BGA’s Business Impact magazine: Issue 3, 2024 | Volume 21

interview while speaking at the Newton Research & Innovation Week in March. For Edmondson, author of the Financial Times award-winning book The Right Kind of Wrong , such people learn valuable information with each failure, but perhaps most importantly, they practise not giving up. Getting gritty Whether we call the ensuing ability acquired resilience, perseverance or grit, this has been one of the most overlooked skills in management and leadership studies until very recently. Getting your child a tutor for a subject they are already good at teaches them that to truly shine, they cannot rely solely on natural ability. They also need to learn how to fail well; a failure in a chosen area is just a milestone on the path to success, not necessarily a signal to change course. Eventually, they will encounter a situation where their natural aptitudes are no longer enough. For example, before I started my master’s at Oxford, I had always been an A-/B+ student with little effort. Trying to prove that, with some hard work, I could have made it to the top of the class hadn’t seemed worth it before. This approach, however, meant that I wasn’t honing my perseverance skills. Predictably, as soon as I met my new Oxford classmates, imposter syndrome ran rampant. Of course, I should have read Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath, in which he discusses how the relative disadvantage of transitioning from the top of a high school class to being surrounded by equally smart or even smarter peers can easily lead to feelings of inadequacy. It wasn’t until years later that my eyes were opened. As I was finishing my DPhil, a colleague at the sociology department, Melinda Mills, announced the opening of the new multi-million Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science that combines a social scientific and genetic approach to the study of behavioural outcomes. She told us that she had applied for funding 10 times before securing it. She had been rejected nine times yet kept submitting her bid. Clearly, she never took the rejections received as an objective indicator that her project wasn’t good enough. Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania professor and winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, known as the ‘genius grant’, argued in her 2016 bestseller Grit that it is the combination of passion and perseverance that explains why some succeed

“Grit is about maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity and plateaus in progress”

and others fail. Grit is about maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity and plateaus in progress. This not only makes sense, but was also fact-checked by London Business School professor Alex Edmans in May Contain Lies . Edmans reminded us that the best predictor of success is the interaction between talent, ability and aptitude on the one hand, and grit, perseverance and resilience on the other. Yet our education systems don’t teach grit. In an era where the world is transforming faster than ever, the need for resilience has never been more critical.

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