Why Continuing Education is essential?

When Burton B.Goldstein, chairman of information America started the company, one of his board members told him: "If you are still in business three years from now, you'll be in a different business." Goldstein says that observation has turned out to be true. "You have to be comfortable with the fact that you are on a road, a learning curve and you are going to learn stuff and you are going to change."

Continuing education is really an extension of the process that brought about the entrepreneurial venture in the first place. That first vision may be 20/20, but it is more likely that the first vision is only a rough approximation or the 'shape of the answer', as author Horace Freeland Judson puts it.

Continuing education is essential because of changing technology. A group of managers recently told me that the technological competence of the average college graduate today will be obsolete within three years or less. What they said is true in most fields because of the pervasive impact of the information revolution. If you don't keep on learning, somebody else will, and put you out of business.

Continuing education is essential because the target audience is changing. No creative activity is more audience-driven than entrepreneurship. If people do not buy the new product or patronize the new store or join the new organization, the venture dies. The target may be a moving one or a fickle one. Tastes may change. People may move physically. So, the entrepreneur must keep on learning about the target audience.

Still another similarity: the ability to do mundane tasks well. What separates entrepreneurial activity from other creative acts is its emphasis on the practical. Entrepreneurial activity is a creative act, and, as such, is cerebral. It may even grow out of pure research. But entrepreneurs must do the thousand-and-one tasks involved in transforming an insight into something tangible.
Xavier Roberts of Cabbage Patch fame told me that people continually approach him with ideas they believe will make a fortune. "I don't need more ideas," he said. "I need people who can implement ideas." He knows that from experience, Robert was selling his loveably ugly little creatures at flea markets and financing his business on credit cards long before the idea became a national craze.

"Think small," an entrepreneur by the name of Fred P.Burke once told me, "Many people who have these grand visions never can take their eyes from the sky and put them down to the little-bitty takes that have to be done right here, right now, this minute."


Extracted from the Lessons From Successful Entrepreneurs by Dr. Gene Griessman
Source: SME & Entrepreneurship Magazine, April 2009