The Most Important Thing I Learned In School

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The following is an excerpt from After School.

 

Team diversity truly results in a better product and outcome. I think it’s pretty comical that it took business school for me to realize this when I’m a black male in the tech industry. I remember the exact moment it hit me too.

I tackled our second assignment with a well thought out answer that I believed was the spot-on solution to the problem at hand.

We were assigned a group for all of our assignments in our core marketing class. By this time in the year we were fairly familiar with each other as classmates, so there was no fear of hurting feelings if opinions differed. Eager to prove to myself that marketing was something that I could indeed stomach, I tackled our second assignment with a well thought out answer that I believed was the spot-on solution to the problem at hand.

I confidently presented my solution to the rest of the team. One of my partners agreed with my thoughts, but another had different plans. After I was done, she proceeded to thoroughly dismantle all of my points. It was all in a tactful manner, but I can admit that I wasn’t ecstatic about it. How was I so off? How did I miss so many clear holes in my analysis? I had team members who agreed with me; I couldn’t have been that wrong.

That’s when it really hit me: she had a completely different perspective from my own.

That’s when it really hit me: she had a completely different perspective from my own. In an attempt to make my thinking as efficient as possible, it seemed like my brain had blocked out other reasonable solutions, choosing to focus on what I knew. Imagine if my team was completely full of people just like me. We would have all came to the same completely wrong conclusion.

This was when I realized the importance of having a team with diverse backgrounds. You get a mix of people who can check each others’ ideas when they don’t quite measure up. Everyone benefits at the end of the day.

 

If you would like to participate/be interviewed for the blog, contact me at nkem.nwankwo@lifeafterschool.co.