Education
Those Who Can Do, Those Who Can´t Teach. Right?
By Joe Haslam B
ack in the year 2004, when I did an MBA at IE Business School, it was a case
of guilty as charged. While then the
professors were
using the very best material on entrepreneurship that was available anywhere, the charge that you can´t really teach people to be entrepreneurs was a convincing one.
Even worse was when the person teaching had never started a company themselves. Credibility in front of the students might not be important in teaching, accounting or marketing but if you are really to convey the terror that is meeting the monthly payroll, it certainly helps a lot if you were once in the trenches. In truth though, as academic or practitioner, no one was really doing a good job at teaching entrepreneurship. Fortunately for everyone concerned, things have really changed in the last 10 years.
The biggest insight by far was that start-ups are not just smaller versions of big companies. A further insight was that start-ups are not really even SMEs. The man most responsible for this is Steve Blank, though honourable mention also goes to Eric Ries and Alex Osterwalder. If I´m really honest, you should stop reading my meagre mutterings and go and get the HBR reprint from May 2013 titled “Why Lean Start Up Changes Everything.” I say this quite deliberately as more and more what I do in the classroom is just
32 entrepreneurcountry
introduce a series of themes, provide a list of places where you can go to get more information on them and then discuss individually what choices the student should next take to maximise their chances working in this area. So when I´m accused at conferences or on radio programmes of having my head in an ivory tower, I like to explain that in addition to teaching at IE Business School, I´m the Chairman of a start-up. I like that when I´m mentoring students about how to get on the front page of TechCrunch, I can show them a picture of when Hot Hotels was most recently written about there.
And it isn’t just me. This profile is more and more common at Business Schools. At IE Business School you can get classes from billionaires like Martin Varsavsky of FON, or Ali Partovi of Dropbox. At Stanford GSB, of course, you have an embarrassment of riches. Just two of the “do not miss” classes I´ve heard about are Andy Grove of Intel and Peter Theil of PayPal. Again, may I suggest you immediately depart from my meandering musings and get the PDF of Blake Masters notes from “CS183: Startup.” In 19 classes, you have everything you need to know about technology, past or future.
Irony of irony, one of the reasons that Silicon Valley is in decline is that this knowledge was once only available person to
person. Now though,
particularly through the very machines that Silicon Valley has created over the years, it is possible for anyone to gain access to the very best thinking running through the valley. The cluster structure which goes back to 1963 and Bill Shockley´s return to his hometown
of Palo Alto is now being replaced by a hub. It´s no longer as important to be physically present in a cluster as it was, though you do have to go there from time to time to get an understanding of how to interact. Anyone could watch Steve Jobs launch one Apple product after another without actually being in the Moscone Center. They could rewind it, splice it and send people links to it. This is absolutely huge and means more people than ever can get the education necessary to work on solving problems. We all need this, particularly as Silicon Valley is not as innovative as it used to be. In the words of Jeff Hammerbacher “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
So what should entrepreneurship education be trying to do? My answer to this question has always been “to inspire.” I take this from the Gaping Void business card which reads: “Entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but it can be inspired.” This education can take place anywhere, from schools to
universities. At business schools the focus should be on providing challenging teaching that encourages risk taking. The hero should be the outlaw, the pirate, the underdog - not the roly poly rent seeker whose idea of business is a toll road or a car park. See for instance the ideas of Kyra Maya Phillips, co-author of the forthcoming book, “The Misfit Economy,” which explores what gangsters, pirates and hackers can teach us about innovation. Counter intuitively, there may be more to learn from pirates about whom history tells us were far from being economic anarchists. In
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