You can’t run a medical school without having an adjoining hospital. Students learn by working along side the best doctors, who, only after years and years of practice, become professors. 

After learning the basics, these doctors hypothesize, experiment, study and codify their new learnings. They become professors only once they have a sufficiently large body of work. 

These doctors realize that their job is to understand and solve emerging challenges every day, codify learnings from their work for others, and thereby advance the body of work in their field. 

By contrast, most of my MBA professors never spent a day working in a real company. Worse, they transferred a static view of work, jobs and learning to most of us, making us believe that our job is to perform in our roles to set of standard expectations. 

But for most of us, our job is not to perform. It is to transform what we do. Like the best doctors, we have to apply ourselves to emerging challenges every day, codify that for others, and thereby advance our body of work – be it finance, HR, supply chain, marketing, or what have you. 

In this sense, the best professionals, like the best doctors, aren’t experts – they are students of their field, endeavoring to make things better for others and thereby for their field.

And it is these professionals who always stay relevant to their customers, organizations, teams and to themselves.