Ashton.Gustafson

The role of business school used to be to teach about scarcity, shelf space or lack thereof, FIFO, LIFO, and bottlenecks. If you understood these things, you understood business.

But there’s frustration in the biz department walls now. The markets are gaining taste, an eye, and appreciation for the arts. Now professors are having to leave the spelling bee traditions of memorization, test taking, and regurgitation and wrestle with beauty, design, art, meaning, and fulfillment.

Couple this with two or more decades of college graduates that learned what they supposedly needed to learn all to find that the knowledge got the job but didn’t unlock meaning they wanted out of life. The system, unfortunately, has made more noise than it has music. But that happens when structure becomes more important than improvisation doesn’t it?

Many are asking what’s next now that we’re on the other side of the industrial and education revolutions.

For one, I would say next isn’t coming – next is here.

And secondly, those that point us towards and experience, meaning, and fulfillment will be the leaders we look back on today with gratitude and the forefathers of whatever we end up calling “next”.

Get the picture now.

This isn’t a Polaroid you want to shake for another ten years to see what it’s going to look like.