No Undergrad.

This is not a story of complaint...but one brought by the desire and hope for more leaders who perceive and pursue talent differently.

I recently was turned down for a potential position because the young HR personnel could not understand one simple truth. No, I do not have an undergrad. But I do have an MBA. She looked at me inquisitively and kept repeating the same question. “But you don’t have an undergrad?” With nearly 15 years of experience and having worked on the development of nearly 15 hotels and over 40 restaurants, I have to admit I was so flummoxed that this was even a question. But that wasn’t it, this HR personnel of a very large restaurant chain in the southeast (you may know them) wanted me to send in my college transcripts as well.

American Business leaders - this is to you my friends. We are missing the point!

I was 20 years old, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life and I left college before finishing. There are many reasons why this was the case and I’m sure at a time I will write more on this. However, for the time being all that you have to know is that I left college and I soon started working as a Project Manager for a construction firm. I was thrown into rooms and situations I had no business being in - I certainly didn’t have the degree but I also didn’t have the formal or informal education.

But I had a whole lot to prove. I was extremely hungry to show each and every person I came in contact with that my decision to leave college would not be my downfall and to diminish my own voice of insecurity that echoed feelings of inadequacy. Just 6 months into working for this construction company I was handed a large restaurant build-out that at the end of the project would amount to a construction budget of $4.5 million. This was a first for me for several reasons but you see I had grown up on “fancy” dinners like the occasional Sunday Church’s Chicken or the ever-so-seldom dinner at Oliver Garden. I knew nothing about fancy meals or fancy restaurants where you ordered from the appetizer menu and I certainly had never known money even close to this lump sum.

The project began and was filled with trials and issues of all sorts. For example, the beautiful custom steel window system that the owner so deeply desired was well out of their price range - so we turned multiple stones and talked to multiple custom welders - we found ourselves a small father and sons trio in a small town an hour outside of our location who with my custom drawings and many rounds of prototypes built us a a fully customized steel window system. Another example, we ere just one day away from inspection and all the door hardware had arrived but did not fit the beautiful custom wood doors we made. Off I went to the local (not so local considering the hour drive it took me to get there) hardware store and rummaged through boxes of door hardware while on multiple calls with the city trying to garner as much time as possible for us to still make our inspection. And lastly, the example of stepping in when the interior designer was MIA and the owner wanted to redesign the entire restroom set up while your project manager was busy doing coke in the bathroom.

Will-power and determination are not something that are easily checked on an application. They are seldom read in a person through an online interview. But I have known many a person such as this that have overcome the “lack” of having credentials to run circles around several leaders. My own mom, after homeschooling six kids without a college education, went on to graduate with her under-grad and her Masters in her late 40s and early 50s - and has now gone on to run a large non-profit in Ethiopia that is changing the lives of multitudes daily. My amazing friend Steven has partnered with brands as big as Tommy Johns, Stetson, Coca-Cola and more for some of their largest photography campaigns. My friend Christine has launched multiple retail stores across the U.S. with great success and accolades (including Condé Nast Traveler a Garden & Gun). My assistant, Madi was a nursing major who has gone on to lead interior design for several high net worth individuals and independent boutique hospitality projects across the US. All of these individuals may not have been able to check a box of “prerequisites” for the jobs they have held and continue to hold and yet they are accompanied by several others that are “lacking” in this way: Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Branson, John D. Rockefeller, Michael Dell, Henry Ford…the list goes on.

My hope is that we are changing - my hope is that with all of our conversations on “empathy” and “story” we are growing in our realization that humans are far greater than a piece of paper or even the list that is created on that piece of paper. People require thought and conversation to truly get to know or even begin to know. And as much as this may sound like an admonishment of Corporate America - it is more than that, it is a reminder that often times the road untraveled is well worth it but will still often be misunderstood by traditionalists and naysayers.