As I was walking, my cell phone rang.   I looked and saw it was my younger son. “Yeah, that’s good” I reminded myself.  “He’s in the ‘States.’ ” My son has lived throughout the world for the past 15 years as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. State Department.  He’s a diplomat.  As a parent, it’s been fine, but Pakistan was a concern.   However, this call was from Washington.   I knew he had won a Lawrence Eagleburger Scholarship.    Eagleburger was the only career diplomat to become Secretary of State.  The scholarship was established in his honor.   With it, an officer could do whatever he wanted … for a year.

My son chose to join the Boston Consulting Group.  The incoming call was to tell me about meeting his assigned team.   The team had four other members ages 30-60.  All had advanced degrees in different specialties.    BCG had assigned the group a client that was an international financial firm wanting to reorganize its business.  My son was designated as Diplomat in Residence.   The call was really to tell me how stunned he was by the group’s diversity of backgrounds.   I wasn’t.   My son then quoted me Daniel Kunneman’s comment as explanation, “What YOU see is NOT all there is.”  It’s a variation of the Jewish saying, “We see the world not as it is but as we are.”

I had encountered that concept 35 years earlier at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette.  DLJ, as it was known, was the first investment firm to go public in 1972.  It was formed by three Harvard Business School classmates to do business exclusively with institutional investors.  Dick Jenrette came to our Boston office in 1981.  He talked about the importance of having “a ladder” of people.  Dick wanted employees from all different ages and backgrounds.   The idea would become a concept in behavioral economics. 

Most of us have a proclivity to surround ourselves with people who share our thinking.   In the world of Behavioral Economics it’s referred to as confirmation bias.  As the name suggests, it is a tendency to surround ourselves with people who share the same beliefs which reinforces our own preexisting beliefs.   As my son then went on, “What BCG is doing is creating the opposite of group think.”

This approach is invaluable in a business start up.  It is generally not what you get when an entrepreneur steps down from running his business and a professional manager takes over.  That’s a sign of a mature business.  Interestingly, the vast majority of entrepreneurs never finish college.   Ironically, they are often replaced by people with MBAs.   Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are but two examples.   Having people of different interests, backgrounds and ethnicity is crucial in building a business.  No one person has the knowledge for all things that a new business will encounter.   A case in point is Apple Computer.  We all know about the technology skill of Steve Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak.  But how did they start their retail stores?   No one in technology had ever done that … before or since.   But what could Jobs know about creating a “brand” let alone in retailing?  After all, the product was in technology.

Jobs brought in Mickey Drexler, the man who made Gap into an iconic retail brand.   Drexler probably knew as much about technology as Jobs did about retailing.  But that’s the point of having a team.   

-Francis Patrick Boland