What has always amazed me about business leaders is just how many of them don’t practice the strategies that most students learn in business school. I can’t count the number of times I’ve found myself saying aloud:

“How did you possibly get to this point doing what you’re doing?!” 

I’ve worked with countless companies with no job descriptions, no HR policies, no forecasts or budgets, no workable accounting systems (including a couple who literally track their accounts with pencil and paper), no job duty checks and balances, no formal onboarding or termination processes, no formal purchase agreements or customer invoices, no digital backups, and many more deficiencies. The existence of just one of these deficiencies alone is enough to make most outside consultants shudder. Sound impossible? It’s not.

Years ago, a good friend of mine named Andrew was at a career junction and contemplated pursing an MBA. After much deliberation, he ultimately decided not to and instead went to work for a start-up. The hiring manager at the start-up bluntly declared in the interview: “What we’re doing here has never been done before and what you would have learned from MBA doesn’t really apply. If you had gotten an MBA, we probably wouldn’t have even looked at hiring you.”

What kind of company rep says this? Did this start-up feel they were so different that had a super bright like Andrew been formally educated, he would’ve been a poor fit for the business? On the contrary, the start-up wanted to engage with people who were willing to innovate and push forward for what they believed in, not let established norms and practices get in the way. The common word hiring managers and founders at start-ups often use for the people they’re looking for – “scrappy”.

When I work with companies, there are almost always people there who greet me like I’m their therapist and exclaim, “you’ve probably never seen anything as messed up as this, right?” They commonly think their company is dysfunctional unlike anywhere else and that all these other companies out there are doing things right. But I tell them that every business has its problems. Businesses are made up of people, products, and processes and no company I’ve ever worked with in my career has ever gotten them all right, all the time. I’ve had the good fortune of working with businesses of all sizes, on five continents, and across dozens of industries and would attest that many companies have at least some degree of them wrong all the time. Dysfunction doesn’t surprise me anymore.

When the brain makes decisions, it does so by quickly analyzing data available at that moment, including past experiences and future conjectures. A key challenge of the decision-making process is how much reliance tends to be put on past personal experiences, or even the experiences of believable or trustworthy people, as a key data point for the future.

The same rationale can exist from the perspective of business professionals. Large corporates I’ve worked with are full of talented people, many with impressive résumés. Small and mid-sized businesses I’ve worked with also have very talented people though the breadth of experience may be more limited. Leaders or consultants review or recall what worked at other companies and borrow from their lessons. Often, having expertise means becoming well-versed in solutions to business challenges…challenges that person once faced.

My experience isn’t so dissimilar. When I go into a company and assess the problems there, my brain analyzes what I see and hear again what I’ve seen and heard in the past. An experience will get illuminated any my brain will essentially communicate: “This problem is just like X company’s problem. Using that experience is a good place to start.”

Herein lies the problem: expertise in solving historical issues doesn’t always equate to expertise in identifying and solving future challenges. The experiences and skills that are so valuable for growing businesses and building wealth, can be the same experiences and skills that make businesses and people confident yet complacent and blind-sided by disruption. There’s no shortage of giant companies or business leaders who once dominated their industries, following tried-and-true practices of the past, but who are now thought of, nostalgically, as examples of what not to do.