve as your career progresses

Of course, brand recognition, alumni networks, and access to capital present big barriers to entry, so perhaps we’ll have to wait until established schools address some of these challenges after all.

• The learning attained in business school is easily duplicated at work or through self-directed study
• Supposedly, only a few schools give students a positive financial return after accounting for tuition costs and two years of foregone salary
• There are various gaps in the curriculum (e.g., not enough focus on people management, communication)
• More recently, both the analytical techniques and mindset they promote have been accused of contributing to the financial crisis and ethical problems at companies like Enron

There are a lot of nuances to these arguments, and I can’t cover them all here.  So I’m going to present my qualitative opinion on the educational and career value of business school.  These are inherently individual topics, based on a person’s background before school, their plans afterwards, and how much effort they put in.  So consider this anecdotal.  Nevertheless, here are the highlights of my experience:

• Completed around 150 team-based projects
• Worked on a dozen different teams of classmates that all ended up organizing tasks and seeing things in a unique way
• Conducted four significant outside consulting projects for companies ranging from a startup to a Brazilian tile manufacturer to Nextel
• Honed my job search skills through several hundred interviews, as well as writing cover letters and customizing my resume equally many times
• Developed a network of at least 150 friends and acquaintances in my class and gained access to the much larger alumni network
• Earned a credential that I believe made a significant difference in my earnings over the next five years
• Had a number of outstanding professors, both academics and practitioners from backgrounds including consulting, private equity, Fortune 500 companies – you name it
• Led a student organization with about 200 members

In a nutshell, business school was one of the top two growth experiences in my career, the other being starting a company.  I find critiques that imply that you can get the same degree of learning by reading a bunch of business books to be fairly naïve.  Becoming conversant in a topic is not the same thing as understanding it in depth.  Essentially no one is motivated enough to get the same depth of knowledge from outside reading, and self study completely misses the experiential component of the learning – everything from doing problem sets and case presentations to working with your team members.  It’s also difficult to approach various subjects with the same degree of structure and enthusiasm.  You might be excited about finance but not about marketing, or vice versa.

In contrast, many people’s work experience tends to be fairly routine and boring.  They end up doing slightly more responsible versions of the same thing for years.  The pace of learning is often slow.

Basically, critics make the mistake of comparing the ideal work experience with an actual business school experience.  As you probably know, few people have an ideal work experience that allows them to constantly learn new skills and take on responsibility as quickly as they can handle it.  For those few, especially entrepreneurs, consultants, and investment bankers, the case for an MBA is of course much weaker.

While I gained a great deal from b-school, its value depends highly on your situation and what you want to get out of it.

• If you are a specialist (e.g., financial trading, market research, technology product management) and are on a good career path, an MBA program may not add much value and may simply put your progression on hold for 1-2 years.
• If you plan to work in a non-profit field, you won’t get the same increase in salary, potentially making the degree a poor financial choice.
• For people in certain professions like management consulting, you really do end up learning a lot on the job.  The educational value of b-school will be much less for you, although the network and credential might still be helpful.
• If you want to change career tracks or are unsatisfied with the pace of progression in your career, business school was made for you.  It’s the perfect opportunity to reset your career and pursue a new path.
  • Just be realistic about the odds of achieving your chosen career.  For example, private equity and venture capital attract many MBA’s, but only a few with a combination of luck, hard work, and typically a top-tier school like Stanford or Harvard make it.  So don’t bet the farm on a dream like that unless you have a very good plan B.
• If you want to start a company, it’s a tough call.  Business school gives you a well-rounded background to be a company owner, but you might learn more by just running the company.  Also, most entrepreneurs who fail do so because of lack of capital, so the money you could sink into the MBA might be better spent on the business.  Finally, if the success of your business depends on specialized industry or functional expertise, an MBA may not help you with that.

Overall, I’m a big fan of the MBA, as you can tell.  However, I would be remiss not to mention a few areas where b-school curricula are typically weak:

• Sales and sales force management
• Areas where you have to do it to understand it, like recruiting and managing people
• Hands-on experience in realistic work situations
  • For example, a market research class will teach you statistical analysis and types of research, but it will tend to mimic a real market research project, with client demands and ambiguous data, rather poorly.
  • In my opinion, offering more opportunities for real project work similar to post-MBA jobs is the most important area where business schools can improve.

Coincidentally, a book called Rethinking the MBA recently came out.  It discusses the pressures business schools face and how they are responding to them.  While I haven’t had a chance to read it, I’ll make sure to follow up on this post once I do.

For those of you who have or plan to get an MBA, what’s your perspective?

Practice

Rehearsing a presentation beforehand is probably the single most important thing you can do if you want to be a great presenter.  You’ll be less nervous, more articulate, and better able to focus on the audience’s reaction instead of what to say next.  As you practice, you’ll also notice parts of the presentation that need to be revised, something that often is not apparent until you actually deliver it.  I tend to skip the practice, and a result many of my presentations in the past have been just a notch above mediocre.

Ideally, you should practice in front of someone.  Failing that, record and critique yourself.  The iPhone’s voice memo feature is excellent for this approach.  Video is even better, so get a Flip camcorder.

Rehearse using the same format in which you’ll be presenting (e.g., paper document, projector).

Be energetic and vary tone and pacing

If you sound bored or tentative, that message will override anything you actually say.  So as trite as it sounds, make sure to project enthusiasm.  In an appropriate way, of course – no one wants a cheerful discussion of layoffs.  Change up your speed, and especially try to slow down for important points to let them sink in.  Also make sure you have some inflection in your voice.  These aspects are difficult to master without practice, so refer back to my previous point about recording yourself.

Ask for questions

If the audience is quiet during the talk, stop at a couple of points and ask whether they have questions.  The best presentations are discussions rather than monologues, and a disengaged audience may not understand or agree with your points.  Best to get those issues out in the open.  Of course, individual questions may not be feasible if there are more than 10-15 people in the audience, unless they’re part of a separate Q&A session.

Speak off the page

Please do not read from the document.  Nothing is more painful for the audience to sit through.  In fact, you should think of your talk as covering the main points on the page but overall being more like color commentary.  When getting ready for a presentation, I jot down 2-3 points per page to make sure to cover, and some of them may not be written in the document at all.

Decide whether it’s a presentation or a deliverable

In contrast to a keynote presentation, where the slides have been pared down to the minimum and may just have a few words of text on the page, most consulting presentations are rather wordy, crowded affairs.  The presentation doubles as the leave-behind deliverable, so it has to convey most of the information in text.  Also, most consultants are habitually averse to leaving out any three-syllable words that might make their ideas seem more sophisticated.

I won’t really criticize this approach because I do it as well.  However, you should make sure to send the document to the client at least 24 hours in advance, preferably more, to give them time to review it.  Don’t make them struggle with trying to read it while you’re presenting.

Have someone proofread the document

Enough said.

Think about the storyline

Every presentation places the main point or conclusion either at the beginning (often in a one-page executive summary) or at the end.  Stating the conclusion up-front is helpful if the audience is short on time or attention span (like many senior executives).  Waiting until the end allows you to build up to your conclusion with supporting evidence and analysis, which may be better for a skeptical audience or controversial point.  It can also be good for building up some dramatic tension.  Either way is fine, just make a conscious choice based on the situation.

Those are my main points.  What would you add to the list?

When I was a couple of years out of college, I worked on a project defining the strategy for a big luxury travel venture.  The company was going to offer unique multimedia content and booking for luxury accommodations and activities for a variety of global destinations.  We were going to bring the “experience economy,” a big idea back in the late 90’s, to travel.

As a lowly business analyst, one of my tasks was working with a specialist consulting company to pick the first set of destinations we would focus on – places like Bali, Tuscany, and Paris.  I dove in with enthusiasm and started defining the perfect analysis for selecting locations.  It was supposed to incorporate traveler volume and spending, destination themes, exclusivity, and a variety of other sophisticated metrics.  The only problem was that this analysis was virtually impossible to execute.  There was no data available for some of the metrics, and virtually all of them turned out to be rather amorphous (Are people traveling to Florence, Tuscany, or Northern Italy?  Should we be comparing that with Capetown or South Africa as a whole?  Are we looking at US travelers, or should we include Europe and Japan?  Or no, let’s do a weighted average based on GDP per capita at the 80^th percentile!).  Pity the poor consultants I was working with.  They lacked the communication skills to get me to accept a more basic version of the work, and I didn’t have the perspective to realize I was massively over-engineering the analysis in an attempt to create a “perfect” answer to a question that would be judged subjectively anyway.

So what happened?  The analysis blew up.  The consultants couldn’t get it done in time, the executive sponsor had to get involved, and everyone ended up with egg on their faces.  That screw-up probably cost me a promotion a year later.

The point is a simple one:  It’s better to be certain that you can deliver a solid version of the work than to strive for perfection that you and your team may not have the time, experience, or skills to complete.  You need to make a sober assessment of your organizational capacity and plan accordingly.  More generally, putting work out early is also a great way to get feedback from the customer or from management to make sure you’re not going off on a tangent.  If you do decide to strive for the stretch goal, build in a fall-back deliverable.  If possible, complete that first, before adding bells and whistles.  Put in checkpoints where you can step back and figure out whether you’re really on track or need to cut scope to keep the project under control.  Delivering a polished version of good enough is often more valuable and much less risky than a rushed or late product that aims for perfection.

Conferences can be excellent, but of course many are exorbitantly expensive or simply boondoggles.  Those are a topic all their own, so I won’t go into them here.

There is an enormous amount of material on personal development online.  Sites like Lifehacker have personal development themes, and there are also sites like Personal MBA offer good business book recommendations and some courses.  These sites have their place in getting you to focus on your mental habits, but sometimes they overstate just how much they can provide the in-depth knowledge needed for many positions.  Reading a book can help you be more conversant with finance or market research, for example, but it’s quite a leap from there to being able to do the work.

Luckily, online classes targeted for specific business functions are also proliferating.  I have found providers like UMUC (part of University of Maryland) to have excellent programs.  If you have the time and budget for these programs, they are a great option for really expanding your area of expertise.

Now we get to the research-related part of the discussion.  Two of the most meaningful ways to make yourself more valuable at work are to understand your industry (or that of your clients) and function better.  This knowledge directly impacts the impression you make on your peers and managers, and the insights you derive from this research can help show that you’re ready to take on more responsibility.  Online trade publications and blogs are perfect for this kind of focused learning.  The format allows for daily reading that does not intrude on your work schedule, and you can follow several of them to get a better sense of differing perspectives.  Doing a quick search on the industry can lead you to good trade publications if you’re not already aware of them.

There are also a few ways you can make sure it’s productive:

• Set goals.  They could be as simple as reviewing three trade publications every morning before you start other tasks.
• Keep track of your reading.  Keeping score helps you stay motivated.  It also helps you figure out how much you’ve already gone through.
• Bookmark good sources or reference articles.
• Assign yourself homework.  Doing something with the information you’re reading will force you to really assimilate it.  Your homework could be as simple as emailing some colleagues once a week with anything interesting you’ve found.  Or if you prefer something anonymous, you could keep a blog or set up a Twitter account for your industry musings.  Just make sure you occasionally come up with your own opinions or analyses of what you’re reading.  You’ll benefit from exercising your writing skills, and you could also develop a higher profile in the industry over time.
• Keep your reading focused on your short-term career goals.  If you’re a marketing analyst, it probably makes more sense to spend your time learning about managing primary research efforts than reading about managing global advertising campaigns.  There will be time for that later.
  • I would make a minor exception for business strategy reading.  This stuff helps frame how you think about all business problems, so it’s appropriate throughout your career.

None of this is really mind-blowing, but it’s amazing how few people make a concerted effort to keep expanding their knowledge base.  If you do it, it will most definitely set you apart from the crowd.

Level of abstraction

Let’s take your typical consulting organization as an example;  you have analysts, associates, managers, and partners, although the exact titles might vary.  Each role roughly corresponds to a different level of abstraction:  data, information, conclusions, and recommendations.  Analysts crunch numbers and do interviews, associates put together different analyses to get broader insights, managers put those insights into an overall context and draw conclusions about the client’s business (as well as managing projects), and partners decide on the most important recommendations based on those conclusions and the client’s situation.  This hierarchy certainly isn’t set in stone, but it’s a useful way to think about things.

Everyone tends to get a little myopic thinking only at their own level of abstraction, but the best way to show that you’re ready to move to the next level is to avoid getting stuck focusing only on your own tasks.  An analyst who can put the pieces together, an associate who identifies project management risks, or a manager who can craft logical and appropriate recommendations, is showing the thought processes that they’ll need to be successful at the next level.  That type of thinking is what really stands out when the time to decide on promotions comes around.  Doing your assigned job well is necessary but not sufficient, and showing that you already have the mental framework to jump into the next higher role is what tips the scale.

Be proactive

Another way to think about it is to focus on taking something off your boss’s plate.  It may be writing part of a draft of the presentation when you were only assigned the analysis.  It could be following up with a client to get more information.  It could be doing outside research to gain better perspective on the client’s industry.  The problems you should address should flow naturally from your assigned work so that you’re not just randomly taking on additional tasks, but following up on the implications of your work is crucial.  You want to be able to say, “I was doing the compensation analysis, and I noticed the data was incomplete.  I followed up with client and got more complete data.  Then I realized that the analysis would be more meaningful with an outside benchmark, so I quickly found some data on that and incorporated it.  It looks like the client’s top performers are underpaid, and too much of their comp is in salary instead of commissions.”  As opposed to, “The data’s incomplete.  What should I do?”

The expectations cycle

More generally, your career advancement is closely tied to your expectations.  If you expect to get promoted because you’re an outstanding contributor, and you work accordingly, it often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you don’t see any opportunity to take on more responsibility and work like you’re punching the clock, you will end up missing out on those opportunities.  It’s either a virtuous or a vicious cycle.  Setting expectations for yourself to be outstanding, and expecting your company to recognize and reward that, makes a huge difference.  Of course, if you are outstanding and aren’t seeing the rewards, you need to make a fuss.  If people aren’t receptive to your desire to grow professionally and take on more responsibility, you could simply be at the wrong company.

Caveats

There are a couple of caveats to keep in mind.  Don’t get so wrapped up in going to the next level of abstraction that you short-change your actual day-to-day responsibilities.  You will end up looking scattered and unreliable.  If you’re too busy to look up and think about the bigger picture, you might need to work on being more efficient.  Critically evaluate your basic skills (writing, quantitative analysis, etc.) and figure out whether you need to sharpen those before you can spend more time on higher-level stuff.  Also look at how you spend your time.  If you find yourself procrastinating or spinning your wheels, figure out how to address those issues first.  Finally, look for ways to carve out slivers of time for putting yourself in your boss’s shoes.  If you just spend half an hour a day thinking about your boss’s problems, you can often come up with a valuable insight that doesn’t require a lot of time to put to use.

Also make sure you have a good handle on your boss’s ego.  Some people are insecure and will feel threatened if they see you as overstepping your bounds.  There’s a whole other discussion to be had about that, but it’s usually pretty obvious.  If you find yourself in that situation, it may also be a sign to look for greener pastures.

What do you think, does this advice make sense based on your experience?  What would you add?