As an undergraduate finance major, I am forced every now and then to come into contact with my fellow business students. A few of them, just like in the population as a whole, are worth meeting. The majority, however, might as well be zombies who stumble around aimlessly on the path their parents haphazardly set out for them...just like in the population as a whole. I pick on the business majors because, theoretically, they should be more aware. Theirs is a vital and demanding profession, like medicine. If the poet laureate is a space cadet, no one dies or loses their life savings. Business professionals need to be on their game.
It is for this reason that a piece of me dies every time I have to engage with one of these intellectual Lilliputians. Recently I was required to play boss to some management students pretending to pitch an idea to me. I was supposed to ask them questions and they would show their communication and persuasion skills. The program they were pitching was called "ROWE" or "Results-Only Working Environment."
A few thoughts on my experience in this activity:
First, no one should ever have to listen to eleven business students try to sell an idea in any 24-hour period. Nothing at Guantanamo could approach that level of agony. Second, I motion that the words "like" and "um" be surgically removed from the brains of anyone with an IQ below 130. End of story.
What really depresses me, though, and what shakes my confidence in humanity to the core, is the fact that three of the eleven students came in, and when I asked them what ROWE, the project they were selling to me, stood for, they could not answer. Let me repeat, they could not tell me the full name of the project they were pitching.
The next captains of industry coming soon to a hedge fund near you!
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