Posted 7:22 PM by Blah blah

He Who Has the Best Grades…Loses, by management guru Tom Peters.

From the book Whoever Makes the Most Mistakes Wins: The Paradox of Innovation, by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes.
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt's biographer, John Gunther, observed that, "The boys who were the best 'Grotties' [the prep school Groton, which FDR attended] usually turned out to be non-entities later. Boys who hated Groton did much better."

"In his career-long study of millionaires, Thomas Stanley has not only found no correlation between success in school and an ability to accumulate wealth, he's actually found a negative correlation. Few of Stanley's millionaires got good grades or high SAT scores. His wealthy subjects rarely showed up in any ‘most’ category during high school (most talented, most popular, most likely to succeed). After graduating from college (seldom a prestigious one) their lack of sparkling academic records kept many from getting hired by top corporations. As a result, they were forced to start their own enterprises. … ‘It seems that school-related evaluations are poor predictors of economic success,’ Stanley concluded in The Millionaire Mind.

"What did predict economic success was a willingness to take risks. By contrast, the success-failure standards of most schools penalized risk takers. As we've seen, in business, sports, science and the arts, there's a certain regard for gallant failure by those who take big chances. In school, however, an F is an F: Bad news. You flunked. You're a failure. Far from rewarding those who take chances, most educational systems honor those who play it safe. They're the ones who get good grades. As a result, those who do well in school find it hard to take risks later on. That's not what won them academic honors. The ones who do take chances have a hard time in school and are often penalized for their independent ways. Many of Stanley's subjects said teachers told them, ‘You'll never succeed,’ or ‘That's the dumbest idea for a new business I've ever heard.’ "
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Also see the March 25 issue of Newsweek. The cover story is on the recovery of Silicon Valley. P53 Headline: "Failure Is the Best Medicine. The Silicon Valley of today is built less atop the spires of earlier triumphs than upon the rubble of earlier debacles."