Is a conventional degree to be more preferred than an attitude that makes one a champion? | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    It's interesting in the business (aggregating news/information) things sometimes just come together when you are not expecting it to happen. Wednesday (7-24-14) was one of those days. But follow us here, because to get the message you have to connect the dots.

    First, we came across this article put out by the anti-McCrory left-wing NC Policy Watch. Sarah Ovaska "expose" an employee of the N. C. Department of Agriculture who heads up the state's Forestry Service but does not have a degree in forestry. They rant about him taking some courses on state time and at state expense to get a masters in forestry now that he has been assigned to be the Assistant Commissioner of Agriculture that oversees the Forestry Service. He has a degree in economics from UNC Chapel Hill. He's been working the NCDA since 1995. The Forest Service was moved to NCDA by the Legislature in 2011.

    Policy Watch reports that the man is one of some 260 state employee who participated last year a program that promotes state employees getting continuing education. That number is in itself very deceptive because there are many more state employees, particularly those in the university system, who take courses in addition to their regular work schedule.

    So what you have is an apparently high performing state employee who was picked to oversee a new program assigned to his department who is taking university classes. We'll bet he's also gone to some worships, seminars or other continuing education activities, as have most other state employees. But N. C. Policy Watch went out and found some people who are critical of what the man is doing.

    Next, we noticed this article about a motivational consultant making a presentation to a group of business people at a recent trade show. That would not have been news we thought worthy of posting, except for two things. First, it is about Michael Jordan and secondly it looks at what is involved in making organizations function better than the normal, "stuck in a rut" model many organizations—such as state government—are often operating in.

    The consultant's point was that champions have attributes that often don't seem to "fit the mold" of conventional thinking. In fact, the really high performers are round pegs in square holes according to conventional thinking. Take Bill Gates, for example. Gates is a college dropout.

    The point is: Many of the highly effective people in organizations do not possess conventional credentials that are traditionally expected, such as college degrees. Many of them learned long ago that they couldn't let an education interfere with their learning.

    Michael Jordan is apparently one of those champions. He is arguably the greatest basketball player in history and he is now highly successful in the business world because he brings a unique mindset to making money that was similar to what he brought to the basketball court.

    On the same day we received a Letter To the Editor from a man we do not know but who we understand is a former school board member in Dare County.

    His letter is a veiled attack on Mattie Lawson. Lawson is running for the N. C. House seat that represents the northern half of Beaufort County. So we've made it our business to get to know Ms. Lawson.

    The letter writer whines about whether Lawson, who lists "engineer" as one of the entries on her resume but the letter writer thinks it is something to be exposed that she does not have a baccalaureate degree from a school of engineering.

    What we have learned about Mattie Lawson is that she is a highly exceptional individual who has been eminently successful in her career in a field that put her at the cutting edge of technology (developing the Global Positioning System) for one of the world's largest and most innovative companies—Raytheon. It was Raytheon who "awarded" the title "engineer" to Lawson, not a university. Lawson, like Jordan, is a champion. She is a success. But she is by no means conventional. In fact she is running for elected office to try to change state government to make it more successful just as she did with Raytheon.

    So this got us to thinking. Why would people demean successful people who don't conform to the conventional "standards" they seek to impose on others, even as school board members on our public education system. A system that by virtually any standard of measurement is terribly ineffective.

    Now we are not blaming the former school board member-letter writer for the ineffectiveness of the public education system but rather we are suggesting that it might just be wiser for state government to seek champions rather than people stuck in a rut of conventional thinking.

    Epilog: We don't know if Mr. Bissette is a champion or not. All we know is that his boss thought him to be the one to shape-up the Forest Service. We just hope he is enough of an "outside the box thinker" that he asks the real question that needs to be asked of the Forest Service. That is: Can we get forest fires put out with a better system than the current Forest Service model. Maybe, just maybe, we don't need the Forest Service spending millions every year subsidizing private land owners and big timber companies. Don't let'em box you in Mr. Bissette.