It’s the end of August and that means the back to school dance is in full swing. This is special for me because my five-year old is entering kindergarten this year and because my sister-in-law is a kindergarten teacher.

How quickly we get away from the basics as we progress through academia and compete for the best courses, teachers and grades, and then move into the business world. Nowadays it seems that failing to maintain a perfect grade point average through elementary, high school and college is somehow a failure of the self and the system.

Vested Outsourcing and the Five Rules embody the fundamental lessons of fair play, collaboration, playing nice, learning and achieving together as a unit within a definite structure of personal and group goals – and I believe my sister-in-law and hopefully most teachers at this level would appreciate and accept this.

Those concepts get kind of lost as time goes on and the pressure to perform at any cost mounts. They are mostly forgotten or pushed aside as we enter the competitive business world.

Kindergarten teachers, whether consciously or not, employ vested thinking and many of the basic precepts of the Five Rules.

They more than anyone lay the foundation for the academic world their charges will experience for about the next 20 years, and if they don’t employ a What’s in it for We approach in the classroom, chaos will surely reign. (Oddly, WIIFWe will often get transformed into the What’s-in-it-for-me approach for individual achievement but still remains as an overall imperative when it comes to school spirit and pride.)

Kindergarten teachers must also focus on what they want the children as a group and the school to accomplish (Rule 1), on cooperation and collaboration, and on the measurable outcomes (Rule 3) their charges will achieve.

At this level kindergarten teachers must of necessity use a lot of oversight, but if their lesson plans, i.e. governance structure, and general philosophy don’t embody insight (Rule 5) – because each class is different and has its own dynamics – then the class becomes little more than an exercise in structured babysitting.

I don’t want to take the vested approach to kindergarten too far – obviously school is much different from the business world and outsourcing.

But think of it this way – we outsource the education of our children at their most tender and impressionable ages and what happens in these early classrooms will stay with them the rest of their lives.

Then also think about your best and most memorable teachers. Weren’t they the special ones who were the best organized, the most empathetic and insightful about their class’s needs?

Weren’t they the ones who were the most vested in your success – even if you did not realize it at the time?