Experience

It is now a week into school and I suspect there are a lot of freshman students who are a bit sleep deprived as they adjust to the new experience. Regarding experience, I have been most intrigued the last few days concerning our presidential candidates, which makes me wonder how important experience really is to performance.


In some cases, experience is actually a negative. The population of world class gymnasts is typically made up of teenagers – often very young ones. The two best two female gymnasts in the just completed Olympic Games were 16 and 18. Once the skills are learned, experience can be a negative because what you learn from experience is how easy it is to make mistakes (not to mention the body is less nimble).


In some cases, experience can predispose people to be blind to new ways of thinking about things. Entrepreneurs are good at thinking outside the box—where current knowledge is of little use. Some entrepreneurs are very good at doing this over and over. I suppose their experience is helpful, but there have been many successful entrepreneurs who were inexperienced (e.g., Michael Dell).


In some cases, the advantage of experience is short-lived. Consider three restaurant servers: one with six days experience, one with 6 months, and one with 6 years. Certainly, the one with 6 days is going to be at a disadvantage, but is the one with 6 years necessarily that much better than the one with 6 months (all other things being equal)? Sharp people can easily pick up the skills needed to be a good server – though some maturation and life experience will certainly give someone better tools to take on unusual situations.


How about CEOs? Well, it would seem that experience is crucial as many of them are recycled into new jobs as struggling companies attempt turnarounds. But it is undetermined how well these experienced executives have fared – often they seem to steer the ship right over the edge based on the scores of bonehead moves made by these experienced leaders.

Presidents are equally hard to figure. Are Barack Obama and now Sarah Palin qualified to be president of the United States? It seems that there are a number of things that might be considered appropriate qualifications.





First, knowledge. Many people want their president to be intelligent and have broad knowledge. Ronald Reagan, arguably one of the better presidents, was dubbed an “amiable dunce.” As this article in 2004 notes, there have been plenty of supposedly brilliant presidents (Hoover, Carter, Wilson) who have been failures as presidents and “dumb” ones (Reagan and Truman) who were not.


Second, accomplishments. Often people are promoted based on their accomplishments in any number of specialist fields (a great salesperson or a legislator) but this does not easily translate to executive work. Perhaps the biggest accomplishments of the Presidential and V.P. candidates are that they have gotten themselves elected; getting nominated as Obama and McCain have done is an even bigger accomplishment.

Finally, experience. An objective expert on presidents, Richard Reeves, recently noted that there is no way to prepare to be president because the issues that they will face are mostly unknowable or at least uncertain. Although some decisions are strategic, others are reactive. I suspect that while experience is not unimportant it is also overrated (as William Kristol from the NY Times asserts). Says Clive Crook for Financial Times, "No training or experience can prepare you for the presidency. On any given issue, the president is surrounded by specialists who know infinitely more about the subject than he [or she] does. The ability to weigh the quality of that advice, and then act on it, is what matters." In other words, experience can easily be trumped by effort and talent.


So freshmen: don’t bewail your lack of experience as it offers you some advantages . . . but don’t substitute it for hubris, which your professors can detect easily.