How education may help competitiveness in business

One cannot teach tomorrow’s professions but can prepare you how to adopt to changing circumstances and pick up the skills you will need to survive.

Recently, I have been watching how americans, western europeans and eastern europeans approach education and how it may effect on their businesses. There has been always rumors and disapproving notes by the continental europeans about how bad the american (anglo-saxon) education is and how under-educated they are.

Most americans may have less encyclopedic knowledge than european fellows while they dominate in creativity and problem solving. In the era where you have instant access to tremendous information and the challenge is rather how to sort it than acquiring it, what seems to be more important: educating bookworms or creative problem solvers?

What is a scalable and what is a limited scalability business? Scalable businesses are able to grow and manage increased demand while limited businesses can grow with expanding their operations in correlation with the increased demands.

Typical limited scalability businesses are bakeries, hair salons, medical centers etc. In these cases if there is growing demand then the business owner needs to hire more bakers, doctors, hairdressers, because their ability to serve customers are limited to their time. In these cases you mostly sell your time and focus on doing the work.

Scalabe businesses can serve millions of people without scaling the operations in correlation with the growing demand. Software and hardware companies are scalable but most companies who can automate productions are scalable (apparel, beauty, pharmaceutical etc.). In these cases you mostly work on how to make your business more efficient and you sell your ideas.

Communist ideologists used to say that capitalists exploit people. Without judging their statement let’s see what justice may have seen I am pretty sure they did not think of this way.

Since production is getting automated in all industries (in automotive it is already almost fully automated with collaborative robots), and operational processes like customer service, accounting are also to be automated we cannot really speak about exploitation anymore.

And maybe this is even more dangerous for developing countries but for even those european countries who are not in the frontline of innovations because innovators will not need their service anymore.

What if exploitation ends and scalable companies will not need the services of lagging european and developing countries? My bet is they will need to shift to become innovators or they will face serious unemployment rates and plummeting economies.

Changing the mindset and approach to work in whole societies is a tough challenge. Usually it takes generations but our speeding world with disruptive technologies will bring this new order to us sooner than any could expect it.

In this rapidly changing and evolving world my question to the governments of lagging european countries are the following: do you really want to continue to teach students the knowledge of yesterday by filling their minds with useless encyclopedic knowledge or do you want to join the 21st century and teach students how to be courage, creative, and able to adapt to our fast changing environment?

What is your opinion about how education could better prepare us for our fast changing, disruptive environment? Let me know your thougths in comment.

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