Most entrepreneurs were just B students
When my daughters brought me their report cards at the end of the year I made a point of not getting too obsessed about their marks. I obviously encourage them to do the best they can, get good marks, apply themselves, and try, try, try. But if they don’t get top grades, I don’t fuss all that much either.
This may sound like heresy to most educationalists and parents, but the reality is that there is a poor correlation between good grades at school and success out in the real world. In fact, the ability to get an A on a report card may just demonstrate that: the ability to get an A on a report card. It may not be an indicator of success in future business or leadership.
Jim Schleckser boss of the business magazine Inc’s CEO Project says there’s a dirty little secret out there: “A students don’t grow up to lead companies”. He says: “They rarely go on to lead anything.”
Schleckser makes a convincing argument on the Inc.com website, saying that B students actually end up making the best leaders in business, because business is a balance of brains as well as people skills.
He argues that today’s education system treats learning like a “post-industrialage production line”, making it easy to get obsessed with the idea that your child or student needs to get a perfect report card to be successful in their career. He points to research by US military academy West Point, which shows that a disproportionate number of B students go on to become leaders of thousands of people and manage budgets in the billions of dollars.
The point, argues Schleckser, is that leadership in organisations rarely “has anything to do with pure intellect alone”. While A students can make great individual contributors maybe as scientists, engineers, doctors or professors they may not have developed the same interpersonal skills that B students have.
Schleckser finds C students the most interesting of the lot. While A students may be your intellectual number crunchers or your professors, and B students your future leaders he believes it is the C students who are the “wild cards”. These are the students who are “entrepreneurial mavericks” and could go on to start successful companies.
This obviously is taken in a purely business and entrepreneurial context.
In the professional context, to be a top academic, doctor or actuary, to get into university you need to get those As, but the point is that for entrepreneurial or business leadership success those top marks may not be as important as we think they are. A biography of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance adds anecdotal support to this idea, painting the billionaire as a “likable, quiet, unspectacular student” who was not considered one of the brightest in his class at Pretoria Boys High. By all accounts, Musk excelled at university, where he could focus on subjects that interested him.
Here in SA, a straw poll of some entrepreneurial leaders yielded some interesting results. San Francisco-based entrepreneur and local Sharktank investor Vinny Lingham reports that he was a C, “borderline B”, student. Former FNB head, serial investor and cofounder of new banking start-up Bank Zero Michael Jordaan, reports that he was a solid B student. Former kulula.com head turned investor, Gidon Novick, reports that he was “between A and B”.
This is absolutely not a call to slack off, and it’s important to not buy into any type of predeterminism. If you are an A student it does not mean you won’t grow into a business leader or entrepreneurial genius. Moreover, if you are a B or C student it does not mean you will be a business leader or an entrepreneur.
It’s just a reminder that things in life are not as cut and dried as we think they are.
Keep pushing for those high marks, but if you don’t get them, it may not be the end of the world.