Applied Intelligence

I was talking to MattyK, one of my good college friends, when he brought up a good point on “Applied Intelligence.” He was recently watching a rerun of the classic game show Jeopardy and it was one of the shows with the record breaking savant Ken Jennings. The answer posed was,”It’s a colloquial term for Black English.”

The question Jennings asked was “What be Ebonics?”

I think this is interesting not because the answer is difficult, but rather because Ken Jennings was not only able to ring in his question first, but was able to use the knowledge in the correct manor – on the fly.

I think there are many smart people out there, but the speed and accuracy of some is sometimes shocking.

So that’s a great little tidbit but where am I taking this?

I’ve seen that there are many amazingly smart people in the world. They are even at school, but often times the ones who are teaching me about business have spent little time in the business world. They reveal a truly shocking disconnect between the academic and business world, especially in a “business program.” I think that the people that are excellent at defining and teaching a course on business logic have proven to be the very people who either lack the capacity or will to actually deliver on those same ideas. This holds true from the people I’ve seen at Wharton to those at other schools in the area, including Villanova. I once sat in on a Wharton lecture and the material presented was taught from the same text book in my bag, the only true difference I saw was the quality of the people in the seats… and I didn’t find everyone drop dead impressive.

I think time spent knocking on door, making cold calls, putting together market data or closely following specific markets is a much better way that people can add to the classroom. This goes for both student and professors.

As for all others, either cram to be the next superstar winner on Jeopardy or spend some time with what really matters to the business world… not the academic world.