The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Transfer Your Experience from the Boardroom to the Classroom with Leader and Author Stephen Skripak | KEV Talks #10

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

Are you working in the corporate world but wondering what it would be like to teach students at a major university? In this episode I have a great conversation with Leader, Author and my neighbor, Stephen Skripak. Stephen and I discuss his pre-corporate life, his rise to the C-suite in the corporate world, transitioning to academia and his decision to retire while still at the top of his game.Connect with Stephen on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenskripak/

Are you in the corporate world and wonder what it would be like to go into the academic world and teach at a major university? Well, fortunately for you, on this episode, Steven Skripak and I talk about his new book, From the Boardroom to the Classroom, Quitting Corporate for More Purpose. During our conversation, Steven and I talk about his pre-corporate life and where he grew up, his corporate life and rise to the C-suite, and his post-corporate life and transition into academia. He also shares some tips on how you, if you're interested, could transition from the boardroom to the classroom as well. Please go to KevTalksPod.com for more information to read the article

about this episode. But for now, let's fly into From the Boardroom to the Classroom with Stephen Skripak. Why is the path to academia so popular? I think it comes down to several things. One, most people are wired and want to make a difference in the world, and being a teacher affords many opportunities to do so. Two, like the draw of football weekends, becoming a faculty member is a way to get back on campus to relive some of our experiences through our students. Finally, I think most of us like to give advice and to have someone care about that advice. When you're the professor, what you say counts,

even if sometimes it's only important until after the next test. Thank you everybody for joining. That is a quote from The Boardroom to the Classroom. Stephen, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I love that quote.

And it's interesting how you mentioned folks focus Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I love that quote. And it's interesting how you mentioned folks focus so much like getting to the next test, to the next test, to the next test. And we'll jump into this and get way more into it. But over a 15-year career, right, teaching? Almost 16. Wow. That must have been an interesting challenge of getting folks to see beyond that and maybe even spread their knowledge out. And there was another quote I was going to read, which was from the graduating student, or there was a senior, rather, about her most memorable instructor, which was you as well. So there's some really good stuff in that book. Hard to condense it and put it in a short episode or in a podcast episode.

But what I wanted to ask you, so I talk about on the show and we touched base a little bit before we started kind of on these foundational five things of organization, but the leader's intent. So when you were writing this book and if someone reads this book, what do you want them to take away from this with the knowledge they can get from this and the purpose they can get out of this book? So first of all, I think over the 15 or 16 years I was on campus, I heard from at least 100 people who said, I want to come back to campus. I want to work somewhere on campus. They're all Virginia Tech alumni who just had a great feeling about Virginia Tech and just wanted to come back. There's just a lure that, in fact, before I came, one and just wanted to come back. There's just a lure that, in fact, before I came, one of my friends had come back. He was vice president of

administration. And I'm talking to him on the phone. And I'm looking out over the drill field from my window in Burris Hall. And it's just sounded so romantic that you just want to come back and plug in the campus. But the idea of me coming back was because I wanted to see myself making a difference in student lives. And I think that's why the purpose of becoming a college professor. As far as the book, I think anybody who is thinking about a second career, and a lot of people think, I'd like to go teach one day, whether it's at the college level, high school level. There's a certain sense of caring about students that kind of comes along with that. And if you do it for the wrong reason, I'm going to

go back because I want to be back on campus, That's the wrong reason. Even though that's the lure, it's not enough of a reason to go back to campus. The idea is that you want to make a difference in the lives of students. And the premise of the, or the beginning of the story for me was when I was at graduate school at Purdue, and there was a professor there who had been in industry most of his life and had come back to teach late in his career. Okay. And he brought all this experience. And I had 57 credits I took when I was at Purdue.

And so that's probably somewhere close to 20 instructors. He's the only one I really remember as having made a significant difference. And the difference between him and the other professors was he brought industry experience that nobody else really seemed to have. So I saw myself at that time, that was the first time I got the idea of becoming a professor. And I thought, maybe one day I will have the kind of experience that students would come to class and really learn something from and would really light a student's fire for being in the world of business. So I guess that's kind of a long way around to anybody who's thinking about a second career, anybody who's thinking about coming back to academia, anybody who's going to deal with a major culture clash, like going from a profit generating company to

a bureaucratic university, I think would benefit from reading the book. If it existed when I first started, I think I would have made a lot fewer mistakes. Oh, wow. That's great. I mean, it's always to me good to learn from other people's lessons, lessons learned after actions, things like that. And it sounds like that's exactly what this is. It's interesting when you said that, I thought of my professors too. So thinking of, so I went to school for Homeland Security, I wanted to be a G-man or something in the government and ended up being in local and state government. But yeah, the folks were like, this is how we did this for real. And then here's the concept of it that you need to learn in the class, which then you could apply, you know, hopefully whatever class it was, which of

course has varies. But yeah, it was always so, so much more value. And I say that like in the project management world, there's folks that I want to be a project manager. So they think I'm going to get this certification and then I'm a project manager. And I'm like, that just means you studied for the test and you passed it. Right. So great, and it looks awesome on your resume, but what's behind that is how do you actually build relationships, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and how do you actually do all these things that the test said. And yeah, that's awesome, that value that you're providing

with your corporate experience and then academic experience as well. Excuse me. Edit that out. It is super helpful, and I really enjoyed it, especially the pieces that I picked out that we'll touch on. So to that, really, I have an idea from looking at the book,

and for folks, I don't think we mentioned either, we're neighbors, right? We live down the street from each other, which was a great way to connect. Take a look at this book, and thank you for the book. I know Wendy's enjoying it, my wife as well. I'm glad. Yeah. So where'd you grow up? Let's talk about then where you grew up and how you got into the corporate world, which is interesting too, and then jump over to academia after that. Okay. So the book actually starts with where I'm from. And it's only because it's really

foundational in who I am or the personality or the person that I am. I grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, which is five miles as the crow flies from the tip of Manhattan. So I'm a New York City area person. It was an interesting place to grow up because there was always somebody to play with on the street or hang out with when we got too old to say we're playing with somebody. Right. Right. But I think there were 9, 10, 11 kids within a year or two either way of my age. So it was lots of, all boys.

And there was an equal number of girls for my sisters to play with. I have four younger sisters. Okay. There was always somebody to hang around with. But it was, we were on a pretty good street. We lived on a street with a Catholic school and the Catholic kids tended to behave a little better than the public school kids. But I was the one kid on the street who went to the public schools and the public schools had the kids from the projects and the tougher areas of Uptown Bayonne. And so, you know, it was, it wasn't, I wouldn't say we were like street

kids, like you would think of somebody growing up in Bronx or Brooklyn. But it was a step maybe down from that. It was a kind of a tough area to grow up with. It was a lot of fights. All the time, somebody was scrapping with somebody else. And we had literally a written pecking order of who was the toughest and who was the weakest. and you know on the on the catholic school street i was close to the top but you throw me in a public school with those kids from the projects i was pretty far down the list yeah so but bayonne new jersey is where i'm from and and uh and a lot of my you know my street smarts my smart aleck nature um a lot of that comes from growing up in the streets of Bayonne. So did being in that environment lead to, because we've talked about this before, you getting into wrestling?

Was that prompted as an art to learn to be able to control folks? I would have to say that when we fought in the street, it wasn't like stand-up boxing. It was whoever could tackle somebody, get them down first, and whatever happened, then happened. But when I got into wrestling in high school, I got into it because the kid, we moved. So we moved after my freshman year. And we moved to the suburbs, Freehold.

Freehold Township is where I went the last three years of high school. The kid across the street from me was on the wrestling team. the suburbs, Freehold. Freehold Township is where I went the last three years of high school. The kid across the street from me was on the wrestling team. We wrestled in the front yard and he said, you'd be pretty good at wrestling. And he was like the 135 guy and I was barely weighing 85 and I was still managing to hold my own. And so he said, you should come out for the wrestling team. I almost quit the first day of practice. I was absolutely not prepared. I was so wiped out I couldn't even open a book to do my homework. But I went back the second day, and from then on I kept going.

I wasn't very good. I mean, I feel sorry for the 14 or so guys that I beat, more so than I feel like I probably lost three times in my wrestling life. But it was a sport that I could do. And kids came out every year trying to take my spot on the varsity. And every year I beat back all the challenges. So I was varsity for three years, but I still wouldn't say I was very good. Yeah. But you were in the arena. That's one of my favorite speeches is Roosevelt's man in the arena. And so when folks do hard things, they're out there like our local at all level football team in particular had some challenges, but they were out there, right? They're in the arena. And I think that's huge. And I think a great thing in your book too and the different arenas you were in,

coming up and going through the financial positions and experience you've gotten and then get in there and we'll touch on that. But yeah, wrestling also I think, so I did like one year of wrestling and then I got into it when I was in my 40s in jujitsu, which is nuts, it doesn't make sense, but it's awesome. And my son did wrestle a year.

And I think honestly, if we could do like a semester of wrestling required for all kids, I'll say all males, I think it would give people a different perspective on that think, that see the movies, right? And they're like, oh, I could do that. And I could fight like this. And you find out, oh, that's a whole different thing when you wrestle someone that knows how to wrestle, right? They know how to control you. Absolutely. In fact, in gym class one semester, we had wrestling. If you were on a team, you had to wrestle two weight classes up from what your weight was. And I won the weight class two and three weight classes above me

in gym class against guys who didn't know how to wrestle. So here I'm 115, I'm beating a kid who's 142. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, the perception in folks' minds is very different than reality when it comes to that kind of stuff, like grappling and things. Yeah. It's amazing. I mean, the, the perception in folks' minds is very different than reality when it comes to that kind of stuff, like grappling and things, but. Absolutely. So, yeah. So what was your, well, one, so I imagine that as far as getting through the corporate world you did, which we'll go through for sure. And then, you know, the, the challenges in academia, where you grew up in this, in wrestling and other things

helped you get there, right? Did that help shape your mindset early on? Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I never really thought about that question. I can say there was always an expectation on the part of my father that I was going to go to college and I was going to go into a professional rank because he didn't. And he scrapped his whole life financially. Sometimes he worked two, three jobs. We had bartending one night and then painting houses the next day when he's still hung over from board training, or at least exhausted from getting home real late. And so he had to scrap financially his whole life to put the five of us through high school, college for most of us. And so, you know, it was always an

expectation because I was always a kid who did well in school that I was going to college. And so I went without really knowing what I wanted to major in, or, you know, he said, well, you got to put a major down. And I said, what do you, what am I good at? Math. So I majored, I started out as a math major because I knew I was good in math as opposed to something like English. But I'm thinking in terms of high school subjects as opposed to where I could go professionally. And so I was lucky. I went to Virginia Tech as an undergrad without ever having seen the campus. Oh, wow. My family, no one went to college. I had older cousins who went, but nobody in my immediate family went to college.

Okay. And so I picked Virginia Tech out of a brochure. Oh, wow. We didn't come down here to see the campus until it was orientation. So it was a very, very fortunate choice that I went to school where I did and a university where I absolutely loved it and obviously came back to ultimately be a professor here right but we're jumping over the whole corporate life yeah it's there but we'll circle back but but uh but that that was kind of an expectation okay that i had to fulfill uh because dad was absolutely

absolutely hell-bent on the fact that I was going to college. Wow. I was not going to waste my intellect like I think he felt like he did. Gotcha. So it was a good push from his lesson learned, it seemed, to say, hey, you should do this because you're good at this thing. Yeah, absolutely. And that way, yes.

That's awesome. Had you seen mountains much before you got here? You know, I didn't even know Virginia Tech was in the mountains. I'm thinking, I'm going south. I'm getting out of this New Jersey snow in these cold winters. Ha, ha, I go up 2,000 feet in the winter. It's worse than it is in New Jersey. But I knew so little about what I was doing. I didn't even know Virginia Tech was in the mountains. And no, I'd never seen a mountain in fact i i never i didn't even know a cow could lie down until i was in my mid-20s and i saw one and pointed it out to my wife right

and she's finding no particular you know unique thing in this and i'm thinking that cow's laying down i didn't know they could lay down right i've never seen that you know you grow up in in the city and you know what you know how to play stickball and stuff you don't know anything about cows no no yeah and it is a i mean it's beautiful out here and mountainous but you're right we've i think we've commiserated about the ice cold winds that come through and uh yeah there was a day and i had no intention of talking about this but it's kind of funny uh i was a freshman we're sitting there in the middle of winter and and the head of the English, it's an eight o'clock class, and the head of the English department comes in and he says, we're sorry, it's about 10 after eight and the teacher hasn't shown up yet. And he says,

Miss Leach can't make it across campus. She was probably about 95 pounds, very small woman. The wind is too strong and she can't walk across campus, so she had to cancel class. So yeah, that's Blacksburg win for you no kidding no kidding so what so math right so math was your in to finance what made you go into the I mean they they fit right they seem like they go together obviously you got to be pretty good at math to do finance but yeah but I changed majors right before my junior year which put me behind because I had taken all these math classes that now I didn't need anymore because I had more math than finance required. So I had the good

fortune to go to the career services office. And there was a guy there named Jim McBride, who was a pretty cool guy and knew from the Interfraternity Council. And he helped me with a career assessment. And it came back that I should major in finance. And I said, is that Wall Street? And he said, yeah, that's Wall Street. I said, yes, that's what I want to do. Because I saw these guys at Wall Street wearing these cool suits and carrying expensive briefcases and dealing with money. And I thought, yeah, that sounds like me.

So that career assessment was how I ended up becoming a finance major. Oh, wow. And I jumped off of that into a finance job. Right. And went through the GE finance training program. And ultimately, you know, I enjoyed that kind of work. I was good at that kind of work. And so I stuck with it until I decided to make the jump to academia.

Cool. Yeah. You know, glad you pointed out earlier. Let's jump to that because between GE, Sarah Lee, Sarah Lee, and before GE, where were you before GE? I spent a short while at Union Carbide, which is no longer in existence. They had that big chemical disaster in India, and the company went bankrupt. But that was six months of absolutely not what I was expecting when I graduated. My boss was a tyrant. He was very dominating, yelled at people, cussed at people in front of the whole office. I mean,

he would dress you down like a drill sergeant. And I said, this isn't what I signed up for. I'm going to get out of here. But I hung around six months so that I would have a resume that didn't say I quit in three weeks. I wanted to quit in three weeks. In fact, I wanted to quit the first day. But I hung around for six months just so that my resume didn't look completely ridiculous. I guess, I don't know, some positive as you learn how not to lead people, right? Yeah. From that person, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I had my share of bad bosses. Once when the collegiate women in business invited me to speak at what was then their inaugural meeting, and I'm thinking, what an honor is this?

Oh, yeah. These women are inviting me. I'm not a woman, and they're inviting me to be one of their first speakers. Right. But one of the things I did was sit down and graded my male bosses versus my female bosses. And I had 20 male bosses and eight female bosses up to that point. And I gave each one of them a grade and I calculated the GPA. And the male bosses had a GPA of 1.6 and the women's was over three. So high, yeah. So, I mean, I had some really disastrous bosses,

and a lot of them were at GE. Yeah. Although I had some really great bosses at GE, too, but on balance, yeah, I had some pretty lousy bosses and learned what not to do from watching them or from suffering from them. Right, which seems to stick pretty good. It seems like the not great boss stuff sticks in your head a lot.

Not that the good stuff doesn't either. I mean, it's the same thing with the professor, too. Who do you remember? You remember the professor you loved, who that helped you, and you remember the professor you hated because they tormented you. True. And everybody in between, you kind of forget. Good point.

So yeah, let's talk about GE another. So my wife worked for GE for a bit as well and cool thing. And so talk about your journey in GE because you moved through a lot of different, I was looking in the back of the book and if when folks, when you get the book from the boardroom to the classroom, you have all your positions listed, which is neat. In fact, I was thinking of reading all the positions as part of an opening too, but it'll take a while. Yeah, it'll take a while. So folks, get the book and check that out.

So you moved around quite a bit in a good way, right? Which must have been very interesting and let you see different parts of the company. So GE had a culture that if you weren't moving up, you were moving out. In fact, Jack Welch once famously said, we want our people to be anxious to stay and ready to leave. Wow. And I'm like, wow, that tells the story because if you're no longer of value, if you're not on the super fast upward track, get out because you're going to end up being probably separated from the company involuntarily if you hang around too long. They were the ones who came up up with or i don't know if they came up with but they were the ones

who were kind of famous for forced ranking oh yeah and if you were two years in the bottom 10 you were fired automatically two years in a row so it was a tough culture very competitive culture and yet the funny part about ge at that time, in addition to being, or maybe in spite of being very competitive, very foul-mouthed, there were a lot of things you didn't like about it. If you worked there, everybody would fight over the merits of something. It wasn't really political. It was more, you know, my idea is better than your idea. My analysis is tighter than your analysis. And so, as opposed to politics, if you won because your argument was better, the person who you beat in the argument didn't get mad at you. You just went out for a beer and everybody was cool. And they said,

well, I'm going to do a better job next time. So, it really was a meritocracy in that respect. The politics was there, but not to the extent I experienced in other companies. So did that breed some of the success then though? Because people wanted to win so much. Absolutely. And you knew you didn't go into a meeting with your job half done. You would get absolutely mowed over by somebody who did a better job of thinking through something than you. So you went in prepared, you thought things through. They had this concept, they called it completed staff work, which basically meant you're going to do everything that you can before you ask your boss or anybody else for help. And so it was a very individualistic kind of culture, but they demanded excellence and they gave great training to

help you get there um and so there were a lot of things that i think were great about ge that i carried into the rest of my career okay that helped me get up the ladder elsewhere good did they have um crotonville when you're with ge yeah yeah i was at crotonville um and i could tell you a story about jack welch but i'm not sure that his family would appreciate it being on the air. But yeah, I was in legendary Pitt, you know, the 300 person tiered classroom and Welch came in and talked and Larry Bossidy, who later became chairman of Allied Signal and you got to meet and hear these guys and really get a sense for, if I want to be at that level, this is the kind of presence I've got to have and all of that. So Bossidy was a class act. That guy was my favorite of GE's executives. One day some guy asked a really stupid question and instead of Bossidy pouncing on him, he'd

turn the question into something that was intelligent. Oh, yeah. He'd say, what I think you're getting at here is such and such. Right. And then answer what he wanted to answer that was the intelligent part of the question and left the stupid part behind. Right.

That's great leadership. So it was very, very smooth the way he handled an audience. That sounds like it. And yeah, I mean, what a just nice thing to do. Because I mean, folks are nervous enough, I would imagine, right? Being there with so many people and these industry giants and leaders of the big companies. Absolutely. Yeah, what a great thing to do.

I mean, significant investment in your own people in time and um professional development and and stuff it's pretty awesome they recently announced that they're going to sell the campus which is you know i mean it's strategically the right thing to do gotcha but it's kind of an emotional thing for ge people to see crotonville go away yeah i bet i bet i wonder are you aware of um or really other places that you worked or that have similar kind of institutes or leadership development, things like that? No, actually, Sarah Lee was very much a, you bring what you had and they might send you away to a class if they wanted to invest in you, but they didn't really have the Crotonville kind of thing. Gotcha. Capital One was sort of creating Capital One University, but it was really in its infancy

when I was there. So GE was really, they really stood alone in that respect. And the GE training I got was honestly, in most ways, better than my master's degree. Oh, wow. That's pretty awesome. That says a lot too, because that's a pretty big deal. What was the, as far as, so we're talking about development and so Capital One, another big company, Sarah Lee, of course, was a big company. What would you say was, between those three, kind of the best opportunity you had to then mentor others?

Mentor others. Hmm. I guess I would have to say when I was chief financial officer at ballpark. Okay. Because ballpark, the name of the company was high grade, but everybody knows ballpark Frank's. Nobody knows the name high grade.

Yeah. But, but high grade was a company that serially had bought nine years before I got there. Okay. And they had missed the corporate targets nine years in a row, fired three different presidents and CFOs, and bringing a new president in. And then he hired me as the CFO, and he quit a month into the job. Oh, wow. So I'm in this situation where I'm essentially running a company

for all intents and purposes. And we're trying to change the culture to a winning culture and the strategy to a winning strategy from a company that has had nine years of failure. And so trying to bring people up to the level that it was going to take to, and I also had to cut a lot of people who were way heavy on people and finance. So I think I ended up having to let go upwards of 10 people out of my 40-person staff. Oh, wow. But trying to bring the rest up and making them see what excellence was going to look like, at least in my mind, and improve the way that the company was running. So I'd have to say that was, and we did it. Within a year and a half of me arriving, we hit the corporate targets.

We hit them again the year after that. We put some new products out that put the company on the right track for the future. Our market share went up significantly. So we did all the right things. And I obviously didn't do it by myself by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I had a significant influence on the culture and helping us get to where we needed to get. So I'd have to say that would be the number one example. The two things I thought of when you said that one, the, the art of firing people,

right. Letting them to go. What's one, one piece of guidance you could give somebody that's going to be in that position or, or is in that position now to help work through that, both for them and the person that they're going to have to remove from their job, essentially. So one example I have is a guy who essentially fired himself because we worked together. I kept coaching him. I invested in

him. I showed him how to do the kinds of analyses that I was expecting. And then he'd come back time after time with disappointingly badly prepared work. And ultimately, I called him in one day and I said, I won't use his name because some people might remember him. But I said, let's say it's Joe. Joe, how do you feel like you're doing on your job? And well, I'm not really doing very well. Do you think the job is a good fit for you? No, not really. Is there another job in the company that you think would be a better fit for you if I could make something happen?

You know, not really. And so essentially, is there any reason why we should keep you? And no, really, I think I'd be better off, you'd be better off if I just left. And so we put a little package together for him, and he essentially just kind of fired himself because the expectations were clear. The coaching was intense. We gave him every chance to succeed.

And when he realized that he flat out wasn't up to that kind of a job, he knew it, I knew it. Everybody around him knew it. And it was a better solution for him to go find something else to do that was not going to... I'm sure he was going home every night stressing out, afraid he was going to lose his job. So it was a better solution for everybody. And we gave him a little help on the way out so he had time to find another job before he got in a financial pinch. Which that seems great to kind of let them help make the decision, especially the offer to, you know, find them something else, right? Find them something else in the company, even, if you wanted to stay there.

And just say, look, you know, which to me essentially says, we'd still like to have you here, just not right here. Right. In this spot, right? Right. But you're not just like, okay, you're just out. Which is tough, and, you know, I'm sure it's happened, you here, just not right here in this spot. Right. But, but you're not just like, okay, you're just out, um, which is tough. And, and I'm, you know, I'm sure it's happened, you know, many times over the past few years for sure. And I mean forever, but in particular the past few years. Um, so yeah, hopefully that's helpful for folks. If you're in that spot of really helping

ask the questions that then the person who's going to be let go most likely can help answer themselves. Sounds like a good, a good setup for just a horrible situation. It's just hard to do that kind of thing. And I didn't do as elegant a job in a couple of other cases. But again, you learn from experience. Yeah, absolutely. Yes, and to that point, the experience you got with GE. And so can you remind me then of the sequence between, it was Union Carbide.

Union Carbide for six months, GE for 11 years, Sara Lee for 10 years, Capital One for not quite four. Gotcha. And that's where you made the jump from when you were at Capital One. Correct. To academia. Correct. Right. And it sounded like, and again, in the book um then having to go over and this is where you talk about and i call it this the the kind of red carpet myth and you didn't call it a myth i just say you know the way you said it in the book is great where it's don't expect because you did these great things in this other field or in the private sector to show up in academia and get the red carpet right you won't yeah you won't. In fact, I think things are maybe a little bit different

now because 16 years ago, there weren't too many people like me who jumped tracks from corporate life. And in fact, one of the department heads told me, I never thought you would do this. And if you did it, I didn't think you'd last a year. Nobody's going to take that kind of pay cut and jump into this kind of bureaucracy. Right. But I wasn't there for the bureaucracy. I was there because I was enjoying the student experience. Right.

But very few people thought I was even serious about it because it's such an unusual path. 16 years ago, it was such an unusual path. Now it's a little bit more of a thing where there are professors of practice, but now they're even hiring them with PhDs. So I jumped into a situation a little bit like, you know, close your eyes and jump into the pool and then, you know, let's hope when you hit water, you can start swimming. Right. You know what it sounded like too. So you had to, you know, you applied for a couple of different colleges in the area, Bridgewater and Virginia Tech.

Bridgewater and Virginia Tech were the only two I applied to. And they each give you kind of scenarios. What was the, the word used, not packages, but basically, you know, scenarios like,

Hey, here's this thing, solve it. And then here's this other thing. One was marketing focus at Bridgewater. Right. So Bridgewater, Bridgewater was smart.

They, they, they were very clever because they looked at my resume and saw what I had done. And then here's this other thing. One was marketing focus at Bridgewater, right? So Bridgewater was smart. They were very clever because they looked at my resume and saw what I had done, and there was no marketing on it, and they wanted me teaching marketing. So they said, come in and teach a marketing class. And they gave me a marketing prompt, and all they said was marketing in the macro environment. And that was the whole prompt that I got. So I designed a lecture that I thought was pretty good about marketing and the macro environment. And they said, we think you have promise as a teacher. But the other candidate, and there were only two of us, basically there were only two who came for audition interviews.

They said, you know, this person has considerably more experience teaching. We think you have potential, but we're going to go with the person who's more proven. And so they hired the other person. When I came to Virginia Tech, they gave me a case to do, which is one of those Harvard studies that they do in business schools. And it was 25 pages or something. And I had to basically break the case down like I used to do in business school and strategy classes and come in and present the to basically break the case down like I used to do in business school and strategy classes and come in and present the case and involve the class. I tried to involve the class in both cases.

But in a case study, you really have to pull more out of a class. Right. So I guess I knocked the ball out of the park because one of the people on the search committee came up and asked me how I came up with some of the analysis that I presented to the students. And she said she'd been teaching the case herself and hadn't really ever gone that deep with it. So, you know, so I think on that, on the strength of that, I got the offer. But, you know, coming back to your point about the red carpet, you know, I think naivelyively I thought that when I got to campus, people who were academics and teaching their whole life would ask me things like, how did this work in your company? And have you ever seen a scenario like this?

And I had that happen once. Oh, wow. In 16 years. And that faculty member left to go to another university, so she never asked me twice. So there isn't a sense of, wow, we really value your business experience, or at least there wasn't then. I think more so now than then. But again, I was kind of blazing a trail 16 years ago when I made the jump. You made the switch. Yeah.

The prompt you got from tech was donuts. It was Krispy Kreme donuts. Krispy Kreme donuts. Yeah, it was a case about Krispy Kreme donuts. Which I was a firefighter and worked with a lot of cops. So for the police, we don't have that study to help you evaluate your donut choice. A little donut joke for the police out there. Yeah, I mean's i think that's a great way too to interview we did that a lot in emergency management or um not as much in like

technology and things where it's scenario driven right because you can get a lot of one of those soft skills and the hard skills of you know analysis like you know someone could be really really good at and you know this really well but then they get in front of folks and they can't they can't relay that knowledge at all yeah or it's just reading the slides which is awful right they call that death by powerpoint yeah it's all yeah every time anytime whether it's a class or a seminar or whatever and someone turns and they're looking at the slide on the big screen i'm like oh no here it goes that's right i try not, which we'll touch on, too, to be looking at my phone. But, yeah, that's just a killer, which I think speaks to your point about, like, in GE, the culture.

And I think if you're going to be a good professor, you're going to be really good at any presentation where you're speaking. Put the work in ahead of time so you don't have to sit. You could touch on a slide and then just talk right to the audience. And to your point, I would imagine your corporate experience of having to pitch things and hear things from teams, then when you got in the classroom, were you already super comfortable in front of crowds? It was just a matter of reformulating your message, so to speak? Actually, I found myself nervous for a long time. Oh, wow. I would go away after about two sentences. Gotcha.

But when I walked into the classroom, I felt nervous because although I was totally comfortable pitching in front of crowds, I mean, I had to pitch the vice chairman of GE one time when I was there, Dennis Damerman. That was a nervous experience for sure. But I was more nervous than I expected when I got into the classroom because I wanted to be excellent. But what I found is that if you know your material cold and your computer blows up, class is not effective. Because you know what you want to accomplish that day.

And technology is nice if you need to share something on a slide that helps some students to visualize right but you should know your material well enough to where if if it blows up on you and technology doesn't work then you you're still fine i actually gave a case workshop for delta sigma pi business fraternity about maybe a month ago and i stupidly forgot my mouse and i had deactivated the mouse pad on the computer itself because every time i touched the keyboard, it would react. It would go all over the place. And so I'm sitting here with my computer and nobody in the 30 students or so were in the room had a mouse. So I said, that's all right.

I got this. Close the computer. And I just did it from memory. And if you know your material that well, then technology does not get in your way or the lack of technology does not get in your way. You should come in the classroom every day knowing exactly what you want to accomplish and what you're going to cover.

And that's the level of preparation that GE demanded. And I think I carried that over into what I expected of myself when I went in the classroom. Yeah. I mean, that's a great mindset to have for everything. Whether you're the student, the professor, pitching a new is whether you're the student the professor pitching a new project you're the project manager apprentice to your committee like whatever is so just to your point and for meetings that's one thing i found too like there should be tons of prep that happens before we get on a zoom call or before an in-person meeting because hearing um oh yeah i was going to

wait till this meeting to ask you that question i I'm like, why? There's this many other days in the work week, this one half an hour, an hour block of time. Why would you wait for that? And so to not be ready for a meeting, let alone a whole presentation or speech or to take in the information in class is not the way to go. Absolutely. Getting to Virginia Tech, starting to teach, starting to get your rhythm on how do I want to teach, developing course that matters, coursework that matters.

And what I found interesting is there was the course, but it's not like, say, I wanted to teach and I teach the same thing every semester for like five years and it doesn't change other than updates. You had some coursework that changed like all the time, right? Which did you reach back to relevant things? And this was a good point too that I want to touch on later as far as relevance when you're teaching folks. But how did you keep that interesting, up to date, ready to go, as opposed to what I would think of a traditional course where it's the same on the syllabus and people can choose it every semester and it doesn't really change a whole lot?

So the business world changes every day no and then you you if you're still teaching like one of the famous cases in in business school is the cola wars you know coke and pepsi roger enrico the the chairman of pepsi wrote a book that how pepsi won the cola wars like they were over oh wow it's the stupidest title for a book i ever saw because it's not like somebody just turned off the clock and the Cold Wars are now over in Pepsi One. So you have to keep in mind that the business world is constantly changing. And if you're not ready to talk about Bitcoin or if you're not ready to talk about some corporate failure like FTX or something like that. And the students know this stuff is going on, or at least some of them do. The better ones do.

You can't teach the same old stuff. You have to keep stuff fresh. And so every semester, we would evaluate what went well, what didn't go well. It's the same mindset of continuous improvement that you bring over from the corporate life. Oh, yeah. Right? And what went well? What did the students react to well?

What did the students not react to well? And you keep the stuff that works, and you tweak the stuff that doesn't work, and you might throw some stuff out that doesn't work at all. Okay. But one of my favorite days every semester teaching the intro class was when we got to entrepreneurship. I had an episode of Shark Tank about Oru Kayak that I really liked. Oh, cool. And so I would show them the pitch, then stop the video, and the students would be the sharks.

And they'd say, okay, I want to know about this, this question, this question. So they'd ask the questions, we'd write the questions down, then we'd play the sharks and see how well they did, see if they missed things. Right. And what they found was that even though they're freshmen, and they've never had a business class, or maybe they had one in high school, but most of them never had a business class, they have enough smarts to naturally figure out the kinds of things that need to be asked. And there would be a real confidence booster for them and a whole lot of fun just to see,

hey, I got the same question as this guy or that guy or this woman. And, you know, it was pretty cool. You know, I got the same question as Mark Cuban and he's a billionaire. That's a confidence builder. Right. So that was one thing we kept, but we threw out other stuff that didn't work. So you got to keep looking at what you're doing and making sure it's relevant to the world of business today. And you're not teaching something that's 20 years out of date or even five. Yeah, I was going to say the way business moves these days. And imagine you have to be kind of, as they say, your own worst critic and very objective with yourself.

Like, oh, I want this to say, so I'm not really going to say it didn't work or, you know what I mean? Or something like that, which was which is interesting. Would you all ever do kind of peer reviewed courses or is that something to say another professor or somebody would come in and watch and then give that feedback and then you incorporate that in your overall kind of assessment? There is not very much peer review that goes on. And really, I was shocked when I got there that nobody came to watch me. I mean, the feedback you get comes from the students and that's usually at the end of the semester because although one of the best practices I implemented pretty early in the game was getting a mid-semester evaluation so that if I was doing

something that wasn't working for him, I could find out week seven instead of week 15 and change it. Oh, yeah. But very little peer review goes on. Okay. One of the things that I just signed up for that I'll be starting to work on here pretty soon is called Master Teacher Mentors.

Oh, wow. And it's a group of people who've won teaching awards that are going to be willing to do peer reviews on new faculty to help them get better faster. Nice. And that's actually, it's almost an innovation, even though it shouldn't be. Right, right.

Just to see people being willing to put themselves out there and be reviewed by somebody who's an award winner. Right. I mean, you know you're going to get criticized. Oh, get criticized because the award winners, we think we all know everything. But I think that's a good thing, but there's not enough of that that goes on in academia, in my opinion. Yeah, because it seems like such a great opportunity, one, because it seems just the volume to be able to do it. There's so many classes going on. You could set up a rotation, like, hey, we're going to, you know, is it just the volume to be able to do it. There's so many classes going on. You can set up a rotation like,

Hey, we're going to, you know, is it, is it just the culture of academia that, you know, or it's just, that's just how it is.

So just be, which I hate to say, but my course, my material, my approach. Okay. There's like anywhere there's some egos and some fragile egos that don't want to hear criticism.

Yeah. I mean, I like to, and this is true in the business world too, you know, the private sector in particular of, I like that you do like a mid, right, evaluation where I think that would be a great standard where there's kind of maybe sometimes a soft self-evaluation or evaluation six months in and then so you don't wait a year and then find out here's what we thought about you the whole year but we didn't tell you until now you know it was a horrible thing so it's great to hear you did that with the students so they could tell you because you can change midstream and go oh you know what shoot i should change

that now instead of just letting it linger exactly and i mean i would tell them look if you don't feel like filling out the evaluation, stick a note under my door. Oh, nice. The campus is open 24-7. You can get in and slide a note under the professor's door. I promise I won't analyze your handwriting to try and figure out who wrote it. Type it if you want to, but give me the feedback somehow. That's great. Because if you wait until the end and then you slaughter me on a course evaluation, that's kind of the same thing as me not returning any graded work. And you get to the end of the semester and you tell the student,

I'm sorry, you failed. You didn't make it. I didn't tell you anything for 14 weeks, but here in 15, you know, week 15, I'm returning all your work and you failed.

Right. That's so feedback on an ongoing basis is just logical. Yep. But we're more, we tend to look more to the students for the feedback that we do to each other. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah. It just seems like, well, one, you're filling that gap now, it sounds like. So that's great. I hope so. I think this program is really promising. It's very, very early stages, but- And what's the program called? It's called Master Teacher Mentors. Master Teacher

Mentors. Cool. And we'll go over again how folks can link up with you or get in contact both for the book and for that here at the end of the episode. But that's great to hear because some of the best feedback you can get is from people that are either better at you than something. And so you have no recourse to really argue with them or your peers that you work with. Like when on the incident management teams to get credentialed, we have this whole task book and some you have to do on a real response. Some you can do like for pretend, but it's people that have been signed off. And most of those folks were like friends of mine. So it was pretty unfiltered public safety guy talk and talk about, as you mentioned, egos, you, you got to throw your ego, like just out the door before you have that

discussion because they're going to tell you, because the reason, you know, for us is like, you get it wrong. People can actually get hurt, die and things like that. And similar, you can shape or misshape someone's future by continuing to not teach them well or be a good leader or example for them or significant impact, especially young minds in college, I imagine. So to really take advantage and make the people that are shaping those minds better is awesome. That's really cool to hear. And you can do damage. One of my friends had a faculty member say to him in front of the whole class when he made a bad comment, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. You don't think he resented that? I bet. I bet he resented that pretty much. Dang. So service, developing great stuff Mentoring wasn't enough for you though

So you said Hey I want more, I want to be more involved And got involved in the honor system At Virginia Tech And I know we can't spill the beans and look behind the curtain But I would imagine One is they're kind of like a An indoctrination course

Hey here's, everybody has to sign an honor agreement, that kind of stuff, I would imagine. But how do you become someone that's then looking at cases? Or what was your kind of role on that? And what was, I guess to say, I was trying to think of how to keep it generic, the kind of genre of things that you would see the most, we'll say, I guess, right? Okay, so you get into it by just saying you're interested. They'll give you an orientation to make sure you know how the system works. It's more or less a condition of coming to Virginia Tech that you agree to abide by the honor system, even though the students generally don't know all the details of it. They offer workshops or orientation to the honor system at the beginning

of every semester so that students can make sure they're familiar with all the different points and the different ways they can find themselves in trouble. And it's really an important part of the culture of Virginia Tech that we agree that we're not going to cheat, we're not going to use other people's work and that kind of thing. And so once you've been through orientation, you sit on a panel with the majority of the, so I've been involved both at the graduate and undergraduate level. They're a little different in their approach, but I have a lot more experience with the undergraduate level. And there might be, I think there's seven people on the panel and one of them is a faculty member, the rest are students.

Oh, wow. And, you know, essentially it's sort of set up a little too much like a courtroom with a plaintiff and a defendant. But, you know, I don't know that there's an alternative to it. But, you know, the faculty member or the student who's bringing the complaint presents why they think the person should be held responsible for what they did. Okay. presents why they think the person should be held responsible for what they did. And the student has an opportunity to either say, you know, yeah, I did that. And then that would pretty much be handled before it ever got into the panel type of setup. Okay.

But you listen to the facts and you can ask questions and, you know, and you find out as much as you can about what happened before you throw somebody under the bus. Because if that person's found responsible, there's a considerable academic penalty. I think the minimum penalty when I was there was a double-weighted F. So you're failing the course, and you're failing it again as far as your grade point average is concerned. So it's a pretty heavy hit if you mess up. And so we want to make sure everybody's educated. They do their absolute best to make sure people are informed. And we also try to be very fair. And what I found is that some of the students who volunteer for the honor panel tend to be kind of on the prosecuting attorney sort of

personality. They're tough. They don't let their classmates off easily at all. Okay. And I think that's a good thing, but I think it can also be taken a little too far at times. And I actually found myself to deciding vote on more than one occasion. Oh, wow. When I had to vote to find a student not responsible

because the faculty member maybe contributed something to the student getting in trouble. Like in one case, the faculty member loaned the student a calculator that was illegal. So it did functions. And the student wasn't allowed to have a calculator that did functions, but you gave it to him. Right. So how can you say it's his fault when you gave him, you know, I mean, that's, that's what they would call entrapment and, you know, policing. So, so I had to vote to let the student off, but, but, uh, the majority of the kind of cases are

pretty simple. Um, somebody cheated, somebody stole a paper. Um gotcha i had one it didn't make it to the honor well it didn't make it to the honor system but not to a panel where one student turned in a paper with another student's name on it that was in the class the previous semester so she didn't even open the file like okay that was kind of foolish no kid not even open the file and change the name to yours. If you were going to accept the whole rest of the file, turn the file in. No doubt. You know, that was as open a shutter case as you get.

And kind of silly on her part to do something like that, because we have plagiarism detectors and things that check students' work against previously submitted work. Like electronic? And we tell them that and we tell them that yeah oh wow yeah and we tell them that you know this this could be checked against previous submissions so you know just don't cheat yeah do the work it's not that hard do you think do you think most of it was driven or do you know from what you saw and the response from whatever verdict was given to typically the negative just the pressure of being in college negatively affected folks. Could you tell if it was folks that had a pattern of doing it throughout their school? You know what I mean? It was, did you ever get that much info or?

There was a couple of people that I thought had a pattern. Gotcha. Mostly I think what ends up doing, what ends up happening is students get lazy. They, they, they just want to get the assignment out of the way, and they're sloppy, and they do something foolish, and they're not really bad people. They just make a dumb mistake and a dumb choice. And instead of writing a paper that's going to take you two hours, you'd rather go to some bar that night or whatever. And so you skip the work part, and then you have to figure out a way to make up for it and you do something silly. And most of them are like that.

And I have had a couple that I thought were kind of... I had one student up on honor court charges twice in one semester and neither one of them actually got heard because he got kicked out of school before they got heard. You could see a pattern there that he was just kind of school before they got heard so that one you could see a pattern

there that he was just kind of a you know a guy who was just trying to work the system right in the system um but for the most part i think it's just didn't just make a bad choice in a in a weak moment yeah they're not bad people yeah i mean that imagine that plus depending on you know how independent were they before they got to college now they're here and there's all these different things you can do and certainly writing the paper isn't the most popular of them first like to your point going out making friends the pressure of will i get in this club that club sorority fraternity all that kind of stuff and and you know which i don't understand my i i did i did a semester in community college right out of high school with that i barely got through because I was lazy and then joined the Navy.

So I went to college when I was in my 30s with a child, so it was very different. My kids would be like, did you do that in college? When we would see our nephew and niece that were college age, I was like, no, my college was totally different. Go, come home, yeah. So I don't understand, but I'll learn. I'm a 16-year-old, so it's not that long before we'll see what the pressure's like when he's in there. That's for sure. Yeah.

One other area of service that you highlighted in here, I'll call it an area of service, is you were on campus the day of the shooting. Awful day in 2007, in April 2007, standing at the door, which was interesting, too. And I put my emergency management hat on that you were a leader to find out, hey, what at the door, uh, which was interesting too. And I put my emergency hat on management hat on that you were, you know, a leader to find it. Hey, what's the procedures in that? And unfortunately we have to have procedures for those things, which is crazy and it, and it stinks. Um, and then man, the call center, um, you know, for taking calls and you said most of

the calls that you got were then how could people help? Like how could they donate for either families or the school or kind of whatever um and i imagine tech set up a bit you know a donation center and those kind of things to take those calls yeah they they set up a fund specifically for the victims and the victims families yeah you know kids who were wounded and the families who lost their kids and in in some cases, faculty members as well. And I was looking for some way to be valuable in the midst of this total terrible thing

that was the worst thing I ever went through in my life. Yeah. And I just wanted to find some way to feel like I was doing something useful, so I signed up to be a volunteer in this call center. And by the time I ended up, my turn came up, I think most of the people looking for other people kinds of things, all of that had kind of gotten over with by then. The night that I was volunteering,

it was the night that the Shooter's Manifesto video came out on the news. And so we got a lot of calls. You know, hey, did you know this was coming and that kind of thing. But most of the people who called the nights that I volunteered were looking for ways to give money to help the families. Wow. Which is great that, one, people do that after a tragedy. And part of the story after that where you had dinner with some of the students and they're affected, and I wrote down here from there, which unfortunately, but often, through hard times or through tragedy,

there's that inspiration, right? Which that time and seeing that and people coming together and healing then kind of re-inspired you or cemented yeah this is where i need to be yeah right and i remember that dinner i remember a thing we said other than the young lady who said i should have an entry-level fish taco because it was my first time at cabo yeah but i remember the students who were there i even remember you know what they when one of them was wearing and and i remember having you know giving one of them a hug on the way in and it was kind of awkward

because I'd never given a student a hug before and it was like, this seems like a hugging moment and it was just certain little details that stick in your brain but what came out of it for me was just this incredibly warm feeling like

I care about these kids right and they've just been through the worst thing imaginable in their lives and you know here we are trying to heal having a fish taco and just talking about this that or the other thing and right what we talked about i don't remember sure but what i do remember is the just the feeling of you know of bonding and and warmth and how much i cared about them and you know and i still keep in touch with with a couple of them oh well i mean that's huge with um i've done a few episodes and a lot of research and from my past and you know of like traumatic stress and things like that and just talking talk therapy whether it's chit chat um you know it just helps right it makes a difference because you know

you're familiar with whether it's work related family related trauma related um you keep it bottled up it's going to come out at some point and so i imagine the therapeuticness of that was there and that that flash memory of traumatic events where it's like it's wild how you can unfortunately photographically remember that you know or good with the conversation but um yeah that was a really um both you know hard to read sad but inspirational piece where sometimes you get like this is why i'm making a difference this is why i'm going to push on this is you know going to do that um but at some point you decided, all right, I think I'm out. And we touched on this when I started, or before we started, rather, about the three big areas, or three big reasons, I'll say, rather, that you decided that you were ready to retire.

Well, kind of retire because you sound like you're still busy but officially retire i guess from academia right uh and the first one that you mentioned was you wanted to go out on top um kind of like a sports figure what would say like in their prime right kind of yeah you know i mean i i felt like i was a pretty good professor i mean the awards were showing up so i you know i'd have to say that the awards kind of speak for themselves and i guess i was a pretty good professor yeah i don't want to ever get too full of myself about it. But I felt myself slipping a little bit. My passion wasn't as great. My feeling of adrenaline coming out of the classroom that I used to get a lot wasn't as strong.

And I said to myself, I don't want to be ever in a position where somebody says, he was good once. Right. I don't want to be the sports star who comes back out of retirement like Michael Jordan and is nowhere near the same player he was before he retired. Stay retired, Michael. You were great. You did everything you needed to do. I went and saw him play with the Wizards one time. He scored nine points

like michael jordan i knew he would have nine points five minutes into the game no doubt right so uh so i i wanted to to leave at a time when i felt like i was still respected right which is which is huge because it's also probably really hard right because there's still some of that passion in you but i think it's great to identify, okay, this isn't for me now. Like, you know, at what point to know when to stop, which is cool because it's, I think, a very matured way to look at yourself,

which is very, very hard for people to do, right? And realize, like, you're not performing like you used to. And so that's huge. And I think a message for folks listening folks listening like sometimes maybe stop and take stock in what you're doing and do you get up and you're happy about it do you leave it you know not every day at work's gonna be awesome right where you come home and you're like yeah but uh i think that's a great tool folks could use you know as a initiative there's is a tool like a how am i where am i with my career and happiness kind of thing assessment um i'm initiative there's is a tool like a how am i where am i with my career and

happiness kind of thing assessment um i'm sure there's some of those but that's yeah i thought that was very interesting and then good old covid for everybody involved uh made a big difference too because it changed the dynamic of interacting with humans really yeah i mean teaching online is not my thing yeah relationships with the students that was was my thing. I mean, I wrote in a book, I came to class early intentionally every day. Yeah. So that I could get set up and then go around and talk to students and make them feel comfortable, make myself seem accessible, which I always wanted to be. And with COVID, I'd have a screen full of names with maybe two cameras on wow and you can't get any feedback sense of you know the students getting this are they not getting this yeah

any questions and there's just silence and you have no facial expressions to read or anything to to tell you this point got through move on right or this point didn't get through keep going and you know and make it another way right so that aspect of it, teaching online is not my thing, and COVID was what forced us to go online. And even when we came back, we came back in a hybrid fashion to where we had to record the lecture and then go to the classroom for those who wanted the classroom. Oh, wow. And out of 190-something students I had that semester, only five came to class regularly. Holy smokes. So it was three sections of 65 or so. And one student, three students, two students.

Why am I doing this this way? I can't teach to one student. I mean, that's too much pressure on them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole thing's on you today. Exactly. You're the only student in the class. Do you understand this point?

What about this one? What about this? No doubt. It's like the third degree for that poor kid. Yeah. I mean, hopefully, and so is it now, do they still offer hybrid, do you know, as far as you could go online? Yeah. Once I left, I pretty much left.

That was it, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's still tough at work now, too, which there's so many more, hundreds of thousands of jobs. One is good, I guess, but that you could say you go on whatever job search, and I want hybrid, I want remote, or whatever, and there's tons of those. But not as much from the relationship building with student professor thing, but even from

like, hey, let me just get up and go walk over and talk to you about this issue that we were just, you know, emailing about or something like that. Just that personal resolution is definitely something that, um, has diminished in, in business, let alone in academia. And I definitely, you know, and this is from a guy that's been remote now for four, for four years, but, but that's, that's a big detriment, very similar to what you're talking about in the book and with the classroom. It's just a huge, huge thing. I actually wrote a, I don't remember if it was on LinkedIn

or on my website, how, to me, handshakes should never go away. I think that's a big thing, right? The human-to-human interaction is huge. And yeah, I think it's, I can, I understand why, right, from the pandemic and things like that, but I think. Hand shakes followed by hand sanitizer. It's not quite the same thing.

No, not at all. Yeah, that and, you know, I think it's some folks are maybe still a bit slow to get back and, you know, everybody's got their choices and things, but hopefully we come full circle to the human interaction piece being, you know, critical. And how do we make that kind of better? But I won't linger on the COVID topic. That's a, that's got, you know, to the human interaction piece being critical and how do we make that kind of better.

I won't linger on the COVID topic. That's got every news channel going on. And then smartphones, the other big dynamic, right? They have a whole world of entertainment at their fingertips. I can't compete with PewDiePie, who just got knocked out of the number one spot on YouTube, by the way. Oh, no.

By Mr. Beast? Yeah, Mr. Beast knocked him out. Yeah, that's exactly right. pie who just got knocked out of the number one spot on youtube by the way but oh no but you know he's been by mr beast yeah mr beast knocked him out yeah that's exactly right and i mean the students would get a kick out of knowing that this you know 60 something year old faculty member even knows who the host is but but you know i can't compete with that yeah you know or with them watching the highlights uh you know monday night football or whatever it is that they're doing. Right. And you try to, say, keep your cell phones in your bags. They're under the table looking at them. Right. You say, okay, bring your cell phones out.

We'll do a class poll and use some kind of software that brings the cell phone into it. Right. And that's not enough because now they're in their fingers and they're looking at 15 other things while the poll's being taken. So I just couldn't compete with that and i didn't like having to compete with that right and that was you know that that day of uh of apple inventing the iphone that was the beginning of the end for me being able to keep students attention as as well as i'd like yeah yeah the um so i used to teach incident management so i used to teach kind of the concepts

we use to respond to things and organize special events and stuff public safety wise and i did an episode uh i think it's been a couple years now that um is like on the student instructor etiquette right and of course cell phones have to be on there but even adults right in class or in meetings i'll see some of my old colleagues now and they're at conferences and like this class was great. And they'll have a picture with them in the class. And like half the people have their phones out looking at them, not or they're planning something and same thing. And I'm like, which I look for it on purpose now because I know this reality of it.

Right. And it's unfortunate. It's also adults in these professional settings. And then, you know, let alone kids in the classroom. And I imagine probably because of, unfortunately, you know let alone kids in the classroom and i imagine probably because of unfortunately you know incidents like shooting attack and other stuff you can't not have them let them have their phones that's exactly right right part of the emergency management yeah notification system shooting out texts and you know notifications and things and then exactly

you can't um you know block signal you do anything to not let them do that or, or cause they have their own plans and stuff. So it's, that's a tough challenge to get around. I imagine it has to be a, um, uh, not a technical solution, but, uh, you know, uh, a people solution somehow, but yeah, it's, we'll see. I think the best are going to have to figure out how to work with the cell phones right there in front of them. Okay. And either just, you know, just be able to ignore and not be distracted right there in front of them. Okay. And either just, you know, just be able to ignore and not be distracted by students doing it.

Right. Or, you know, find strategies to get the students back into the discussions when you can see that they're out of it. Gotcha. But, you know, I just couldn't really find my way in that environment to the, at least not to the extent that I was satisfied with. Gotcha. Gotcha. And, you know, and I'm going to work from the bottom of my list now, because you just segued right to it, which is great, is finding ways. And this is so getting

to, which is great. So you bring us through some of the stuff we talked about, and there's way more in the book. So again, get from boardroom to the classroom, is how folks can do the same thing you did or similar. So you can go from the corporate world to go teach. But one of the things that you mentioned that definitely stood out was use the trends. Use those trends that are going to be attractive to the students that make them want to be engaged. And you did that when you were teaching because obviously you're talking about something they don't care about.

Phones are not. They're not going to pay attention. How would you do that? Would you just stay up to date on who's number one on YouTube, looking up the kind of pop culture stuff and latest in business? A lot of times it came from talking to students. Oh, okay. You'd ask them, what are you interested in?

What's trending or whatever. But a lot of conversations. I mentioned in the book that I found out about the band Death Cab for Cutie by talking to a student who had her headphones on, took her headphones on and said, what were you listening to? And she kind of looked ashamed. And she said, Death Cab for Cutie. And I said, I don't know what that is, but I'm going to go find out.

And I was expecting it to be like Nirirvana on steroids oh yeah and you know it's i liked it yeah and i so so connecting with students and finding out through discussions with them okay you know what's interesting what's happening you know you you read papers you you know you right watch youtube or see what's trending and any any number of ways to pick up on things that would be interesting. For example, what's going on in Blacksburg now with the campus where they're saying they're going to have this whole new section that's going to be 5,000 new beds and it's going to be its own little city where they're going to increase the number of beds on campus. And so I actually sent an email to the guy who took my course over from me, the intro

to business class. And I said, this would make an interesting discussion about stakeholders. Because the students would have an understanding of the developers don't like it because it might lower their rents. The town likes it because it's going to lower traffic. And so when you're talking about the different stakeholders to a business, the same kind of thing applies to this situation. You pick up little things that would just apply to the class, and you bring them in, and you see what works. Sometimes a joke that worked at 9 got retold at 10 and 11. It happens. You've got to recycle them.

Spontaneous at 9 and planned at 11 and 12 yeah yeah there's there's being able to evaluate um you know like in program project management you know the risks and is this an environmental thing a political thing how do you navigate it you know how do you not navigate it you know depending on you know what you're doing and all that kind of stuff that's great that's great perspective beyond can you balance numbers? Can you do this process that it says in this thing? You know what I mean? That, that has to supersede all of that. And, and, you know, just again, bringing back to relationships, like we talked about earlier, helped you get that information that then makes every, you know, every aspect of it better, which is cool. The other thing,

and I ran into this too. so having interest is master's degree. It's like you can't get around it, right, if you want to teach. Not if you want to teach at a big university. I can't speak to every university or smaller schools or whatnot, but at Virginia Tech, a master's degree is like the ante. Entry level, yeah. Yeah. All that does is get you to the table.

Gotcha. They really want you to have a PhD. Oh, wow. Some of the professors of practice that they're hiring on the non-tenure side are coming in with PhDs. They just don't want to do as much research as the tenure side people. So you have to play ball academia's way. You got to buy what they sell. And if they're selling education at the graduate level, you got to have an education at the graduate level before, no matter what your business experience. Right.

I think they might make an exception for Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or somebody who's obviously killed it in the world of business. The big outliers, yeah. But you erase the big outliers from the equation, 99% of people are going to be expected to have the kind of degrees that academia wants before people are going to be expected to have the kind of degrees that academia wants before they're going to let them teach a course. So that's just a starting point. And then you want to network your way into the campus. The good news is there's lots of advisory boards now. When I started my road in, there was only the dean's advisory board,

and you were either on it or you weren't. Now every department has its own advisory board, so you've got a lot more points of entry. There's a young alumni board. Actually, it's not young. They use the word recent because they want to account for a guy like you who's 30 and who graduated, and they want you on the board, but you're not, quote unquote, in your 20. No. So it's the recent alumni board, but there's lots of opportunities to get plugged in. Okay. There's opportunities to speak. You can teach at a community college. You won't get paid much, but you can at least get a feel for whether it's you or not.

Is it in your DNA? Or by the end of the semester, are you just totally worn out? Right. Because it's not for everybody. We had one faculty member we brought in who, just to teach one course, and she hit the ground running. She was on fire. She was loving it. By the midterm, she was gassed. She realized this is not all these student issues and all the extra time I'm having to take out of class and all of that kind of thing is, and that's not what I wanted to do. I just wanted to give the lectures and go. So, so it's not for everybody, you know, get in, do something at a community college level and, and see if it fits. It's like you're trying on a pair of shoes.

Yeah. That's a great point. And honestly, you just worked down the list. I was going to prompt. That's perfect. So for folks listening, if you want to go from the board into the classroom, here's some actionable things. One, master's degree, right? If you want to be at a major university and I guess you can, you know, it's pretty obvious you can find out what the requirements are for whatever target school you want to go to. Correct. And then teach, get teaching experience. you also mentioned so you mentioned community college but you also mentioned in your company so like try and be the person that teaches new people this or you know whatever specialty you're doing or some area right because teaching is teaching is teaching to some respect the ability to teach something that

you know and then i imagine you learn a lot more, this is how you do it in this setting. And then like you mentioned, all the administrative stuff that goes with it, course prep and all that jazz, yeah. Yeah, don't underestimate that. The course prep is probably 75% of course success. Yeah, which is great getting, you know, printed so many, probably less these days,

but when we teach courses, we have to use, we do a lot of paper because you're doing field work and this kind of stuff. And yeah, just getting the manuals and then going, okay, who's going to teach this section? And when are we going to go to this and synchronizing it? But it pays off because then smoother in the delivery and everything. And you mentioned the networking piece. You mentioned fraternity, sororities, or if not, that was one thing you mentioned in the book. Become a guest speaker, right? Say, hey, I've done this, or, you know, probably depending on how you package it.

And it helps if you know, to your point, if you network, right? So if you have an in or not, or just, I guess you could cold email or call them and say, you know, I have interest in getting down this road. You know, there's a website, and I'm not trying to advertise it, but it's called speakerpost.com. Oh, cool. And it's a person I know, Kamal Kapoor, who is organizing this essentially networking website to bring speakers and campuses together. Cool. So you can sign up, and you may live in Blacksburg, Virginia, and find yourself teaching for UCLA or something one day. Oh, wow.

That was speakerpost.com. Check it out. day oh well that was speaker was it speaker post.com so it's uh you know there's there's ways of getting yourself in a classroom even if you don't live anywhere on college campus that's awesome that's technology you can do that uh mentor programs too which sounds like similar what you're talking about but um usually those are alumni okay who want to give back and oh cool and mentor students. We set up a formal mentor program when I was MBA director. We didn't talk about that aspect of my teaching time,

but I was MBA director for seven or eight years, and we set up mentor programs and got them connected to business people. Oh, nice. That's a way for business people to get connected to campus without giving up their full-time job and see whether dealing with students is something they enjoy. That's true. I guess that's a good first step too, is do you even want to be around students, let alone teach them and interact with them? Exactly. Put time in. And one other way you mentioned, or two more, but this one,

for your company, if they're doing recruiting, say, hey, I'll be the recruiter that goes to, you know, obviously where you want to go teach, but a school to get your foot in the door or something. Absolutely. And, you know, it's one of my favorite days when I was a professor was the day of the Business Horizons job fair. Oh, yeah. Because, and inevitably you walk through the auditorium where they were having it, and there were 10 people in there that I'd had in class that had come back to campus to recruit for their companies. Oh, nice. That's cool. So it was like a whole home week, you week, seeing all these people and seeing how much they'd grown

in their careers. But that's another way for them to give back and stay plugged into campus is just coming back and being a recruiter. That's cool. And the last one I wrote down is give money. You're like, donate to the school. That becomes kind of expected. When I was being hired at Virginia Tech, the guy in development who was helping advocate for me as a candidate, said, it's just a question, and I didn't put this part in the book, but he said, it's just a question at this point of how many zeros are going to be in the check that you write. And I'm thinking, well, I didn't know this was about paying my way in. Right. But, you know, I ultimately did a decent check.

It wasn't probably what he was hoping for, but it was what I was willing to do. Yeah. But, you know, anyone that's gone to school, I think you're perpetually on the mailing list for donations. Yeah, that doesn't take long after you graduate before they start sending you requests for money. And it's not your student loan. No. They're asking for you. I'm pretty sure I didn't notify them I moved,

but they find me everywhere I go. They're very good about that. Yeah, they definitely are. Well, Steve, man, this has been a great discussion. Thank you. I enjoyed it. Yeah, me too. Absolutely.

Yeah, we were talking about it. So we're already at an hour and 15. Look how fast that went by. I didn't really mean to do that, but I hope people didn't go to sleep. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah,

and certainly, but I will say I'm an advocate for reading before you go to sleep. So if you want something to read, not that it'll put you to sleep, from the boardroom to the classroom, quitting corporate for more purpose. And I think we heard a lot about, it sounds like you've had so much purpose,

right? Between from your upbringing, from your dad, you know, through tragedy, from just you wanting to help folks and then doing so, doing the right thing, how you let folks go, unfortunately had to at work and then on campus. And then now still with the mentor programs, which is awesome. So what is kind of a purpose that you, or we could reiterate to folks that they're in the business world. They're like this, I want to go teach, you know, what, what should their kind of focus purpose be before they take any of these steps that we've just given them? So you got to be a

giver. You know, it's not about what you're going to get out of the job is what you're going to give to people by taking the job. And that's, that's, if you're not in it with that is what you're going to give to people by taking the job. And that's, that's, if you're not in it with that mindset that you're here to give, then you're not going to be the professor that you could be. You're not, you're not probably won't even enjoy it. Right. Because the whole, what made my eyes light up every day for doing the job that I did and I loved for almost 16 years. It was making a difference

in the lives of students. You know, they show up on campus, 17, 18, 19 years old. Right. They don't necessarily know what they want to do. If you can help them find their way, not you're not going to reach every kid, but if you can help some of them find their way and that's what you're here for, is to give, to help, to be a service mentality. And if you don't have a service mentality, don't waste your time. Well said. How can folks efficiently use their time to find you? How can they connect with you? Should they look for you on LinkedIn, somewhere else, especially if they have interest in the mentor program or what's the best way? So I'm on LinkedIn, Stephen Skripak, S-K-R-I-P-A-K if you need the spelling.

Thank you for the spelling. It's not a household name like Smith. Yeah. But I'm on LinkedIn. My email address is published on the Virginia Tech website. So rather than trying to read it out here, you can just go on Virginia Tech directory. I'm still there. Okay.

And you can Google me. You'll find me that way. I actually show up a fair amount on Google. Oh, nice. So you'll find me one way or another. But yeah, definitely reach out because one of the things that's been fun about having done this book

is a number of people who've already reached out to me for advice. Oh, great. And I've connected with online that I didn't even know before. And also students I had in class years ago. And I talked to one of them the other day. He's 40. Oh, wow. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, did that ever made me feel old? Because he was in my

very first class and he's a senior vice president now with a big hotel chain. That's awesome. You see how great they're doing. Again, it all comes back to the relationships. But I'm easy to find. Cool. Very nice. And I assume the book can be found on Amazon. Yeah.

Yeah, that's all right now. The biggest bookseller. Okay. That's awesome. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks. Good to see you. I'm sure we'll see you again soon down the street walking the dogs.

Absolutely. Thanks again for having me. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, absolutely. First in the new KevTalks Above the having me. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, absolutely. First in the new KevTalks Above the Garage studio. I think it worked pretty good. Thank you everybody for listening.

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