Throughout this book, we're going to connect two fields, teaching and business, in order to explore the benefits of embracing a teaching mindset in a corporate environment. Simultaneously, if all goes well, by becoming a better teacher, you will learn how to enrich the lives of your audiences, and even better, the scope of your industry.

More specifically, we're going to show you how teaching practices (the stuff the best teachers use daily) can:

• Enrich approaches to selling ideas, products, and services to new (or ready to expand) customers.
• Enrich approaches to providing services to existing customers.
• Enrich approaches to making colleagues understand, demonstrate understanding of, and apply that on which they are being trained.
• Enrich approaches to developing and managing teams and individuals.

We're also going to show you how to think of and serve your customers and colleagues as modern learners – because that's exactly what they, and we, all are.

Learning (for a New) Now

The “new now” of learning is transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary. The modern learner‐practitioner, whether she is a teacher, learner, employee, seller, or buyer, has been unboxed and unbounded – invited to be combinatory and connective and to solve problems that matter. The modern learner‐practitioner has full permission and agency to think across domains, between silos, and using all available perspectives. One should plan accordingly.

There's an old, and good, justification for breaking down the artificial boundaries we place around learning: life itself. Outside of the time we spend in school, we don't really live in isolated disciplines, switching from English to math to science, and only when the bell rings. Instead, we live both between disciplines (interdisciplinarily) and across disciplines (transdisciplinarily). We blend and mix aspects of several disciplines, working with teachers and laypeople alike, in order to make progress in a given area, in order to make sense, however temporarily, of the world.

According to researchers, the term interdisciplinarity quite simply means an approach to knowledge that takes more than one discipline into consideration. Its driving force, or perhaps outcome, is a social relevance that is not always present in more disciplinary, academic work or research. In short, an interdisciplinary approach can be more stimulating for the learner because it is often more relevant to his or her direct concerns rather than some abstract, possible use in the future. Transdisciplinarity, on the other hand, has the added layer of being produced with others, especially others who exist outside of what is traditionally referred to as “the academy.” When professors partner with industry folks to explore a problem, they do so transdisciplinarily (Frodeman & Mitcham, 2007; Frodeman, 2017).

If you track such combinatory thinking, you will see that it pops up again and again like some kind of low‐key superhero, often when people are stuck and need to learn something in order to advance a project or possibility.

When working on their Shinkansen bullet train, trains that travel up to 300 kph, Japanese engineers could not figure out how to reduce the sound boom as trains entered and exited tunnels. They turned to biomimicry, or the combination of nature and engineering, to find a solution. Noting that the beaks of kingfishers allowed them to dive into water without making much of a sound, the Shinkansen engineers reshaped their trains accordingly. Once the fronts of the trains resembled the beaks of the kingfishers, the engineers reached their goal, reducing the sound (Moskvitch, 2011; JNCC, 2018).

Combinatory thinking has been used in sports as well. As an engineering student at Oregon State University, Dick Fosbury applied his knowledge of physics to his love for a track and field event: the high jump. Before Fosbury, high jumpers used a straddle jump, jumping over the bar face down. After Fosbury used applied physics to lower his center of gravity, the Fosbury Flop was born, showing athletes that a better approach involved lifting one's hips and lowering one's shoulders. He won a gold medal, breaking the Olympic record, in 1968 (Durso, 1968; The Guardian, 2018).

If you look into the careers of people as diverse as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mendel, and Eratosthenes, you will find religion mixed with philosophy and literature, botany mixed with genetics, and math mixed with geography and science. You will find, in other words, combinations leading to breakthroughs in human rights, human genetics, and geography.

Such knowledge production is not merely intuitive; it is documentable and therefore, then, repeatable. Some in the academic community have done this work with gusto, categorizing certain approaches and thinking patterns as Mode 1 and Mode 2.

Mode 1 thinking is what many of us grew up with: memorizing and performing in order to pass (through) school. Such problem‐solving is isolated from applicability, that is, the real world, but has credence in academic circles. It can be reviewed, and tested, without undue outside influence (Gibbons et al., 1994).

Mode 2 thinking often takes place outside of academic institutions; its context is provided, and defined, by its application, and its intention is pegged to a specific use. What's more, its practitioners, who are often university‐trained researchers and scholars, seek collaborative partners outside of university settings (Gibbons et al., 1994).

From Business and Teaching to Business Is Teaching

This book is our deliberate effort to highlight and then blend the many connections, parallels, and opportunities for cross‐industry learning between working in business and working at schools.

We found that the blending was easy once we began: sellers, leaders, service professionals, and trainers, similar to teachers, benefit from being heard and understood because buyers, team members, colleagues, and existing customers, like all learners, can only take meaningful and impactful action around a cause when they understand that cause and its relevance.

Let's think first about sellers. They face the same “spoiler” problem that many teachers face. In the information‐network age, anybody can access information. Buyers can quickly research what a product is and what a product does. Students can quickly learn about everything from simple geometry to the plot of Hamlet to the oscillatory dynamics and spatial patterns of a simple predator‐prey system (see Brockman, 2018). Buyers can quickly and easily comparison shop. Students can quickly and easily watch several different professors explain the same concept. When you walk in front of a customer, or a class, you're most likely addressing a group that already knows the way the story ends…and all the major plot points along the way. Behaving accordingly is a new norm.

Let's think about leaders alongside teachers, as well. There are numerous ways to organize people and resources as you seek to fulfill the mission and promise of an organization. There are numerous ways to teach well, and very few of them involve constant lecturing. Increasingly, the people being led – and taught – are aware of the many paths and ways available to organizations – and learners. And you can bet they will analyze, if not publicly question, the choices that a leader, or teacher, makes. Think of how many times you have been called to a meeting and thought, “Did we really need to have a meeting to go over this? Couldn't this have been mediated electronically?” Conversely, think of how many times you have thought, “Why didn't we handle this in person? Why was it done so impersonally?” Or, more pointedly, if you've been in a classroom lately, think about how the simple act of being able to be instantly online has changed your relationship to the material being presented and the person tasked with presenting it. Leaders and teachers alike are dealing with an empowered and connected audience.

Service professionals are facing this audience, too, speaking to them on the phone, hosting them in their offices, or in some instances, walking right into their homes. Done well, this work both resolves an existing issue and deepens an existing relationship, elevating the service professional to the status of a trusted advisor. People connect to a service professional presumably because they cannot solve the problem on their own, using either online videos or forums or the self‐service resources made available to them by a service provider. This initial research, though unsuccessful, could mean that service professionals are being greeted, as many teachers are, by customers who have developed significant bias for or against a particular solution. More than ever, service professionals, like teachers, need to be able to identify and break down pre‐existing assumptions or flat‐out incorrect assertions.

And what about trainers? For a long time in business, traditional training has mirrored the didactic practices of Darwinian models of learning (i.e., survival of the fittest) especially seen in high school and undergraduate programs. The instructor delivers the information. Some of the learners will figure out how to make it work; others will not. Some will get A's, some will get B's, some C's, and some simply will not survive. What's worse is that some will find a way to move through the process without learning what they need to learn – and then face clients or customers or real‐world dilemmas without the appropriate skills or knowledge. In a school, this outcome has deep moral consequences (TNTP, 2018); in a business, it not only has moral consequences but also unnecessarily elevates risk.

When somebody is trying to fulfill a role in a business, or teach something, therefore, they will benefit from considering ways that they can tie a product, service, or lesson to a person's context. In teaching circles, this is called “knowing the learner.” Teachers who want to use this powerful approach become specialists in something called “social‐emotional learning” practices.

As in teaching, all areas of business are moving away from information transfer and moving toward relevance (for the learner) and application (for the learner).

As a side note, and as educators at heart, we also found that the blending of teaching and business is mutually beneficial.

To sell well is to teach well; to lead well is to teach well; to train well is to teach well; to serve well is to teach well. To teach well – through sales, leadership, training, and customer service – is potentially transformative for individuals, companies, and societies. Everyone can benefit from approaching their work as if they are functioning in a high‐level, truly supportive learning environment.

Teaching is a fundamental resource for companies big, small, and in between, and is a form of business capital. In turn, the highest forms of selling, leading, serving, and training, like the highest form of teaching, add meaning and value to an exchange and can lead to an ongoing, worthwhile relationship that amplifies all involved parties.

There are two foundations for our certainty here: First, reducing asymmetry in business interactions (working toward symmetry, as a good teacher would) is the right thing to do. It's a behavior that most people can practice often, whether they are selling homes to one another, leading change in an organization, pouring one another a cup of coffee, or sending someone an email. It's human decency in action.

Second, in our networked age, approaching these areas of business as teaching, or aspiring to perform like a teacher, will provide a direct advantage to the seller, leader, trainer, and service professional because it will allow him or her to serve the audience in ways that will be resonant and lasting.

In an interview we conducted with him, Joshua Cooper Ramo, a sage of the networked era, explained the affordances and limitations of our current, networked situation.

We can and should be discerning about what we are connected to, but the great goal in education today is to prepare and encourage kids to be connected to all kinds of things, to be as cross‐disciplinary as they possibly can be, and to understand that every object in their lives, whether it's a job or their health or some idea, takes its value from what it's connected to. And that's an amazingly exciting way to think about education. It removes the kind of top‐down role of the teacher because, obviously, everybody's connected differently. So you need to be a curator of connections, and an advisor and a guide. Somebody who pushes and challenges a great deal about how those connections are built and assembled. (Richards & Valentine, 2017)