Can you learn business?

Young people approach me from time to time, asking me to prescribe some secret formula for success in business. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with the young being eager to consult wiser old heads. On the contrary, I consider it natural and commendable. The problem lies in the question itself. So all I do is smile to them and throw up my hands.

For if success could be prescribed like antibiotics, we’d all be happily triumphant, only exchanging our prescriptions from time to time, like you do with business cards at the golf club. Yet nothing, least of all business, is simple enough to be pigeonholed into guidelines and advice.

It’s also worth remembering that luck plays a crucial role in this aspect of life. You can have great ideas, bolstered with talent, and never be successful. Why? Because circumstances beyond your control may conspire to derail you. This is something to be aware of and ready for. It is essential that you know how to overcome the first, second, and even third failure. Such knowledge is decisive for your further career.

For, luckily for us, luck is fickle, and even a momentary lack of it can be reforged into something of great value: a resilient spirit. If we do not let the vicissitudes of fate break us, we are not at our journey’s end. Our fight goes on. Business calls for a resilient mind, a trait that not even the most prestigious of schools can furnish us with.

Yet even luck is but an element of success in business. Should you count wholly and solely on a favourable alignment of the stars, lucky winds, or whatever other augury, you are unlikely to get very far. As the saying goes, you must give luck a helping hand.

Does running a business call for a university degree to testify to your entrepreneurial abilities? Not as far as I am aware. I am of the opinion that it takes many years of practice to achieve mastery. Trial, sometimes error, but always moving forward. No academic institution offers that kind of curriculum.

The Polish education system is rather focused on theoretical minutiae, studying history, and analysing data. We can go to any length to keep students at their desks as far from real business life as possible. Yet not everything can be trimmed into a system of coordinates, pie charts, and colourful bars.

Things are not well when the training of future entrepreneurs is conducted solely by theoreticians. Of course, one can be an outstanding coach without ever having been an outstanding footballer, yet it’s good to have some experience from the pitch before beginning to lecture on strategies.

What insight into business can be offered by someone who has spent their whole professional life in cushy, secure positions, swallowing assorted grants like a pelican gulps down grapes? Will matters of incorporating and running a company, taking risks, and shouldering the plethora of responsibilities of true entrepreneurs not be absolutely alien to them?

West European and US systems of business education have a slightly different focus, which obviously does not mean that their lecture halls become eyries hatching business eagles only. In short: if you lack the necessary package of traits and the innate talent supported by a touch of luck, you will not become a business shark, even if they raised you in the best-equipped aquariums.

I wonder whether you have noticed how common zoological metaphors are in business? We have quite a zoo here: eagles, sharks, tigers, and yes, even hyenas. All of them so animalistic and so predatory.

And yet the most profound sense of this game is to be successful, and – while succeeding – remain the most genuinely true person to the core.