A Lot of Hard Work Comes to Fruition

I wrote two posts ago about the course I've been trying to start here at the Johnson School -- Creative Design for Affordability. Well, I'm happy to report that the dream of making this course a reality has finally come to fruition.

I wanted to tell the entire story here, since it's not often documented how something challenging comes to pass. Often, when I see someone take a leadership role and come out successfully, I assume it must just be easy for that person. Perhaps they're a born leader. Or, at the very least, they know what they want and somehow just make it happen. Not so for me.

The Genesis of the Idea

About three years ago, I was a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York. I was covering business school education and had been reporting on a number of different topics and trends at b-schools around the country and around the world. One thing I found interesting was that more and more schools were teaching creativity in their curricula. Their argument: any school can produce an army of quant jocks; it's the people that show leadership and creativity that ultimately achieve a lasting level of success.

Through the course of writing a story on the topic called "Creativity Comes to B-School", I came upon the Stanford course I'd previously blogged about. The enthusiasm and excitement I heard from the course professor was contagious, and he spent an hour on the phone with me (a normal interview generally lasts between 15-25 minutes or so) discussing its genesis and eventual success.

I was sold on this course. And not only did I learn about it, but I also took the low-cost lighting product a team of Stanford engineers and MBAs had developed in the course with me to Argentina, where I launched a pilot project to market them to microfinance borrowers in the rural north of the country.

Last Winter

Knowing that such a course didn't (but should) exist at Cornell, I set out to figure out how to get it started. Luckily, I had some extra motivation. One of the requirements of accepting the Park Fellowship is completing a project that benefits either the Cornell or Ithaca community. Imitating the Stanford Extreme Affordability course seemed the obvious project for me. And how hard could it be to imitate a course that already existed, that had already created a successful blueprint?

About a year ago, I set out to find out. I developed an initial proposal for a new course based on the Stanford idea, with an international trip component and a close relationship with the Johnson School's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise. I arranged meetings with the Center's director, Mark Milstein, and also with the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Doug Stayman. I received enthusiasm and an offer to help from Milstein, and a degree of skepticism from Stayman. Emulating the Stanford course would be a monumental challenge, he said, since they had founded a Design Institute with funding from several successful Silicon Valley-based alums. The only way to make it happen during my time at Johnson would be to find a faculty member willing to teach -- or at least oversee -- the course by June.

So the next task was laid out before me -- find a faculty sponsor before the end of the semester and I'd be good to go. The course would be as good as done. One more warning from Stayman -- it would be difficult, he said, to entice a Johnson School faculty member to take on a new course. They would have to drop one of their existing courses, since just about everyone was already oversubscribed. After conversations with a couple more Johnson School professors, I began to think that Stayman had been right.

To take the pressure off whichever Johnson School faculty member I eventually might persuade, I set my sights on finding two professors to jointly deliver the course. Asking around, I began to understand that many faculty members across campus are interested in issues of sustainability, international development, and new product development, which were the three overarching topics of the course.

Last Spring

As luck would have it, Cornell President David Skorton had recently announced a campus-wide task force called the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future (CCSF). That organization was headed by a professor of Physical Science named Frank DiSalvo, so I made an appointment with him. I pitched my course idea to him. He agreed to present my idea to the CCSF executive committee at their next meeting, but I got the feeling he was so busy that he probably just filed my proposal in the circular file.

Around that time, I decided to substantiate my claim that the Johnson School needed a product design course. So I surveyed the student body through a simple SurveyMonkey survey online. I got 158 responses to the survey, 75% of which said that "yes, they are interested in designing and building products that meet people's everyday needs in affordable ways." My resolve was strengthened; at least now I knew for sure that I was trying to do something for the Johnson School that people wanted.

By now, it was getting to be late in the Spring, and I hadn't yet identified a faculty sponsor. I let down my guard for a while and stopped pursuing any more professors. Frustration had begun to set in.

Summer

The end of the Spring semester came and went, and I presented Park Leadership Fellows program director Clint Sidle with my project proposal. I had some vague idea that I'd pursue faculty members over the summer, but as it transpired, I got busy with my internship and came back to campus in the Fall having done nothing to further my project. In fact, I began to consider pursuing some another project entirely, which I told Clint when I met with him in September.

This Fall

Shortly thereafter, I saw an email addressed to the SGE club from an AMBA student named Charles Lo. He was interested in forming a sub-group to the club around Creative Design for Affordability. He had been inspired by the core course, Managing and Leading in Organizations (known as MLO), where he had seen a ABC "Nightline" clip on the design firm IDEO. Charles had been so inspired by the clip that he traveled to the Bay Area of California and visited the company.

When I saw his email, I felt a tiny twinge of hope. I had so far been frustrated in trying to make my course become a reality. Could I somehow use the enthusiasm of a newcomer to get myself back on track?

Charles and I met and discussed the course idea. He agreed to help make it a reality. I told him about my discussions from the previous Fall. We eventually met with Stayman again, who recommended we talk with Bob LaPerle, a professor of marketing who had previously been an executive at Kodak. Like Milstein, LaPerle had been excited about the course when we related our idea, and he'd even given us some direction based on his experience designing and marketing the Kodak one-time use camera. However, he too was oversubscribed to oversee the course.

Around the same time, I got back in touch with DiSalvo from Cornell's Center for a Sustainable Future, who connected me with the leader of the Center's Education Committee, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Professor Paulette Clancy. Meeting with Paulette got Charles and me excited that we might acquire some fresh connections across campus. After following up with Paulette, she connected us with Max Zhang, an engineering professor interested in designing a "smart grid" for renewable energy and electric cars.

A couple weeks later, after propositioning five or ten more professors, Charles and I met with Max, who offered to let us market our course to his engineering students. He also recommended we contact Professor Alan McAdams, a professor at the Johnson School who teaches a Seminar in Sustainable Development. Why hadn't we thought of him before, we wondered?

This Winter -- Full Circle

After about three hour-long meetings with McAdams, trying our darndest to make Creative Design fit into his course on developing an infrastructure for electric cars, we decided that the partnership just might not work out. The two courses were just too different.

I was scheduled for shoulder surgery on January 2 so had other things on my mind over the break. But about a week later, I got a surprise email from Charles stating that McAdams had agreed to be the keeper of our course and offer it entirely separately from his Seminar in Sustainable Development.

This was the brightest ray of light I'd yet experienced in the entire process of the project. McAdams ordered us to immediately draft the course syllabus, which we promptly adapted from some of the documents we'd drafted earlier in the process. We sent the syllabus draft (which, over the course of the last year had decreased from a full semester to a seven-week course, and into a course populated with guest lecturers, instead of one professor) to Stayman, who gave us our first positive feedback.

Still, he had major reservations. I arranged a meeting to help address his concerns, in which I met with him and the other Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Accounting, Mark Nelson.

Some Serious Selling

This was it. I had to do some serious selling to do.

I sat down at the table with a lot of optimism. That was soon dashed, as Nelson led off the conversations detailing the four or five red flags he'd read from the syllabus. Somehow, in the course of the meeting, I convinced the two deans of the feasibility of the course, the demand for it, and I clarified the structure of the course for them. Students, I explained, would be split into cross-disciplinary teams of four (2 MBAs, an engineer, and another masters student), then be presented with a design challenge (for instance, designing a safe way for a woman to carry money and a cell phone through a dangerous area). They'd use simple, low-cost items to create a product aimed at addressing the needs of the target customer. Then, through the course of the quarter, teams would iterate three times on the same product, integrating the feedback they get from their classmates as they built a more and more advance prototype.

Eventually, with a number of subsequent drafts, we finally got the syllabus and course proposal approved. We sent it to the curriculum committee over this past weekend.

Today, the course was passed.

The Road Ahead

In many ways, the project has only just begun. We still have to nail down speakers and make sure to fill the class with the appropriate mix of students. But despite that, I've learned more about myself and about leadership through this project than through almost anything else I've ever done. I'm extremely proud of the fact that the course has been approved, and now I can't wait to make it an overwhelming success. After so many frustrations and so many challenges, I'm so glad that all of that hard work has finally come to something -- that my three-year-old dream is finally going to come to fruition.