Logic for Leadership: Why Executives Should Study Math (Part 1)
People make many arguments about the relative merits of a liberal arts education versus a business background for future enterprise leaders. These conversations, however, are about the overarching education of young adults; I venture that no one would claim that someone could not benefit from a combination of both.*
When thinking about the most useful fields of study for the business leaders of tomorrow — or even what you, as a current executive, might pursue in your spare time — math should be a formidable contender. In this first section of a three-part series, we will explore why math is underappreciated, feared, and just taught plain wrong. In the next sections, we will determine what math has to offer and why the skills it imbues are particularly important for enterprise leaders and strategic thinkers.
Why does everyone hate math?
Many business students take a variety of ‘liberal arts’ classes, and most have to fulfill basic distribution requirements. Yet, across both business and liberal arts students, there is a prevalent fear of taking advanced mathematics classes. Often, students will locate the easiest form of calculus, ideally something that heavily overlaps with what they learned in high school, to fulfill the requirement and move on. They may go on to take elective English classes, history, or science, but avoid math like the plague.
This is what many in the field call math anxiety, or the irrational fear of math instilled from a young age by our educational system. Math anxiety manifests as an almost paralysis around quantitative analysis, wherein students think that they are fundamentally incapable of performing well.
There’s little-to-no parallel for math anxiety in other fields. I challenge you to find someone who thinks they are incapable of doing well in an English class. They may say it’s “not their thing,” or that they’re better at other subjects, but no other field incites the same kind of visceral response that math does.
Professors like Jim Henle of Smith College believe that this is due to the way math is taught from a young age. From their first days of addition, students are told that there is a right answer and a wrong answer — yet, even the most fundamental answers cannot be memorized for rote recitation, unlike in the natural sciences. They attempt to boil a process and structure into a set of truths, but the discipline doesn’t fit the mold.
How we teach math is wrong
If you were a chemistry teacher and a student stated that water is comprised of two oxygens and a hydrogen (rather than two hydrogens and an oxygen, ergo H2O), how would you respond? Likely, you would correct the student in a gentle way, while ensuring that they have memorized this fact moving forward.
On the converse, what if you were a math teacher with a student who believed that 2 + 2 = 5? Hopefully not you, dear reader, but many math teachers would respond with a stern negative and perhaps an example of adding two sets of two apples.
Many people don’t see what’s wrong in this example, but there are two key issues at play: (1) the sternness of the response and (2) the emphasis on correction rather than exploration.
As someone who has a natural propensity for math and who has gotten frustrated with others for not grasping concepts immediately, I truly believe that there is a prevalence within math teaching of taking for granted that elements must be learned. This is deeply sad because it shames students, particularly young ones, into thinking that because they did are not progressing at others’ expectations, they are fundamentally incapable of succeeding. I believe this is the primary cause of the anxiety many people feel, but it does not get to the root of why some people do seem to not grasp concepts even after years of school.
The reason people can take years of calculus and not understand the basic concepts, or feel stumped by problems that they once learned to rattle off in exams, is that mathematics is simply not meant to be memorized but it is often taught in this way. In fact, while 2 + 2 = 4 technically follows the rules dictating mathematics, higher level math diverges in schools of thought and systems of logic.** The purpose of mathematics isn’t to learn the rules, memorizing truisms and formulas, but to teach a system of discovery. Unlike many other disciplines, math is a circular system that you can, with enough inquiry, find answers within without necessary outside help (e.g., we know water is H2O from experimentation, but we can know 2 + 2 = 4 from exploration).
I would challenge the teacher in our example to ask the student to explain how they can add 2 + 2 together and get 5, allowing the student to fully grasp why the central logic does not hold with an answer of ‘5.’ For, while 2 + 2 is used as the archetypal example, there is no part of math that merits memorization except as useful in speed of processing (e.g., learning your times tables). After all, in math, you will likely never see the same problem twice!
In a senior-year seminar surrounded by majors and post-bacs, we explored why so many of our peers shy away from the subject. Since many in the class went on to pursue Masters and PhDs in the field, the professor was preparing them to teach students of the future. For this professor, math is not about numbers but about pathways, and how we can help future students learn those ways of thinking. Hopefully, as more students like those in the classroom end up in teaching roles, fewer students will grow up thinking they “just can’t do math.”
So — why does this matter? We may need to rejig the pedagogy of mathematics at the primary and even university level, but how does this apply to you? In part 2, we will explore what this new vision of math truly has to offer. Keep on reading.
*Many institutions are paring down their offerings based on what they consider economically valuable to the workers of tomorrow. This is deeply sad, but not the focus of our discussion today.
**A pivotal example of mathematics diverging into different logical systems arises from the continuum hypothesis, which is the debate over whether there can be multiple kinds or levels of infinity. This has sizeable (pun intended) ramifications for numerous areas of mathematics.
