Book Smart vs. Street Smart

I have been reading some fascinating books, and delightedly discovered an interesting phenomenon.

There are A students and B students.

B-students don’t know everything about anything and are excellent at nothing. B-students do, however, know something about a lot of things, and they can complete almost any task with some modicum of competence. There is no one thing they do well. But there are many things they do well enough. B-students are not stupid. Their penchant to understand everything about nothing and a little bit about a lot of things is that they get bored quickly with any one task.

A-students, on the other hand, know a lot about one thing, whether it is technology or marketing or sales or finance. And they do this one thing extremely well. If they don’t do it well, it bothers them. A-students want to do things perfectly all the time.

Most born entrepreneurs are B-students, and most well-trained managers are A-students.

A-students are better off going to an investment bank, or to a management consulting firm like Bain, or Law school. But don't start a business. They will most likely fail. Not because they aren't smart but because they are too smart.

Entrepreneurs want results immediately, while managers are happy to wait, confident that if they execute perfectly over time the results will eventually follow. An entrepreneur’s short attention span allows him, or maybe even forces him, to think laterally. Managers, on the other hand, can stay focused on one topic for a long period of fashion. Lateral thinking is necessary for start-up where the entrepreneur is constantly being pulled off course when plans don’t go as planned, while linear thought is required in more mature companies where getting several hundred or several thousand people to stick to a plan is absolutely necessary to get anything done.

A good decision made quickly is far better than a great decision made slowly for new/small business. A-students simply can’t allow their perfectionist minds to settle for good; they need great. But startups move too fast for greatness.

The most important thing to realize when you are a B-student entrepreneur is that you need A-student managers. In the end, the job of entrepreneurs is to attract, organize, and motivate A-student managers. Together, they create a great company.