May 21, 2020
“Students should pursue entrepreneurship because it’s fun. It’s fun because you’re just looking at a problem and saying: I’m going to solve this problem. I’m going to dream about it and hustle around it, and I’m going to build a solution for it.” -Shasidharan CSP, Global Head of Integrated Supply Chain Transformation at Lendlease
Our CEO Jack interviewing Shasi over a Zoom call
Shasi is one of Generation Entrepreneur’s industry mentors, who has had over 15 years of leadership experience at companies like Lendlease and CBRE. In his current position at Lendlease, he has managed projects worth billions of dollars across US, Australia, Asia and UK.
With Shasi’s experience and exposure across various industries, our CEO interviewed him in order to gain insight into why he thinks entrepreneurial education is important for students.
The need for emotional intelligence
“The ability to work with people and understand them is extremely important. Emotional intelligence is not going to be learned at school, it’s going to be learned through entrepreneurship.”
Using the analogy of an hourglass, Shasi explained that students start their careers at the bottom of the hourglass, with their skills and talents from learning computer science or English at school.
After a while, they reach a point where they need to completely flip, and there is a whole different skill-set for them to learn.
“Problem solving, collaborating with a team, being able to communicate a problem and analytically navigate through its solution — these are leadership skills, and students will need emotional intelligence in order to carry out these skills,” said Shasi.
Problem-solving in the real world
A key idea we teach students is that entrepreneurship begins with a problem that you care deeply about. Yet many teachers are sceptical, asking, “How does problem solving apply to the real world? How will it help my students succeed in school and in the future?”
“As students come out of school into the real world, they’ll be working for companies that deal with what we call wicked problems. The ability to solve these wicked problems is what companies of the 21st century are looking for.”
A wicked problem is one that is impossible to solve or one that has multiple different ways to be solved. Some examples would be education design, financial crises, world hunger and poverty.
According to Shasi, students who can think creatively and analytically, and can bind these skills to solve these big social and economic problems are the ones who will succeed in the future.
What Generation Entrepreneur’s programs do to students, Shasi explained, is make them ask, “Is this a simple problem? Is this a wicked problem? How do I choose which problem to solve? What kind of tradeoffs do I have to make? Where is the value in what I’m doing?”
This early exposure is crucial to students, who would otherwise have to develop these skills on-the-job and in high-pressure settings.
Shasi believes that exposing students to these skills through entrepreneurship early on will create the trigger that will guide their thinking and decision-making around social and economic problems in the future.
If you want to find out more about Generation Entrepreneur’s online entrepreneurship program for students, click here.
