“A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this. Nor can big business or big government-those idols of the right and the left-reliably secure such work for us. …work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences. The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students.” — Matthew B. Crawford
This has been a tough year for MBA students seeking work. The financial crisis and recession disappointed many hopes and shattered most expectations that students brought with them to B-school. Journalists, pundits, and bloggers are now asking whether B-school is the portal to career advancement that it used to be. I think it still is-as long as you are totally clear on what you have to offer and on what the world needs. In recent years, too many MBA applicants and students have been motivated by a sense of entitlement: if you put in your time, the world owes you. But as Mark Twain said, the world doesn’t owe you anything; it was here first. It’s time to shed the sense of entitlement and embark on finding the kind of work you enjoy and at which you can excel.
This theme is reinforced in an essay by Michael Crawford in this morning’s New York Times Magazine. He describes an experience of getting a couple of graduate degrees, doing some knowledge-work, and then eventually quitting to start a small motorcycle repair shop. The essay is a reflection on the satisfactions of the trades: “the immediate feedback you get from material objects and …the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.” It’s a good essay and I commend it to you. It reminded me of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which he argues that good work combines the rationalism (roughly, caring about the details and how things work) and the romanticism (such as the gestalt, Zen, and “being in the moment.”) Crawford’s rejection of a career in knowledge work also reminds me of Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.” Finding a deep connection between what you do and how you live is a fundamental achievement of successful people.
One can argue with Crawford. His personal experience with knowledge work isn’t the experience of everyone. The notorious cubicle-office of Dilbert is hilarious because it is a stereotype and not necessarily a reflection of the world. And trades-workers aren’t the only ones who get close to people and outcomes. Most of the great knowledge-workers I know are deeply rooted in the experiences of customers, employees, and the world around them and care greatly about the impact their work has.
But where Crawford and I agree is in his quotation above: good work finds a match between “best capacities” and impact-and failure is probably a necessary part of the process of finding good work. Truly, the world doesn’t owe you a living. You must find it. And a process of trial-and-error is probably a necessary part of the search. As I meet Darden alums at our annual reunions and at chapter meetings around the world, I am impressed with stories of the search and with what seems like a reasonable success rate. Where B-School seems to help is in extending a person’s familiarity with the range of opportunities, providing some training to become a plausible interviewee, linking the student to a network of recruiters and other alums, and transforming the outlook and leadership capabilities of the student. But as Crawford says, academic credentials won’t guarantee an outcome. What you ultimately get is what you make of it.