Heidi Neck and her teaching colleagues at Babson are way out in front of the seismic changes taking place in business today, offering students an education in the fuzzy front end of entrepreneurship—the places where there’s still lots of friction to contend with.
Heidi Neck has been teaching entrepreneurship at Babson since 2001. So what’s changed since then?
At Babson, a degree in entrepreneurship has historically been about new venture creation, she says. “But what our students learn is transferable. The world needs our students to think and act entrepreneurially, regardless of what they do.”
We ask Neck about the value of a college education these days, when you can find pretty much anything you want about any topic you’re interested in on the Internet. If all the knowledge is in the cloud, what point is there of a college campus?
“My favorite song is ‘Landslide’ by Stevie Nicks,” Neck replies. “Google can provide you with the lyrics, but it can’t teach you how to sing.” Neck says the role of educators is to create environments in which students can actually experience and practice aspects of entrepreneurship. “Our job is to help students sing.”
How have the changes that technology has wrought been reflected in the curriculum? What ways can they be reflected in the curriculum? “Given how the nature of work is changing,” says Neck, “our job is to teach students how to act in increasingly uncertain environments. They need to get comfortable with the uncertainty of our age. Which means they need to develop the ability to learn how to learn.”
And for that, we might add, they will need to develop the courage to learn.
That’s just as important—or perhaps more important—for those in the workforce today as it is for those who haven’t entered it yet. Why? Because the technological revolution is rendering increasing numbers of jobs irrelevant with every passing day. You don’t need to be on the forefront of technology to realize that call center jobs, once a mainstay of a consumer economy, are not long for this world. At this point, the first fifty questions a customer has can be answered by a chatbot. I know that because when I asked Britt to look into chatbots, she came back two hours later and told me that we were good to go—our chatbot was already operational.
What’s the difference between ambiguity and uncertainty? “To me, ambiguity means ‘I’m a little confused, but I can figure it out.’ Uncertainty, on the other hand, is more of ‘I have no idea what the hell is going on, but I have to do something.’ From an educator’s perspective, we have to teach them how to ‘act in order to learn,’ as opposed to the old way, which was ‘learn in order to act.’”
Neck teaches what she refers to as the “fuzzier front end of entrepreneurship.” That’s the stuff they can’t jam into a spreadsheet—topics such as mind-set, idea generation, opportunity identification, and analysis. What’s changed in the past two decades? “More educators are emphasizing evidence-based entrepreneurship over writing a business plan,” she says. “I’m not against planning, just against the business plan per se.” The other thing she’s seen is that the thing they’re teaching has shifted from entrepreneurship to the entrepreneurial mind-set. What does that mean? “It means that some of the most impressive stuff is going on outside business schools themselves,” says Neck. “Engineering schools are adopting it, there’s entrepreneurship in the arts . . . everyone is much more accepting of the e-word than they were twenty years ago.”
At The Inside, I ask my employees to act like entrepreneurs too. So much uncertainty and ambiguity have crept into every facet of business these days that it’s not just the CEO of a startup that needs to be entrepreneurial—it’s everyone. Those are the only people who are going to be adaptable enough to survive now that the once-steady ground that is business is literally moving beneath our feet.
But it’s not just for startups either. “Twenty years ago, students who wanted to work for large companies were leery of taking entrepreneurship courses, because they thought that larger companies would be turned off by it,” says Neck. “Today, it’s the opposite—the large companies are saying, ‘We want those kids, even if they’re not going to be with us for a long time.’ That’s a big shift.”
The thinking at Babson, says Neck, is that the teaching of entrepreneurship is a way to make sure that students realize that business cannot be considered as a collection of silos. They’re trying to teach students to be whole-minded. “Every entrepreneur ultimately understands how marketing integrates with sales,” she says, “how sales integrates with operations, and how operations integrates with the overall business model—because everything in business is connected.” The goal? To provide graduates with the wherewithal to tolerate ambiguity and navigate uncertainty, and the ability to see the totality of a business.
While Neck teaches entrepreneurship in the context of starting a business, what she’s really teaching, she says, is entrepreneurship as a life skill. We agree. If you’re going to succeed at all in the future, the entrepreneurial mind-set isn’t just something you might want; it’s nonnegotiable.
As every entrepreneur can tell you, of course, you can’t teach the majority of the things that make for a successful entrepreneur. When we ask Neck about Harvard Business School’s vaunted case method, she scoffs. “Students can’t know how to navigate a system in real time until they actually do it,” she says. “Case studies don’t give you that experience.” So what can business schools ultimately do, if they can’t offer actual experience? “In some respects,” says Neck, “I think we’re giving the students the courage to try.” Which is a lot.
Which company founded by a Babson grad is her favorite showcase of all that an entrepreneurial venture can be? That would be Bigbelly Solar, founded by Jim Poss. Bigbelly has applied both renewable energy (solar) and cellular communication to the complex and expensive process of waste collection. The company’s sensor-equipped waste and recycling bins transmit real-time status to municipalities to streamline waste operations. In short, they don’t come to collect the trash until they have to.
What does Neck worry about when it comes to her students’ mind-set? She worries that they all think they’re going to start a business, get that $50 million in funding, and then exit the business with a stunning liquidity event in just a year or two. “There’s too much attention on the exit,” she says. “Young entrepreneurs need to focus on building a scalable business rather than a fast unicorn exit. If they build for scale, the exit will come at the right time for the right reason.”
She’s right. You can trust me on this too: entrepreneurship is just too difficult to enter into with a gambler’s motivation. If all you want to do is roll the dice, go buy yourself some dice.