Harvard Business School professor Reza Satchu says every entrepreneur needs to learn judgement. He appeared on The Big Idea with Elizabeth Gore podcast on November 20.
In addition to serving as a senior lecturer for his course the Founder Mindset, Satchu is the founder of several ventures, including supply chain software firm SupplierMarket and NEXT Canada, a philanthropy focused on entrepreneurship.
He believes that in terms of education around entrepreneurship, the current school system is off the mark. In the age of AI when jobs are going to be changed and replaced, he said, some common skills that are taught, like memorization and observation, will become irrelevant.
Judgement, on the other hand, will be increasingly crucial.
“The reason entrepreneurship is so important, to your point, is because it forces a student to stop being reactive, or stop pretending they’re the person to actually being the person making these decisions,” he tells Gore.
He rejects the common practice in higher education of doing everything to make students comfortable. Instead, he believes in doing the opposite, as discussed in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind. He thinks students should be pushed to get uncomfortable.
“We force them to express their opinions in a transparent way,” Satchu said. “We force them to make decisions that are consequential without having all the information. Ultimately it’s safe because you’re in a classroom, but it forces them to seek risk.”
Satchu said that when asked about risk, many of his students say that they want to avoid it. That’s what needs to change.
“Risk is where the return is,” he said. “I try to create environments where there’s real risk where my students have to make decisions.”
Still, he clarified that entrepreneurs shouldn’t jump into situations blindly. Entrepreneurs don’t just take any risk. They should be taking calculated risk, he said.
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Ava Levinson
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