Learning options will indeed mushroom for business students and leaders, but it will take prudence and shrewdness to find and utilize the best option.
Interpretation
Business leaders must be discerning in choosing from the many learning opportunities available to them.
Warren Bennis emphasizes the importance of being cautious and insightful when navigating the abundant learning options available to business students and leaders. While the variety of choices can foster growth, it requires wisdom and strategic thinking to identify and leverage the most beneficial opportunities that will enhance one's skills and knowledge in a professional context.
In practice
During a conference on business education, this quote could inspire students to be selective in their learning paths.
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.
Specialized management courses are useful but should come well after the complexity of management and business are understood.
You need people who can walk their companies into the future rather than back them into the future.
Leaders should always expect the very best of those around them. They know that people can change and grow.
Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.
I always tell students that you've got to be practical. You do not need a dream. You need a purpose, something you can wake up to in the morning when the dream is dissipated.
So far, we do not seem appalled at the prospect of exactly the same kind of education being applied to all the school children from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but there is an uneasiness in the air, a realization that the individual is growing less easy to find; an idea, perhaps, of what standardization might become when the units are not machines, but human beings.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
Human intelligence is richer and more dynamic than we have been led to believe by formal academic education.
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
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