A Couple of Wise Guys.
Déjà vu, all over again. The last time I co-wrote something with my Stanford Business School classmate, Seth Godin, was 35 years ago. We were two of the youngest people in our class, and, quite frankly, we were a little weird. I entered biz school at age 21, and Seth was just 3 months older. We were both entrepreneurs at heart. But we got restless in lectures, especially from professors who’d never run a business.
Near the end of our two-year program, we co-applied to receive non-classroom academic credits to interview some of the most well-known business leaders, after which we would co-write a book, “Business Rules of Thumb” (Amazon’s sole description of the book: “Wisdom from America’s Business Leaders”). We recognized that these leaders would never give us access post-graduation as they would have thought we were looking for jobs. So, we leveraged our identities as fawning, naive students and, in the process, Seth and I probably learned more in our research than we did in the rest of our in-classroom studies.
Over the next week, Seth and I will banter back and forth with a series of 7 posts. We hope our dialogue will offer you some actionable lessons on how to cultivate and harvest wisdom. You may come to realize that wisdom is often shared, not taught, leadership can be anyone’s role, entrepreneurship is about matchmaking, and your wisest mentor may be closer than you think.
Hope you enjoy being a fly on the wall at our reunion.
