Let’s stop giving grades

Can business schools stop giving people marks from A to F or zero to 100 please? Just give them pass or fail, so they are prepared for real life.

One of the things I completely abhor, is business students fresh out of school with grandiose plans but poor execution combined with a loser attitude. The mindset seems to be that, “it doesn’t matter if I have a big night and consequently turn in shit work the next day, as I will do some better work downstream”.

Unfortunately real life doesn’t work like that.

• You do shit work – the client fires you. Pass/Fail.
• If clients fire you because of your work – I will fire you. Pass/Fail.
• You get caught slightly over the limit – you lose your licence. Pass/Fail.

There is no grading in real life!

When I trained to be an Army Officer, you were trained to never give up and allow yourself to fail, until you had explored every opportunity for success or even partial success. And it doesn’t matter how outrageous or how difficult, stressful or personally uncomfortable it is for you. Because everyone depends on each other, when you fail, you bring others down like dominoes.

A couple of years ago I shifted offices. The delivery truck was supposed to arrive at midday, arrived at 8pm and demanded cash payment before he unloaded rather than the agreed cheque. I had to scrounge up money from more than one personal bank account (because of daily withdrawal limits), then unload the truck and create a couple of usable workspaces so that staff could start working the next day. I finished at 1am. This isn’t a story of me acting heroically, it’s a story of not accepting failure, exploring options and preventing the removalists’ failure from affecting my staff.

Why am I ranting? Because this week I had someone fail on me, plus they didn’t advise me of the failure until I enquired. They accepted the failure and said, “it would never happen again”. But what I wanted was them to have the mindset of not accepting failure. Especially as I could think up at least three options that they could have taken, to mitigate their failure.

Real life doesn’t give you a B-, it fails you and it doesn’t care.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.