Q} What kind of teaching will you be doing at St. Thomas?
A} My role is more lecturing than teaching. I’ll be picking out courses where pieces of my career have relevance. I’ve been doing this at St. Thomas for many years. Over the years, I’ve been asked to talk about new enterprise, the Toro turnaround, and implementing strategy.
Q} Your subjects?
A} I will be speaking about ethics, culture, [and] spirituality in the workplace. I’ve spent the last two to three months lining up courses, and now I’m getting scheduled with the various professors. For certain required courses, it could be 10 lectures during a semester for four to five sections.
Q} What prompted your interest in teaching?
A} After getting my master’s from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, I thought I would prefer to teach, be a professor, than go into business. So I went to the University of Chicago to get my Ph.D. I discovered that path had a lot of issues which were distasteful to me.
For example, I starting interviewing and found the publish-or-perish syndrome. I was told that teaching was okay, it goes with the territory, but one’s focus had to be on publishing interesting research. And I said that I’m really not interested in that, I’m interested in teaching. As a result, I decided to stop, to not get my Ph.D., and go to work.
But I still had a thirst to teach. Early on at Toro, I was asked to come to classes to talk about strategy at Toro, or new product development at Toro, or how to sell snowblowers when it isn’t snowing.
Q} So you brought the ‘real world’ to St. Thomas.
A} As you know, St. Thomas is very practically oriented. We don’t want just theoretical ideas. We want practicing people to come in and say this is the way the real world works. For example, one of the lectures I did for marketing classes was about what happens to strategy when it starts to get implemented. The marketing geniuses figure out what would be an elegant new marketing [or] new product strategy. But when they get it out to the sales force, the customer, and the service people, the strategy gets compromised somewhat in order to make it work.
Q} What have you learned about yourself in this process of teaching?
A} Passion, for one. Students ask, ‘How did that really work?’ Or, ‘This is a surprise.’ The students’ reaction energized me, and if I had some passion for these subjects when I was in the business environment, it was accentuated when I was evangelizing about these subjects that are near and dear to my heart. It’s about turning an organization upside down, and empowering people, and coaching and mentoring and serving, as opposed to running roughshod using a controlling management style.
Q} What’s your impression of today’s MBA students?
A} They are more intense, more focused than when I went to school. They’re engaged and thoughtful, and very concerned about the subjects of business leadership and ethics—these are very important issues for them as they’re launching their careers.
Q} What issues are on their minds?
A} They want to know if business is all about going to meetings from 8 to 5. They ask, ‘When do you have time to think?’ They’re also starting to get a sense in corporate America that it’s about the team. You go to business school and you’re an individual. You want to get top grades, you want the company to pick you because you’re the best in the class. Yet when I talk about my experiences, it’s all about teams. The student needs to develop competencies in interpersonal relationship skills. The question emerges: How is it going be when they’re sitting in their cubicle, and all of these other functional areas are working on the same problem?
Q} Are they inclined towards more entrepreneurial activities?
A} They feel more entrepreneurial to me. They’re self confident, they’re risk takers. They’ve thought more about their careers than we did in my era. And at St. Thomas, they’re exposed to the entrepreneurial side more than I ever was.
Q} What’s the hardest lesson to teach?
A} It’s a hard notion, whether you’re in the classroom or the office, to do things that are sustainable, that take a long time to come to fruition. So often, the world wants things to be faster, quicker, sooner. But what’s really enduring? Like building a corporate culture where the self-confidence and self-esteem of people actually grows out of the work they’re doing. Those things don’t happen very quickly, but if you stick with it, what you leave is something is sustainable coupled with a continuous-improvement mindset. If you have a core belief, don’t give up on it.
