How - Dov Seidman [32]
The B/B+ students in my class demonstrated good command of the material. They started their intellectual journeys at the beginning of the semester and climbed a hill of understanding. They did all the reading, they were industrious, and they were able to lay it out very clearly on the final exam. They climbed diligently, as one does on all journeys, ever upward toward knowledge. At the end of the semester they displayed a basic understanding and basic knowledge, made no major mistakes, showed little confusion, and repeated it all back clearly. Basic knowledge deserved a grade of B.
Those who received A grades had mastered, synthesized, and integrated the material into their being. They thought deeply, developed counterarguments that weren’t part of the readings, internalized the material, and put it to work. They took charge of what they had learned, took it further, challenged it, and created new, innovative thoughts: thinking outside the classroom, if you will. In short, they had developed a power—a power informed by what they had read and heard, and amplified by the way they saw it at work in the world. They were not just taking the class; they were in some respects teaching it, and I found them inspirational. They deserved a grade of A.
Those who got Cs, however, really caught my attention. As you would naturally assume, some were lazy and did the bare minimum to get by. But I was surprised to realize that a good number of them were every bit as industrious as those who got As. They, too, did all the reading and understood the material well. And like those who got As, they exuded flashes of brilliance, often trying to take their understanding to the next level. But when it came to coalescing it into an understanding and expressing their thoughts, they were stuck in a deep valley of confusion, struggling to get out. They had taken the extra step and had gone for the deep knowledge, but missed it by a degree or two or kept slipping back, and couldn’t express their thoughts in clear or cogent ways.
When I plotted it out on a graph it looked like Figure II.1.
The paradox was that the C students were actually further along than the B students. They had traveled more ground and gone past the first peak of basic understanding achieved by the Bs. They were unable to command the power of the As, sure, but they were closer to the As than the Bs, further on the intellectual journey than the Bs. The good news/bad news story for those C students was, at semester’s end, I had to give them a C for confusion. But they revealed a com-pelling analogy for the path of knowledge. It is easy to stop on the Hill of B; you feel like you made a climb, can see the lay of the land below you, and think that perhaps you deserve a little rest. It feels safe there, too; on that first hill, things seem clear. You have demonstrated a reasonable amount of effort and achievement, and exposed yourself to relatively little risk.
FIGURE II.1 The Paradox of the Hills of Knowledge
B, however, is not a winning grade. If you stay at B while others accept the challenge of continuing on to A, you get left behind. B is stasis, and, as we all know, success lies in consistent progress. To gain true understanding requires struggle in the deep Valley of C. If you don’t struggle there, you’ll never get to that second, much higher, peak. You can skip around in this book, for example (as many people do with business books) and come to a superficial understanding that Innovating in HOW is good business, that HOW we do what we do holds the key to long-term, sustained success, and that the winners in the twenty-first century will outbehave