As a child of the 90’s, I was told the euphemism of Don’t make fun of a nerd, you’ll wind up working for them one day almost constantly. This served two purposes: it was intended to motivate the ne’er-do-wells to behave and to study a little harder and to motivate the nerds of the classroom-dangling the hope of a better future in front of them. However, in many real-world situations, this has not panned out in our modern society.
Now, that’s not to say that nerds (an ethically dubious term that maybe we shouldn’t toss around so casually?) cannot have lucrative careers in our modern workforce; they absolutely do. Many six-sometimes seven-figure careers exist in the quantitative side of finance, as well as medicine, science, technology and engineering. It’s possible-and sometimes necessary- for the immediate managers of the positions to be highly specialized themselves. After all, it would be nice to have a software manager who understands the weeds of the software, or an engineering manager that understands the underlying concepts. However, this becomes less and less of a requirement the higher up one tracks in an organization; it’s highly unlikely the CEO of JetBlue is capable of landing a plane.
Charismatic networkers tend to get a bad rep in today’s society. Mental images of tall men in suits, casually chatting up other suit-clad executives in a posh office commonly come up-to say nothing of the negative connotation of word “schmoozing”. However, charismatic networkers serve as the backbone of our economy. No profitable company can exist without a successful salesforce, and this skillset typically does not (though to be fair, I’m not saying never) overlap with highly specialized technical knowledge. Charismatic networkers are normally quite competent at motivating staff, reaching out to candidates, playing hardball in negotiations, persuasion and other gifts of gab that many of us are secretly jealous of. Extroversion is just as much of an asset as introversion.
I say this not to bash our nations Ph.D’s; we absolutely need them. However, a Ph.D program (if I may ponder, my formal education stopped at a bachelor’s degree) often specializes its students to undergo a career in research, or to narrow their field into one sub-genre of a field. With all of this time dedicated towards research and publication, this typically does not leave room for entrepreneurial endeavors. While someone who holds a Ph.D in Organic Chemistry would be able tell you about all of the intricacies of a Diels-Alder reaction, they are typically inexperienced in the areas of securing investor capital for an idea, negotiating contracts, and recruiting potential candidates. There is a common maxim in the business world of experts know more and more about less and less, and this is a commonly agreed-upon notion among the billionaires interviewed for the book All the Money in the World by Peter Bernstein (which is highly worth a read).
While anecdotal, my time spent as a STEM undergrad focused mainly on this is what graduate schools like and/or when you graduate and get a job rather than when you graduate and create a job. Many of my fellow students approached career fairs and networking events with a deer-in-the-headlights look (which the lesser competition was to my benefit, but that’s beside the point).
Of course, one must be aware enough to not fall into trap of thinking in absolutes. Of course, highly analytically intelligent people can-and have-become great entrepreneurs, while others have carved out a comfortable niche as consultants, with all of the billing, scheduling and tax knowledge that entails. And a lot of charismatic networkers have either run companies into the ground (Jim Collins wrote an entire book on this, Good to Great) or failed to climb the corporate ladder. However, I’d argue that the 90’s maxim of Don’t make fun of a nerd, you’ll wind up working for them is also thinking in absolutes, not mention unrealistic; every nerd winds up owning a company?
Besides the dodgy ethics of labeling young children as nerds so early in life-setting them up with both unrealistic expectations and to be potential targets of their peers, we must also consider that at many highly specified fields, the highly specialized employees typically report to more generalized executives. After all, no one CEO can be an expert in every facet of their company; that’s why they hire experts in the first place! Therefore, I’d like to make a motion in our culture to stop with the dated 1990’s way of motivating our youth and start telling them the more likely scenario; Don’t make fun of a charismatic networker, you’ll wind up working for one.
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