Teach Your Children Well

I am reading Charles Handy's Beyond Certainty. In the chapter, Teach your children well, Handy summarise a study done on the education and development of Arab executives where nearly 200 executives were identified as notably successful and interviewed at length. The results is universal.

The top factors in order of importance:
1. Good education - 91% of executives had a degree or a diploma
2. Exposure to early role models - what the father does is always the best predictor of what the son will do.
3. Early responsibility - little jobs and bits of responsibility in one's youth help to build self-confidence, the willingness to make decisions and to stand the consequences which some people learn too late in life.
4. Ethics and Values - hard work and integrity, loyalty and honesty.
5. Self-development - an active inquiring mind, the urge to seek out opportunities for learning or for study, push oneself into new situations or risk mistakes, suffer rebukes in search fo experience.
6. Training - nine days per executive per year
7. Problem-solving culture

Success starts young...