Auguste Rodin was an obsessive genius, horrid toward his family and other people. This type of personality has been evident throughout history. Silicon Valley high tech jerks have also been around for decades. The “bad” Steve Jobs is only one of many examples. A more recent example would Uber’s Travis Kalanick, whose behavior arguable has severely damaged Uber’s business and its IPO. The conundrum we face with these people is that once they are in place it can be very difficult to remove them.
Auguste Rodin was an obsessive genius, horrid toward his family and other people. This type of personality has been evident throughout history. Silicon Valley high tech jerks have also been around for decades. The “bad” Steve Jobs is only one of many examples. A more recent example would Uber’s Travis Kalanick, whose behavior arguably has severely damaged Uber’s business and its IPO. The conundrum we face with these people is that once they are in place it can be very difficult to remove them
Now that I have a large number of weekly viewers, and subscribers, I want to use this update video to again offer a bit more about myself, and to give you advance notice of my plans for delivering more online streaming and live video content in the next few months. I am specifically looking for your feedback comments to assist me in making those plans most effective.
Seeking Your Feedback To Offer The Most Effective Program of Webinars
Now that I have a large number of weekly viewers, and subscribers, I want to use this update video to again offer a bit more about myself, and to give you advance notice of my plans for delivering more online streaming and live video content in the next few months. I am specifically looking for your feedback comments to assist me in making those plans most effective.
First, I am a Silicon Valley veteran, an Intel alumni. I have started my own companies in North America and Europe, and worked on both sides of the venture capital process. I was the Director of a technology incubator in Silicon Valley, and I have taught entrepreneurship and management at a major university. I am now planning to offer more in-depth live Webinars specifically targeted for the French Tech entrepreneurial audience. My plan is to begin offering 1 hour Webinars based on my most popular YouTube Channel weekly teasers beginning in early October. I will eventually be returning permanently to France to offer live seminars. I am reaching out to you for your feedback on my plans, and your suggestions. Please comment here, and I will respond.
One of my Intel colleagues, a Harvard MBA told me a story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.” The students thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become calculating and ruthless. He amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their colleagues and subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed. Kotter’s book of the same name is filled with case studies of “ruthless” people who failed and those with humility who succeeded.
Real Power and Influence
One of my Intel colleagues, a Harvard MBA told me a story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.” The students thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become calculating and ruthless. He amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their colleagues and subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed. Kotter’s book of the same name is filled with case studies of “ruthless” people who failed and those with humility who succeeded.
I want to talk a bit about networking with new acquaintances or renewing old contacts. Networking is often dreaded because it sounds like being disingenuous or insincere. Good networking is genuine and sincere. I made the point in Week 1 that communication skills are crucial, and they can be learned. Warren Buffett has said that “public speaking” is the most important skill he ever learned. So let’s discuss a few ideas on how to make networking less stressful and more successful. In this video, I will list three key things to remember when networking and expand on why they are so important. My UBC Management students will remember this from my Management Communication course.
Welcome to a bonus Week 2 Update of Mayo615’s Odyssey to France.
I want to talk a bit about networking with new acquaintances or renewing old contacts. Networking is often dreaded because it sounds like being disingenuous or insincere. Good networking is genuine and sincere. I made the point in Week 1 that communication skills are crucial, and they can be learned. Warren Buffett has said that “public speaking” is the most important skill he ever learned. So let’s discuss a few ideas on how to make networking less stressful and more successful. In this video, I will list three key things to remember when networking and expand on why they are so important. My UBC Management students will remember this from my Management Communication course.
Engineer into the Workforce presentation to The University of British Columbia, School of Engineering, 4th year Capstone Project course. November 2, 2016
Presentation given to today, to the UBC School of Engineering Capstone course
I had the great good fortune to know Professor John Sperling, Cambridge don, when I was an undergraduate student at San Jose State University. At that time, our campus was awash in great thinkers: visiting scholars Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts, and a host of other eminent faculty. I knew Sperling as a friend and mentor, and worked closely with John and my friends with the SJSU student government: Dick Miner, Peter Ellis and others, some of whom went on to work with Sperling at the Institute of Professional Development and later at the University of Phoenix. My fondest recollection of John was as the catalyst for our symbolic burial of an ugly yellow Ford Maverick on the first Earth Day. John challenged us to define ourselves by what we would do to mark that day. It has become one of the defining events of the first Earth Day. But I also view John as the precursor of the current MOOC’s movement. John shook up the academic world with his revolutionary ideas about education. John created immense controversy but he also spawned significant change.
I had the great good fortune to know Professor John Sperling, Cambridge don, when I was an undergraduate student at San Jose State University. At that time, our campus was awash in great thinkers: visiting scholars Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts, and a host of other eminent faculty. I knew Sperling as a friend and mentor, and worked closely with John and my friends with the SJSU student government: Dick Miner, Peter Ellis and others, some of whom went on to work with Sperling at the Institute of Professional Development and later at the University of Phoenix. My fondest recollection of John was as the catalyst for our symbolic burial of an ugly yellow Ford Maverick on the first Earth Day. John challenged us to define ourselves by what we would do to mark that day. It has become one of the defining events of the first Earth Day. But I also view John as the precursor of the current MOOC’s movement. John shook up the academic world with his revolutionary ideas about education. John created immense controversy but he also spawned significant change. Regrettably, over the years, Phoenix has turned into a questionable “for profit” education mill, akin to Trump University, and now the subject of a federal lawsuit for defrauding military veterans.
From the Arizona Republic:
John Sperling, a virtual illiterate as a teenager, learned to love learning as a young adult and went on to revolutionize the business of college education and access to it by creating the for-profit University of Phoenix.
His death at 93 on Friday was announced Sunday on the website of Apollo Education Group, the University of Phoenix’s parent company. A cause of death was not listed.
Sperling, a billionaire with homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and Phoenix, was remembered for his vision and his tenacity in support of adult education and numerous other causes that engaged his passion. Although he kept a low profile in Arizona, his philanthropy supported a variety of causes, from solar research to anti-aging efforts to the decriminalization of marijuana.
Sperling’s son, Apollo Group Board Chairman Peter Sperling, and company CEO Greg Cappelli said in the statement that “Dr. Sperling’s indomitable ideas and life’s work served as a catalyst for innovations widely accepted as having made higher education more accessible to adult students.”
Sperling founded the chain of schools in the 1970s and retired as executive chairman from its parent company in 2012. On his watch, the school grew from a small California operation to a publicly traded Fortune 500 company with 12,000 workers in Arizona. It established itself as the national leader in adult education and online classes.
Sperling’s schools often catered to older students wanting classes at more flexible hours. By tapping a demographic niche that traditional schools missed or didn’t want, Sperling elbowed the University of Phoenix into a lasting place in the often-staid world of higher education. But by the time he retired, the University of Phoenix had become a sometimes-controversial symbol of the rapid growth and excesses of for-profit universities.
The financial success of the University of Phoenix allowed Sperling to bankroll his social initiatives, from advocating medical marijuana to seeking to clone his dog.
“University of Phoenix is my proudest legacy,” Sperling said in a 2011 interview withThe Republic. “Knowing that over 1million staff, faculty and students have benefited in some way from the university is something I’m very proud of.”
“I think everyone will agree John Sperling really shook up the higher-education world,” said William Tierney, a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and co-author of the book “New Players, Different Game: Understanding the Rise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities.”
“Sperling realized a need that the market had not thought about and the public sector frankly didn’t care about, and man, was he right,” Tierney said in a 2013 interview. “He really tapped into education as a needed commodity in a way that nobody else had done.”
A singular vision
Those who knew him well described Sperling as a man of generosity, curiosity, vision and grit.
“His focus was on bettering people’s lives,” said Jorge Klor de Alva, a former University of Phoenix president and Apollo Group senior vice president who knew Sperling for more than 40 years. “This university was focused on trying to help people succeed.”
Klor de Alva said Sperling, essentially shy, never backed down from a fight.
“He was always in pursuit of social-justice causes,” Klor de Alva said.
Grant Woods, a former Arizona attorney general and attorney who represented Apollo Education Group, said Sperling was ahead of his time with his views on many topics, including treatment for drug offenders, instead of incarceration, and the benefits of telemedicine.
“Professionally I was impressed with how visionary he was,” Woods said. “He was willing to be controversial, to fight the fights that most people wouldn’t fight. He was never afraid to put his money and his prestige behind them.”
Sperling invested heavily into causes including plant genetics and seawater agriculture, anti-aging medicine and drug decriminalization as opposed to treatment. He participated in efforts with fellow billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis to sponsor and pass citizen-backed initiatives in 17 states focusing on treatment and education, as opposed to jail time, for non-violent offenders, while decriminalizing marijuana, especially for medical purposes.
U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a fellow Bay area resident, said in a statement: “John Sperling’s passion for education changed America. By improving access to higher education for thousands of non-traditional students, he created a movement and empowered a generation of working adults with the tools needed to provide a better quality of life for their families. His life story inspires us to see — and seize — opportunities.”
Humble beginnings
Sperling achieved his perch atop for-profit education after escaping a humble, sickly and unhappy childhood.
In his autobiography, “Rebel With a Cause,” Sperling wrote that he was the youngest of five children. He was born in a log cabin in Missouri and raised in a home that had a coal-burning stove and an outhouse. He said his mother was “possessively loving” and described his father as a “classic ne’er-do-well” who often beat him.
“I learned nothing from my childhood except that it’s a mean world out there, and you’ve got to bite and scratch to get by,” he told Fast Company in a 2003 interview.
Sperling joined the Merchant Marine in 1939, and one of his ship’s engineers befriended him, teaching Sperling to read. Sperling was spellbound by classics such as “Notes from the Underground” and “The Great Gatsby,” fueling a lifelong love of literature and poetry.
After serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Sperling earned an undergraduate degree from Reed College on the G.I. Bill. He then attended the University of California-Berkeley, where he was awarded a fellowship to study at King’s College at the University of Cambridge. He earned his doctorate in 18th-century English mercantile history in 1955.
Starting in 1960, Sperling served for 12 years as a tenured professor of history at San Jose State University.
There, Sperling made a name as a union activist.
Popular program
While still teaching in San Jose, in 1974 Sperling won a government contract to develop coursework for teachers and police officers who worked with at-risk children.
According to New Yorker magazine, top administrators at San Jose State balked at the program. The University of San Francisco was more receptive, so he launched it there.
The program proved so popular that Sperling, working with business partners, created an adult-education program for 2,500 students with classes available at Bay Area colleges. It became known as the Institute for Professional Development and offered bachelor’s and master’s degrees for its students.
“He got this thing going, and it was making money. It was running a surplus,” said David Breneman, a University of Virginia professor who teaches the economics of education. “The regional accrediting body in California came down on him like a ton of bricks. They didn’t like anything he was doing.”
Sperling responded in 1976 by moving the IPD and renaming it after its new home: the University of Phoenix. Within three years, it gained grudging accreditation in Arizona.
Sperling told The Republic that Arizona attracted him because the state “had never gotten around to writing any regulations.”
With his background in economics, Sperling draped his university in pragmatic cost-consciousness. Instructors were drawn from the working world. Accountants, for example, taught accounting rather than decorated academics.
Students presumably benefited from the instructors’ real-world experience; Sperling and the students gained from the lower faculty salaries that went with it.
In 1981, Sperling formed the Apollo Group, the parent company of the university, and bought out one of his partners. Seven years later, Sperling bought out another partner to take full control of Apollo.
As the university fell under his full control, it also began developing distance-learning classes, a forerunner to the online courses that would help remake adult education.
For years, the University of Phoenix grew steadily, largely on the strength of an older student body looking to start new careers. At a time when traditional schools made students build schedules around faculty, Sperling built his no-frills school around the students.
In December 1994, the Apollo Group joined the Nasdaq Stock Market as a publicly traded company. At the time, it had 28,000 students. In some ways, it was a final vindication of Sperling’s unique approach to higher education. But some say it also put the school on a new path that inevitably led to a shift in priorities.
“They got pushed by Wall Street,” said Breneman, who co-edited the book “Earnings from Learning: The Rise of For-Profit Universities.” “They got into this rat race of having to try to grow 10, 20, 30percent every year, so they started dipping down into younger students.”
By 2000, enrollment in the Apollo Group’s holdings reached 100,000. Three years later, it was 200,000. By 2010, enrollment had mushroomed to 600,000.
At that point, more than 80 percent of the university’s revenue source was federally backed student loans. In 2008, for example, it collected more than $3billion in federal financial aid.
That attracted scrutiny from Washington. On Capitol Hill, the university and its many for-profit competitors came under fire for bringing in too many students ill-prepared for college who, if they graduated at all, found themselves saddled with high debt and poor job prospects. The high dropout rates were fueled, some said, by recruiters whose pay was effectively tied to enrollment, which would violate federal law.
In 2009, the Apollo Group settled a whistle-blower lawsuit against the university for nearly $80million to dispense with claims of recruiting commissions.
A two-year Senate investigation pointed out in 2012 that an online degree from the University of Phoenix cost six times more than a comparable degree from the Maricopa Community College system and that Sperling was paid $8.6million in 2009, 13 times more than the president of the University of Arizona.
“When the University of Phoenix was started in 1976, it pioneered an entirely new model of learning,” the report concluded. “That model revolutionized thinking about how to provide opportunities for higher education to underserved and non-traditional students. Yet in the 2000s, Apollo appears to have made critical decisions that prioritized financial success over student success.”
During the probe, Washington tightened lending rules to hold schools accountable for the degrees their students pursued, and the university made its own adjustments, though Sperling, with characteristic bluntness, disagreed.
“We don’t agree with the new regulations. We think they are stupid,” he told The Republic in 2011.
Operating under tighter regulations, an uncertain economy and intense competition from other for-profit schools and public universities that had learned from Sperling’s model, the University of Phoenix contracted. It has cut its payrolls by thousands, and degreed enrollment in May was 242,000.
Sperling left as CEO of the Apollo Group in 2001 and retired as executive chairman of the company’s board of directors in December 2012.
Variety of causes
In 1996, Sperling gained attention as a financial backer of medical marijuana in Arizona, something he favored during his recovery from prostate cancer in the late 1970s.
In 2000, he funded a biotech company to help clone pets. His dog Missy died in 2002 without success in cloning her. Four years later, the company was shuttered.
Between 1997 and 2013, Sperling made more than $700,000 in political contributions, according to federal records. Overwhelmingly, but not totally, he gave to Democrats. He wrote several books, some on education and one outlining his liberal views on political demographics.
Although he was often at odds with the establishment, most say Sperling left a mark on higher education.
“I think we need to give credit where credit is due,” Tierney said. “There are a lot of others out there, and they didn’t become the University of Phoenix. He had an American kind of can-do spirit.”
Sperling is survived by his longtime companion, Joan Hawthorne; his former wife, Virginia Sperling; his son, Peter; his daughter-in-law, Stephanie; and his two grandchildren, Max and Eve.
We all have our own reasons why we stopped teaching. Some are voluntary, others involuntary. John Beck discusses many of the uncomfortable issues of evaluation and faculty politics that get in the way of the joy of teaching
Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School are adopting drastically different strategies for delivering business education. These differing strategies are reflected in the debate that has erupted between two of Harvard Business School’s best known professors and their visions for the future of business education, Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. I have also been personally tire kicking MOOC’s, acting as a mentor for Stanford’s online Technology Entrepreneurship course, hosted by NovoEd. I have been pleasantly surprised by the experience, and among the teams I am mentoring is a group of Xerox senior research scientists acting as an entrepreneurial team.
Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma
Harvard Professor Michael Porter, author of numerous books on Competitive Strategy
Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School are adopting drastically different strategies for delivering business education. These differing strategies are reflected in the debate that has erupted between two of Harvard Business School’s best known professors and their visions for the future of business education, Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. I have also been personally tire kicking MOOC’s, acting as a mentor for Stanford’s online Technology Entrepreneurshipcourse, hosted by NovoEd. I have been pleasantly surprised by the experience, and among the teams I am mentoring, is a group of Xerox senior research scientists acting as an entrepreneurial team.
Christensen predictably argues, as in his most famous book, that in order to survive disruptive change, businesses themselves must embrace disruptive change. Professor Porter on the other hand, argues that an enterprise “… must stay the course, even in times of upheaval, while constantly improving and extending its distinctive positioning.” Ironically, this debate is closely related to my most recent post, and a much earlier post on recognizing “strategic inflection points,” and acting on them.
If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School, whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it’s hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts: Competitive advantage. Disruptive innovation. The value chain.
But when its dean, Nitin Nohria, faced the school’s biggest strategic decision since 1924 — the year it planned its campus and adopted the case-study method as its pedagogical cornerstone — he ran into an issue. Those professors, and those concepts, disagreed.
The question: Should Harvard Business School enter the business of online education, and, if so, how?
Universities across the country are wrestling with the same question — call it the educator’s quandary — of whether to plunge into the rapidly growing realm of online teaching, at the risk of devaluing the on-campus education for which students pay tens of thousands of dollars, or to stand pat at the risk of being left behind.
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Harvard Business School faced a choice between different models of online instruction. Prof. Michael Porter favored the development of online courses that would reflect the school’s existing strategy.CreditDavid De la Paz/European Press Photo Agency
At Harvard Business School, the pros and cons of the argument were personified by two of its most famous faculty members. For Michael Porter, widely considered the father of modern business strategy, the answer is yes — create online courses, but not in a way that undermines the school’s existing strategy. “A company must stay the course,” Professor Porter has written, “even in times of upheaval, while constantly improving and extending its distinctive positioning.”
For Clayton Christensen, whose 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” propelled him to academic stardom, the only way that market leaders like Harvard Business School survive “disruptive innovation” is by disrupting their existing businesses themselves. This is arguably what rival business schools like Stanford and the Wharton School have been doing by having professors stand in front of cameras and teach MOOCs, or massive open online courses, free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world. For a modest investment by the school — about $20,000 to $30,000 a course — a professor can reach a million students, says Karl Ulrich, vice dean for innovation at Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Do it cheap and simple,” Professor Christensen says. “Get it out there.”
But Harvard Business School’s online education program is not cheap, simple, or open. It could be said that the school opted for the Porter theory. Called HBX, the program will make its debut on June 11 and has its own admissions office. Instead of attacking the school’s traditional M.B.A. and executive education programs — which produced revenue of $108 million and $146 million in 2013 — it aims to create an entirely new segment of business education: the pre-M.B.A. “Instead of having two big product lines, we may be on the verge of inventing a third,” said Prof. Jay W. Lorsch, who has taught at Harvard Business School since 1964.
Starting last month, HBX has been quietly admitting several hundred students, mostly undergraduate sophomores, juniors and seniors, into a program called Credential of Readiness, or CORe. The program includes three online courses — accounting, analytics and economics for managers — that are intended to give liberal arts students fluency in what it calls “the language of business.” Students have nine weeks to complete all three courses, and tuition is $1,500. Only those with a high level of class participation will be invited to take a three-hour final exam at a testing center.
“We don’t want tourists,” said Jana Kierstead, executive director of HBX, alluding to the high dropout rates among MOOCs. “Our goal is to be very credible to employers.” To that end, graduates will receive a paper credential with a grade: high honors, honors, pass.
“Harvard is going to make a lot of money,” Mr. Ulrich predicted. “They will sell a lot of seats at those courses. But those seats are very carefully designed to be off to the side. It’s designed to be not at all threatening to what they’re doing at the core of the business school.”
Exactly, warned Professor Christensen, who said he was not consulted about the project. “What they’re doing is, in my language, a sustaining innovation,” akin to Kodak introducing better film, circa 2005. “It’s not truly disruptive.”
‘Very Different Places’
Professor Christensen did something “truly disruptive” in 2011, when he found himself in a room with a panoramic view of Boston Harbor. About to begin his lecture, he noticed something about the students before him. They were beautiful, he later recalled. Really beautiful.
“Oh, we’re not students,” one of them explained. “We’re models.”
They were there to look as if they were learning: to appear slightly puzzled when Professor Christensen introduced a complex concept, to nod when he clarified it, or to look fascinated if he grew a tad boring. The cameras in the classroom — actually, a rented space downtown — would capture it all for the real audience: roughly 130,000 business students at the University of Phoenix, which hired Professor Christensen to deliver lectures online.
Why had his boss, Mr. Nohria, given him permission to moonlight? “Because we didn’t have an alternative of our own” online, Mr. Nohria explained.
The dean had taken a wait-and-see approach — until 18 months ago, when his own university announced the formation of edX, an open-courseware platform that would hitch the overall university firmly to the MOOC bandwagon.
He said he remembered listening to an edX presentation at an all-university meeting. “I must confess I was unsure what we’d be really hoping to gain from it,” he said. “My own early imagination was: ‘This is for people who do lectures. We don’t do lectures, so this is not for us.’ ” In the case method, concepts aren’t taught directly, but induced through student discussion of real-world business problems that professors guide with carefully chosen questions.
“Nitin and I are close friends, and we’ve talked about this repeatedly,” Professor Porter said. “I think the big risk in any new technology is to believe the technology is the strategy. Just because 200,000 people sign up doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.” Though Professor Porter published “Strategy and the Internet” in the Harvard Business Review in 2001, before the advent of MOOCs, the article makes his sternest warning about the perils of online recklessness: “A destructive, zero-sum form of competition has been set in motion that confuses the acquisition of customers with the building of profitability.”
Mr. Nohria ultimately chose for the business school to opt out of edX. But this decision forced a question: What should the school do instead? “People came out in very different places,” Mr. Nohria said. “Very different places.”
One morning, he sat down for one of his regular breakfasts with students. “Three of them had just been in Clay’s course,” which had included a case study on the future of Harvard Business School, Mr. Nohria said. “So I asked them, ‘What was the debate like, and how would you think about this?’ They, too, split very deeply.”
Some took Professor Christensen’s view that the school was a potential Blockbuster Video: a high-cost incumbent — students put the total cost of the two-year M.B.A. at around $100,0000 — that would be upended by cheaper technology if it didn’t act quickly to make its own model obsolete. At least one suggested putting the entire first-year curriculum online.
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On the topic of online instruction, Prof. Clayton Christensen said: ‘Do it cheap and simple. Get it out there.”CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times
Others weren’t so sure. “ ‘This disruption is going to happen,’ ” is how Mr. Nohria described their thinking, “ ‘but it’s going to happen to a very different segment of business education, not to us.’ ” The power of Harvard’s brand, networking opportunities and classroom experience would protect it from the fate of second- and third-tier schools, a view that even Professor Christensen endorses — up to a point.
“We’re at the very high end of the market, and disruption always hits the high end last,” said Professor Christensen, who recently predicted that half of the United States’ universities could face bankruptcy within 15 years.
Mr. Nohria states flatly, “I do not believe our M.B.A. program is at risk.” He concluded that disruption is not always “all or nothing,” and cited the businesses of music and retailing as examples. “In the music business, all record stores are gone,” he said, while in retailing, “it’s not like Amazon has eliminated everything; after those debates, my feeling was that we’re going to be more in that category.”
Still, Mr. Nohria said, he wanted some insurance. “Our beliefs can always turn out to be wrong,” he said. Harvard Business School could not afford to stand on the sidelines. So last summer, he said, he asked the business school’s administrative director, “What would you say if we started a little skunk works around this technology?”
‘Hollywood’ at Harvard
That skunk works, in a low-slung building 300 yards from campus, is not little. It buzzes with 35 full-time staff members — Wharton’s online efforts, by comparison, employ one-half of one staffer, Mr. Ulrich said — who are scrambling to complete a proprietary platform that, after this summer’s limited go-round, could support much larger enrollments.
“Here’s Hollywood,” Ms. Kierstead said on a recent tour, passing an array of video equipment that’s hauled around to film business case-study protagonists on location. Nearby, two digital animators worked on graphics for Professor Christensen’s forthcoming course. Another staff member handled financial aid.
To run HBX with Ms. Kierstead, Mr. Nohria tapped Bharat Anand, 48, a strategy professor who had been researching how traditional media companies have coped, or haven’t, with digital disruption. “I think about those cases a lot,” said Professor Anand, who is also Mr. Nohria’s brother-in-law.
The dean handed him a sheet of six guiding principles, including these: HBX should be economically self-sustaining. It should not substitute for the M.B.A. program. It should seek to replicate the Harvard Business School discussion-based style of learning. This was no easy assignment, Professor Anand conceded.
“What is competitive advantage?” he asked, invoking Professor Porter’s signature theory. “It comes from being fundamentally different. We teach this all the time. But saying it is one thing. Putting it into practice is hard. When everyone is going free, everyone is going with a similar type of platform, it takes courage to do your own thing.”
On campus, Harvard business students face one another in five horseshoe-shaped tiers with oversized name cards. They fight for “airtime” while the professor orchestrates discussion from a central “pit.”
“We don’t do lectures,” Mr. Nohria said. “Part of what had already convinced me that MOOCs are not for us is that for a hundred years our education has been social.”
The challenge was to invent a digital architecture that simulated the Harvard Business School classroom dynamic without looking like a classroom. In a demonstration of a course called economics for managers, the first thing the student sees is the name, background and location — represented by glowing dots on a map — of other students in the course.
A video clip begins. It’s Jim Holzman, chief executive of the ticket reseller Ace Ticket, estimating the supply of tickets for a New England Patriots playoff game: “Where I have a really hard time is trying to figure out what the demand is. We just don’t know how many people are on the sidelines saying, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about going.’ ”
It’s a complex situation meant to get students thinking about a key concept — “the distinction between willingness to pay and price,” Professor Anand said. “Just because something costs zero doesn’t mean people aren’t willing to pay something.” A second case study, on the pay model of The New York Times, drives the point home.
Then a box pops up on the screen with the words “Cold Call.” The student has 30 seconds to a few minutes to type a response to a question and is then prodded to assess comments made by other students. Eventually there is a multiple-choice quiz to gauge mastery of the concept. (This was surprisingly time-consuming to develop, Professor Anand said, because the business school does not give multiple-choice tests.)
At a faculty meeting in April, Professor Anand demonstrated the other two elements of HBX: continuing education for executives and a live forum. He unveiled the existence of a studio, built in collaboration with Boston’s public television station, that allows a professor to stand in a pit before a horseshoe of 60 digital “tiles,” or high-definition screens with the live images and voices of geographically dispersed participants. “I’m proud of our team, and how carefully they’ve thought about it even before they’ve done it,” Professor Porter said.
The Clashing Models
Not everyone was so impressed. Professor Christensen, for one, worried that Harvard was falling into the very trap he had laid out in “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” “I think that we’ve way overshot the needs of customers,” he said. “I worry that we’re a little too technologically ambitious.”
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The dean, Nitin Nohria, found that students were also divided on the issue of online instruction.CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times
He also feared that HBX was tied too closely to the business school.
“There have been a few companies that have survived disruption, but in every case they set up an independent business unit that let people learn how to play ball in the new game,” he said. IBM survived the transition from mainframe computers to minicomputers, and then from minicomputers to personal computers, by setting up autonomous teams in Minnesota and then in Florida. “We haven’t got the separation required.”
Professor Porter has expressed the opposite view. Companies that set up stand-alone Internet units, he wrote in 2001, “fail to integrate the Internet into their proven strategies and thus never harness their most important advantages.” Barnes & Noble’s decision to set up a separate online unit is one of his cautionary tales. “It deterred the online store from capitalizing on the many advantages provided by the network of physical stores,” he said, “thus playing into the hands of Amazon.”
Here is where the two professors’ differences come to a head. In the Porter model, all of a company’s activities should be mutually reinforcing. By integrating everything into one, cohesive fortification, “any competitor wishing to imitate a strategy must replicate a whole system,” Professor Porter wrote.
In the Christensen model, these very fortifications become a liability. In the steel industry, which was blindsided by new technology in smaller and cheaper minimills, heavily integrated companies couldn’t move quickly and ended up entombed inside their elaborately constructed defenses.
“If Clay and I differ, it’s that Clay sees disruption everywhere, in every business, whereas I see it as something that happens every once in a while,” Professor Porter said. “And what looks like disruption is in fact an incumbent firm not embracing innovation” at all.
In other words, it’s not that U.S. Steel was destined to be undone by minimills. It’s that its managers let it happen.
“The disrupter doesn’t always win,” argued Professor Porter, who nonetheless called Professor Christensen “phenomenal” and “one of the great management thinkers.”
Who will win the coming business school shakeout? Professor Porter acknowledged that it’s a multidimensional question.
Most schools offering MOOCs do so through outside distribution channels like Coursera, a for-profit company that has Duke, Wharton, Yale, the University of Michigan and several dozen other schools in its stable. EdX, of which Harvard was a co-founder with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, counts Dartmouth and Georgetown among its charter members.
“These will come to have considerable power,” predicted Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He pointed to the aircraft industry: “In order to get into China, Boeing transferred its technology to parts manufacturers there. Pretty soon there’s going to be Chinese firms building airplanes. Boeing created their own competition.” Business schools, he said, “are doing it again; we are creating our own demise.”
Professors as Online Stars
The worry is all the more acute at midtier schools, which fear that elite business schools will move to gobble up a larger share of a shrinking pie.
“Would you rather watch Kenneth Branagh do ‘Henry V,’ or see it at a community theater?” asked Mr. Ulrich at Wharton. “There are going to be some instructors who become more valuable in this new world because they master the new medium. We’d rather be those guys than the people left behind.”
This raises a still more radical case, in which the winners are not any institution, new or old, but a handful of star professors. One of Professor Porter’s generic observations — that the Internet increases the “bargaining power of suppliers” — suggests just that. “It’s potentially very divisive in a way,” he acknowledged. “We’re all partners; we all get paid roughly the same. Anything that starts to fracture the enterprise is a sobering prospect.”
François Ortalo-Magné, dean of the University of Wisconsin’s business school, says fissures have already appeared. Recently, a rival school offered one of his faculty members not just a job, but also shares in an online learning start-up created especially for him. “We’re talking about millions of dollars,” Mr. Ortalo-Magné said. “My best teachers are going to find platforms so they can teach to the world for free. The market is finding a way to unbundle us. My job is to hold this platform together.”
To that end, he has changed his school’s incentive structure, which, as in most of academia, was based primarily on the number of research articles published in elite journals. Now professors who can’t crack those journals but “have a gift for inspiring learning,” he said, in person or online, are being paid as top performers, too. “We are now rewarding people who have tenure to give up on research,” Mr. Ortalo-Magné said.
Mr. Ortalo-Magné spins out the possibilities of disruption even further. “How many calculus professors do we need in the world?” he asked. “Maybe it’s nine. My colleague says it’s four. One to teach in English, one in French, one in Chinese, and one in the farm system in case one dies.”
What is to stop a Coursera from poaching Harvard Business School faculty members directly? “Nothing,” Mr. Nohria said. “The decision people will have to make is whether being on the platform of Harvard Business School, or any great university, is more important than the opportunity to build a brand elsewhere.
“Does Clay Christensen become Clay Christensen just by himself? Or does Clay Christensen become Clay Christensen because he was at Harvard Business School? He’ll have to make that determination.”
Stanford University’s free online course, Technology Entrepreneurship begins this week. I have agreed to be a mentor to a maximum of two entrepreneurial teams in this Stanford online course.
In addition to being free you can follow the course on your schedule via the posted video lectures. The course will be taught by Assistant Professor Chuck Eesley. The recommended textbook, Technology Ventures, by Thomas Byers, Richard Dorf, and Andrew Nelson, is available as an etextbook on CourseSmart or Kindle. The first three course videos are available online now.
I will also be working this term with Professor Thomas Hellman at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business on his Technology Entrepreneurship course. I will be scheduling time to meet with students for both the Stanford and UBC Sauder courses. Further information on dates and times will be posted here.
Stanford University’s free online course, Technology Entrepreneurship begins this week. I have agreed to be a mentor to a maximum of two entrepreneurial teams in this Stanford online course.
In addition to being free you can follow the course on your schedule via the posted video lectures. The course will be taught by Assistant Professor Chuck Eesley. The recommended textbook, Technology Ventures, by Thomas Byers, Richard Dorf, and Andrew Nelson, is available as an etextbook on CourseSmart or Kindle. The first three course videos are available online now.
I will also be working this term with Professor Thomas Hellman at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business on his Technology Entrepreneurship course. I will be scheduling time to meet with students for both the Stanford and UBC Sauder courses. Further information on dates and times will be posted here.
VIDEO: Stanford University E145: Technology Entrepreneurship, Introduction & Overview
Originally posted on Gigaom: Which modern technology “enables us to send communications…with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space”? If you answered “the internet,” you’re right. If you answered “the telephone,” “the television” or any other speed-of-light telecommunication technology, you’re also right. That quote is from an 1860 book by…
An excellent discussion of the deeper social implications of the Internet of Everything. Perhaps difficult for some to grasp, but consistent with many other futurists’ views. The current world of MOOC‘s in online education, for example, may only be a brief waypoint on the journey to anytime, everywhere education.
SUMMARY:In the future everyone will be connected—everywhere, all the time—making space and time no longer an issue for physical devices, people and products.
Which modern technology “enables us to send communications…with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space”? If you answered “the internet,” you’re right. If you answered “the telephone,” “the television” or any other speed-of-light telecommunication technology, you’re also right. That quote is from an 1860 book by George Bartlett Prescott, an American telegraph official.
In 1860, the fastest telecommunication link between California and New York was the Pony Express, which took at least 10 days to get a message to the other side of the continent. Then one day in 1861, the First Transcontinental Telegraph was completed and you could send the same message across the continent in 10 seconds. Two days later, the Pony Express officially ceased operations. Prescott was onto something.
The Ancient Greek word “tele” means “far away”. To telecommunicate is to communicate farther than you can shout. When you connect two points with a speed-of-light telecommunication channel, you annihilate the spacetime-distance between the points. You get a kind of wormhole.
The internet is a network of spacetime wormholes connecting every human being on the planet. If you want to chat with someone face to face, you just stare into your cell phone and they stare into theirs. You can’t tell if they’re a thousand miles away, or in the next room.
But when it comes to physical things, we’re still living under the tyranny of spacetime. Kevin Ashton, the inventor of the term “Internet of Things”, wrote in 1999: “We’re physical, and so is our environment … You can’t eat bits, burn them to stay warm or put them in your gas tank. Ideas and information are important, but things matter much more.” Just look around the room right now, at anything other than your cell phone. All the things you can see and touch depend on where you are in space, or on how much time you spend moving yourself to a new location.
That’s a problem, because at any given moment, most of the things you care about aren’t in your line of sight. Almost none of the food you’re going to eat that day is. Almost none of the appliances you’re going to use that night are. That’s the tyranny of spacetime, which the internet of things is now beginning to overthrow.
The internet of things has three major spacetime-annihilating functions:
Transportationmaking far away things come to you
Teleportation – instantly getting copies of far away things
Telepresence – interacting with far away people and things
Transportation
In the past, far away things had no way to know what you wanted from them or when you wanted it. The right things wouldn’t know how to find you. So you’d have to travel to where the things were — to a restaurant, to your house, to various stores.
If you shop on Amazon instead of going to the store, you’re on the internet of things. Last year, Amazon acquired robotic warehouse technology company Kiva systems. When you one-click on that toothbrush, Amazon’s robots move it from deep inside the warehouse onto the floor where employees pack it and ship it to you.
The internet of things transports things to you pretty fast, but not at the speed of light. It uses the internet’s fast-moving bits the way skydivers use a little pilot chute to pull out a bigger, heavier parachute.
Teleportation
Actually, sometimes the internet of things does make faraway things come you at the speed of light. The trick, called “teleportation”, is to convert things to bits and then back to things again.
The first teleporters were invented before the internet, but the far away “facsimiles” they brought you were just pieces of paper. Modern teleporters are a lot more versatile.
The MakerBot Digitizer can scan 3D objects and store their structure as a file of bits. The MakerBot Replicator can read a file of bits and print a 3D object. Put the Digitizer and Replicator at opposite ends of an internet connection and you get a teleporter.
Thousands of objects can already be teleported at the speed of light – silverware, vases, lamp frames, and even some weird-looking, but functional shoes. Soon the internet will be able to teleport physical objects into your lap as easily as it teleports web pages into your screen, and you’ll be able to surf the internet of things.
Telepresence
Sometimes you want to interact with far away things without having them transport or teleport to you. Then what you want is telepresence.
For example, you often move far away from your locked bike. Normally that means you can’t unlock your bike to let a friend borrow it, and you also don’t know when thieves are cutting your lock. LOCK8 is a smart bike lock that lets you unlock it from far away, and notifies you when a potential thief is tampering with it. No matter how far away you are from your bike lock, LOCK8 gives you all the benefits of being near your bike lock.
What if you’re far away from your office, but still want to attend meetings as if you weren’t? Virtual presence systems like Anybots and Suitable Technologies’ Beam let you remote control a walking, talking, seeing, hearing robot. You can travel halfway around the world, and still have a physical presence at your office.
The future: The internet of everything
Did you know you have two wireless modems in your head? Your eyes constantly receive radio signals in the visible spectrum, and your sense of vision connects your brain to nearby physical things, like a de facto Local Area Network. But your sensory LAN connection only extends as far as your line of sight. It’s nothing compared to a Wi-Fi internet connection.
In the future of the internet of things, Wi-Fi is going to be everywhere, and the internet will connect you to every person and thing on the planet via transportation, teleportation and telepresence. A trillion wormholes will let you reach out from anywhere on earth and hug your loved ones, or try on a new pair of shoes, or unlock your bike.
In the future beyond the internet of things, all your senses will be wired directly into the internet’s wormholes, and you’ll be completely indifferent to the location of your physical body. When you look around you, you won’t be looking into a nearby region of space. You’ll be surfing an internet that annihilates all time and space – the internet of everything.
Liron Shapira is the co-founder and CTO of Quixey and is an advisor to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). Follow him on Twitter @liron
Which modern technology “enables us to send communications…with the quickness of thought, and to annihilate time as well as space”? If you answered “the internet,” you’re right. If you answered “the telephone,” “the television” or any other speed-of-light telecommunication technology, you’re also right. That quote is from an 1860 book by George Bartlett Prescott, an American telegraph official.
In 1860, the fastest telecommunication link between California and New York was the Pony Express, which took at least 10 days to get a message to the other side of the continent. Then one day in 1861, the First Transcontinental Telegraph was completed and you could send the same message across the continent in 10 seconds. Two days later, the Pony Express officially ceased operations. Prescott was onto something.
The Ancient Greek word “tele” means “far away”. To telecommunicate is to communicate farther than you can shout. When you connect two points…
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