Rookie Smarts - Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work

INTRODUCTION

When is not knowing more valuable than knowing?

Why are you often at your best when you are new to an undertaking, doing something for the first time?

I’ve often wondered about these questions, too. At the age of twenty-four, just a year out of business school, I was thrown into a management role, due more to circumstances than to capabilities. I was working at Oracle, at the time still a young, maverick software company that was doubling in size each year. After a year of teaching Oracle software to new recruits, I was put in charge of company-wide training and charged with building a new corporate university—a task about which I knew absolutely nothing. The job felt more than a few sizes too big for me. Nevertheless, it seemed ...