A boxcar? A mile of track?” The Erie had issued fi fteen different bonds over its 150 years in operation, and the value of each bond was dependent in part on where it stood in se niority compared to the others. Bruce’s research turned up a little document in which the fi nancial institutions had agreed to the sequence in which bonds were to be paid off when the assets were liquidated. With a fi x on the value of the company’s assets, liabilities, and the bond structure, they knew what each class of bonds was worth. Bondholders who hadn’t done this homework were in the dark. Ju nior bonds were selling at steeply discounted prices because they were so far down the food chain that investors doubted they would ever see their money. Bruce’s calculations suggested otherwise, and he was buying.
It’s a longer story than we have space to tell. A railroad bankruptcy is an astonishingly convoluted affair. Bruce committed himself to understanding the entirety of the pro cess better than anybody else. Then he knocked on doors, challenged the good- old- boys’ power structure that was managing the proceedings, and eventually succeeded in getting appointed by the courts to chair the committee that represented the bondholders’ interests in the bankruptcy pro cess. When the Erie came out of bankruptcy two years later, he was made chairman and CEO of the company. He hired Barney Donahue to run it. Hendry, Donahue, and the board guided the
Make It Stick ê 138
surviving corporation through the remaining lawsuits, and when the dust settled, Bruce’s bonds paid twice face value, twenty times what he paid for some of the ju nior bonds he had purchased.
The Erie Lackawanna, with all its complexity and David versus Goliath qualities, was just the kind of mess that became Bruce Hendry’s bread and butter: fi nding a company in trouble, burrowing into its assets and liabilities, reading the fi ne print on credit obligations, looking at its industry and where things are headed, understanding the litigation pro cess, and wading into it armed with a pretty good idea of how things were going to play out.
There are stories of other remarkable conquests. He took control of Kaiser Steel, staved off its liquidation, guided it out of bankruptcy as CEO, and was awarded 2 percent own-ership of the new corporation. He interceded in the failure of First RepublicBank of Texas and came out the other side with a 600 percent return on some of his fi rst investments in the company. When manufacturers stopped making railroad boxcars because they were in oversupply, Bruce bought a thousand of the last ones built, collected 20 percent on his investment from lease contracts that the railroads were bound to honor, and then sold the cars a year later when they were in short supply and fetching a handsome price. The story of Hendry’s rise is both familiar and par tic u lar; familiar in the nature of the quest and par tic u lar in the ways Bruce has “gone to school” on his ventures, building his own set of rules for what makes an investment opportunity attractive, stitching the rules into a template, and then fi nding new and different ways to apply it.
When he is asked how he accounts for his success, the lessons he cites are deceptively simple: go where the competition isn’t, dig deep, ask the right questions, see the big picture, take
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 139
risks, be honest. But these explanations aren’t very satisfying.
Behind them is a more interesting story, the one we infer from reading between the lines: how he fi gured out what knowledge he needed and how he then went after it; how early setbacks helped seed the skills of shrewder judgment; and how he developed a nose for value where others can only smell trouble. His gift for detecting value seems uncanny. His stories bring to mind the kid who, waking up on his fourth birthday to fi nd a big pile of manure in the yard, dances around it crying, “I’m pretty sure there’s a pony in there somewhere!”
All people are different, a truism we quickly discern as children, comparing ourselves to siblings. It’s evident in grade school, on the sports fi eld, in the boardroom. Even if we shared Bruce Hendry’s desire and determination, even if we took his pointers to heart, how many of us would learn the art of knowing which pile had a pony in it? As the story of Bruce makes clear, some learning differences matter more than others. But which differences? That’s what we’ll explore in the rest of this chapter.
One difference that appears to matter a lot is how you see yourself and your abilities.
As the maxim goes, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t , you’re right.” The work of Carol Dweck, described in Chapter 7, goes a long way toward validating this sentiment. So does a Fortune article of a few years ago that tells of a seeming contradiction, the stories of people with dyslexia who have become high achievers in business and other fi elds despite their learning disabilities. Richard Branson, of Virgin Rec ords and Virgin Atlantic Airways, quit school at sixteen to start and run businesses now worth billions; Diane Swonk is one of the top economic forecasters in the United States; Craig
Make It Stick ê 140
McCaw is a pioneer of the cellular phone industry; Paul Orfalea founded Kinko’s. These achievers and others, when asked, told their stories of overcoming adversity. All had trouble in school and with the accepted methods of learning, most were mislabeled low IQ, some
were held back or shunted into
classes for the mentally retarded, and nearly all were supported by parents, tutors, and mentors who believed in them.
Branson recalled, “At some point, I think I decided that being dyslexic was better than being stupid.” There, in a phrase, Branson’s personal narrative of exceptionalism.3
The stories we create to understand ourselves become the narratives of our lives, explaining the accidents and choices that have brought us where we are: what I’m good at, what I care about most, and where I’m headed. If you’re among the last kids standing on the sidelines as the softball teams are chosen up, the way you understand your place in the world likely changes a little, shaping your sense of ability and the subsequent paths you take.
What you tell yourself about your ability plays a part in shaping the ways you learn and perform– how hard you apply yourself, for example, or your tolerance for risk- taking and your willingness to persevere in the face of diffi culty. But differences in skills, and your ability to convert new knowledge into building blocks for further learning, also shape your routes to success. Your fi nesse at softball, for example, depends on a constellation of different skills, like your ability to hit the ball, run the bases, and fi eld and throw the ball. Moreover, skill on the playing fi eld is not a prerequisite for becoming a star in the sport in a different capacity. Many of the best managers and coaches in pro sports were mediocre or poor players but happen to be exceptional students of their games. Although Tony LaRussa’s career as a baseball player was short and un-distinguished, he went on to manage ball teams with remark-
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 141
able success. When he retired, having chalked up six American and National League championships and three World Series titles, he was hailed as one of the greatest managers of all time.
Each of us has a large basket of resources in the form of aptitudes, prior knowledge, intelligence, interests, and sense of personal empowerment that shape how we learn and how we overcome our shortcomings. Some of these differences matter a lot— for example, our ability to abstract underlying principles from new experiences and to convert new knowledge into mental structures. Other differences we may think count for a lot, for example having a verbal or visual learning style, actually don’t.
On any list of differences that matter most for learning, the level of language fl uency and reading ability will be at or near the top. While some kinds of diffi culties that require increased cognitive effort can strengthen learning, not all diffi culties we face have that effect. If the additional effort required to overcome the defi cit does not contribute to more robust learning, it’s not desirable. An example is the poor reader who cannot hold onto the thread of a text while deciphering individual words in a sentence. This is the case with dyslexia, and while dyslexia is not the only cause of reading diffi culties, it is one of the most common, estimated to affect some 15 percent of the population. It results from anomalous neural development during pregnancy that interferes with the ability to read by disrupting the brain’s capacity to link letters to the sounds they make, which is essential for word recognition. People don’t get over dyslexia, but with help they can learn to work with and around the problems it poses. The most successful programs emphasize practice at manipulating phonemes,
Make It Stick ê 142
building vocabulary, increasing comprehension, and improving fl uency of reading. Neurologists and psychologists emphasize the importance of diagnosing dyslexia early and working with children before the third grade while the brain is still quite plastic and potentially more malleable, enabling the re-routing of neural circuits.
Dyslexia is far more common among prison inmates than the general population, as a result of a series of bad turns that often begin when children who can’t read fall into a pattern of failure in school and develop low self- esteem. Some of them turn to bullying or other forms of antisocial behavior to compensate, and this strategy, if left unaddressed, can escalate into criminality.
While it is diffi cult for learners with dyslexia to gain essential reading skills and this disadvantage can create a constellation of other learning diffi culties, the high achievers interviewed for the Fortune article argue that some people with dyslexia seem to possess, or to develop, a greater capacity for creativity and problem solving, whether as a result of their neural wiring or the necessity they face to fi nd ways to compensate for their disability. To succeed, many of those interviewed reported that they had to learn at an early age how to grasp the big picture rather than struggling to decipher the component parts, how to think outside the box, how to act strategically, and how to manage risk taking— skills of necessity that, once learned, gave them a decided leg up later in their careers. Some of these skills may indeed have a neurological basis. Experiments by Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that individuals with dyslexia do poorly at interpreting information in their visual fi eld of focus when compared to those without dyslexia. However, they signifi cantly outperform others in their ability to interpret information from their peripheral vision,
Get Beyond Learning Styles ê 143
suggesting that a superior ability to grasp the big picture might have its origins in the brain’s synaptic wiring.4
There’s an enormous body of literature on dyslexia, which we won’t delve into here beyond acknowledging that some neurological differences can count for a lot in how we learn, and for some subset of these individuals, a combination of high motivation, focused and sustained personal support, and compensating skills or “intelligences” have enabled them to thrive.
Belief in the learning styles credo is pervasive. Assessing students’ learning styles has been recommended at all levels of education, and teachers are urged to offer classroom material in many different ways so that each student can take it in the way he or she is best equipped to learn it. Learning styles theory has taken root in management development, as well as in vocational and professional settings, including the training of military pi lots, health care workers, municipal police, and beyond. A report on a 2004 survey conducted for Britain’s Learning and Skills Research Centre compares more than seventy distinct learning styles theories currently being offered in the marketplace, each with its companion assessment instruments to diagnose a person’s par tic u lar style. The report’s authors characterize the purveyors of these instruments as an industry bedev iled by vested interests that tout “a bedlam of contradictory claims” and express concerns about the temptation to classify, label, and ste reo type individuals. The authors relate an incident at a conference where a student who had completed an assessment instrument reported back: “I learned that I was a low auditory, kinesthetic learner. So there’s no point in me reading a book or listening to anyone for more than a few minutes.”5 The wrongheadedness of this
Make It Stick ê 144
conclusion is manifold. It’s not supported by science, and it instills a corrosive, misguided sense of diminished potential.
Notwithstanding the sheer number and variety of learning styles models, if you narrow the fi eld to those that are most widely accepted you still fail to fi nd a consistent theoretical pattern. An approach called VARK, advocated by Neil Fleming, differentiates people according to whether they prefer to learn through experiences that are primarily visual, auditory, reading, or kinesthetic (i.e., moving, touching, and active exploration). According to Fleming, VARK describes only one aspect of a person’s learning style, which in its entirety consists of eigh teen different dimensions, including preferences in temperature, light, food intake, biorhythms, and working with others versus working alone.
Other learning styles theories and materials are based on rather different dimensions. One commonly used inventory, based on the work of Kenneth Dunn and Rita Dunn, assesses six different aspects of an individual’s learning style: environmental, emotional, so cio log i cal, perceptual, physiological, and psychological. Still other models assess styles along such dimensions as these:
• Concrete versus abstract styles of perceiving
• Active experimentation versus refl ective observation modes of pro cessing
• Random versus sequential styles of or ga niz ing The Honey and Mumford Learning Styles Questionnaire, which is pop u lar in managerial settings, helps employees determine whether their styles are predominantly “activist,” “refl ector,” “theorist,” or “pragmatist” and to improve in the areas where they score low so as to become more versatile learners.
The simple fact that different theories embrace such wildly discrepant dimensions gives cause for concern about their
