Different people bloom at different times of life
Being average isn’t a bad thing at all as Indra Nooyi has shown. The recently appointed CEO of PepsiCo has been described by her teachers and batchmates from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta as having being an average student. To be considered average in academics is seen as a sign of an average life ahead. Parents spend years drilling into their children’s head to excel and expect them to do so in academics as that is seen as the ticket to a better future. So why should an institute like IIMC be proud of an average student like Nooyi? Does this mean that one need not excel at studies and still hope to occupy the CEO’s chair? History is replete with examples of people who failed or were average students, but not only were they successful later in life, some even changed the course of history. Napoleon, for instance, finished near the bottom of his class at military school yet is considered to be one of the most brilliant military strategists. Albert Einstein did poorly in elementary school and even failed his first entrance exam at the Zurich Polytechnic. Human beings change and different people blossom at different stages of life. And that is why an average student like Nooyi can bloom into an extremely successful professional. By putting too much emphasis on just brilliant academic performance while recruiting, companies can lose out on the real achievers. A publishing house may have never hired William Faulkner — he had failed to graduate from high school as he did not have enough credits. It’s an altogether different matter that he went on to win the Nobel prize for literature. Or for that matter George Washington would not have been considered presentable in today’s marks-obsessed world as he had poor grammar skills and did not do too well academically. Thomas Edison’s fate would have been well and truly sealed had emphasis been put on the fact that he was thrown out of school when he was 12 years old because he was thought to be dumb and bad at mathematics. The bottomline is that anyone can be successful — even those who were just average students. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Academic performance needed for job success Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} It’s become fashionable to downplay the role of academic achievement while considering a person’s success in later life. And of course among the usual suspects the name of Einstein is always trotted out first in the mistaken belief that he failed in mathematics or school. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, even during childhood Einstein showed a brilliant curio-sity about nature and an ability to understand difficult mathematical concepts. In fact, by the time he was 12, he had already taught himself Euclidian geometry and begun to study calculus. The reason he didn’t complete school in the first instance is only because he withdrew halfway through due to family reasons and finished it the following year. However, school bored him and he often skipped classes. This often happens to extraordinarily brilliant people or, as in the case of Einstein, born geniuses. The merits or demerits of the educational system have nothing to do with it. The latest example which is being paraded now is Indra Nooyi, the newly appointed CEO of PepsiCo. It’s true she was an average performer in her baccalaureate years and later in IIM too but it’s also true that being just out of college she was the youngest in her class of 122 students, whereas most of her batchmates had an edge over her by having completed their engineering degrees. In any case, whether extracurricular activities took a toll on her studies or the fact that her strength lay in leadership qualities and persuasive skills instead or that she was intellectually way ahead of her peers, we’re still only talking about yet another exception to the general rule here. The rule, which any statistical study can easily demonstrate, is that there exists an extremely strong correlation between better academic performance and better placements. Indeed the proof is right there in the IIM campus itself where headhunters representing global corporate interests routinely descend each year in order to snap up the best performing students for astronomical sums. Need we say more?
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