Education

I wrote, to follow Ryan Holiday's Here's The Technique That Ambitious People Use To Get What They Want, I teach and coach people to get jobs through performance and it works. Schools teach people to react, take tests, and show how great they are. For a posted opening, you're presenting yourself as a commodity -- a slightly shinier one, you hope. It's based on compliance. Most analytical, geeky types got a lot of schooling. After decades of it, most people have learned that model without awareness of alternatives. If you want to avoid challenges in life and just get a job so you can retire 50 years later with nothing remarkable in between, that strategy works. What Ryan described---to audition---is standard in other fields, such…

Joshua Spodek Uneducated at Any GPA Is the Ivy League Today Big 3 Auto of the 1960s? America's top universities today are like America's Big 3 car manufacturers of the 60s: hugely profitable, projecting growth for decades, the envy of the world, dominating their markets, dictating terms to customers and employees, and accelerating to bankruptcy. Cars aren't diplomas, but besides the obvious differences between the fields, systemic similarities suggest a need to act for leadership asleep at the wheel. Missed Opportunities I participated in an NYU committee to promote entrepreneurship. Nobody seemed to notice the irony in the following two items in one meeting's agenda. A goal to attract large companies for student internships (leaving aside that corporate internships are not particularly entrepreneurial). Delays building…

Leadership, entrepreneurship, and other performance-based professional practices are fundamentally social and emotional. Traditional academics teaches you to comply, not to lead or take initiative. It teaches intellectual skills, which are perfect for the knowledge worker of the mid-twentieth century. Those days are gone. Today's challenges are social and emotional—how to create relationships and learn people's problems so you can solve them. Learning to lead, innovate, create, and solve people's problems requires self-awareness, teamwork, empathy, and other social and emotional skills. Most graduates of traditional education learned to analyze, recall facts, and other intellectual skills, which, today, keep you from promotion. Few people know you can learn social and emotional skills, it seems. You can. It requires facing and overcoming social and emotional challenges. Most people…

Sometimes people who want to know to lead ask directly, How do you lead? I don't think they're asking a question that will help them improve their leadership. You can walk and talk, but you'd be hard pressed to describe how you do it beyond generalities like "you put one foot in front of the other." No one taught you the theory behind language or walking. You practiced until you succeeded. You fell along the way. You would never lecture to a child on how to talk. Same with playing an instrument, sport, or any performance-based practice. You learn by doing. In fact, you'd never ask someone to teach you to play tennis by lecturing you in a classroom or assigning you to write papers.…

Meeting with Frances Hesselbein means talking about service. Her touchstone phrase is "to serve is to live." All the men in her life served in the military. She taught at West Point and led me to my co-teaching for three days last fall. By contrast, when I grew up, I associated the military with the draft, whose compulsory nature seemed unconstitutional. My sense of community has changed---I would say matured. I find discipline valuable and lacking in the United States. A civilian service, maybe mandatory A year or so ago, Frances mentioned the idea of civilian service, maybe even compulsory civilian service. I hadn't seriously thought about the idea before. Many nations have it but not the U.S. Most of my life I would have…

Influencive's Surya Prakash Singh posted an interview of me, "Nurturing Millennial Leaders," of how to start leading, especially if your traditional education didn't help. The article begins Nurturing Millennial Leaders I get the chance to speak with author and leadership specialist Joshua Spodek. According to a survey, each day approximately 10,000 baby boomers retire. By 2020, 48% of the workforce will be made of millennials. Because of this scenario, 84% of organizations are bound to feel the lack of leaders in the organization in the next 5 years. How can we mold Millennials to embrace and develop leadership skills? Being a millennial entrepreneur myself, I always seek out coaches who help me develop my own leadership skills. Around 95% of Millennials feel either that they lack…

[EDIT: Lloyd Austin has since become the United States Secretary of Defense. He also endorsed my book, Leadership Step by Step, saying: Great leaders aren't born with a 'leadership gene'; great leaders develop the necessary skills and gain confidence through practice and hard work. In Leadership Step by Step Joshua Spodek presents a thoughtful approach to becoming a highly effective leader that emphasizes the importance of experiential learning. It will serve as a valuable resource for leaders at all levels in any profession. Indeed, Joshua's practical exercises will help prospective, as well as experienced leaders, to master their craft and ultimately to succeed in leading and inspiring others in their various pursuits. Now back to the original post.] Yesterday I got back from three days…

Columbia University's Alumni Association posted a piece I wrote, "An Alum's Inside Look at the World of Career Coaching," which included a video of my WBECS talk from a couple months ago. It begins An Alum's Inside Look at the World of Career Coaching By Joshua Spodek '93CC, '96GSAS, '99GSAS, '06BUS of the Columbia Career Coaches Network Spodek shares valuable insight from his job as a career coach and details the real value in working with the Network to better your career. With five diplomas from Columbia, I love our alma mater's education, but I recognize the limitations of traditional education. What we learned in classrooms may have been decades ago. The world has changed, as have we, and much of university learning doesn't apply outside academia. Coaching…