Sunday’s NY Times Magazine chronicles the sad saga of Elizabeth Shin, the M.I.T. student who committed suicide two years ago. She and her parents seemed to have been caught up in the culture of over-achievement way before college, and the pressure cooker atmosphere at M.I.T. was more of the same. And now they and M.I.T. are caught up in the culture of litigation, rather than grieving, learning, forgiving, changing, and moving on.
After reading about Shin’s suicide, I happened to read the May issue of Fast Company, which has some interesting takes on the Enron debacle. Read Wall Street’s Den of Thieves and Are All Consultants Corrupt? and then ask yourself: Does the culture of over-achievement in our schools (high school and post-secondary) have anything to do with the culture of dishonesty on Wall Street and ethics-be-damned pursuit of cash in our professional services firms?
At times I think my three twenty-something sons are missing out on too much by not going to college. Not tonight after I stumbled on this interview with Charles Handy:
“Most important of all, however, was the lesson that I learnt from the study of people who create something in their lives out of nothing — we termed them alchemists. They proved to me that you can learn anything if you really want to. Passion was what drove these people, passion for their product or their cause. If you care enough you will find out what you need to know and chase the source of the knowledge or the skill. Or you will experiment and not worry if the experiment goes wrong. The alchemists never spoke of failures or mistakes but only of learning experiments. Passion as the secret of learning is an odd solution to propose, but I believe that it works at all levels and all ages. Sadly, passion is not a work often heard in large organizations, nor in schools, where it can seem disruptive.”
Enron employees talk about the passion at Enron, but delve a little deeper and it soon becomes apparent that that’s not the kind of passion Handy’s talking about.