Robert F. Bruner, Dean

The death of Steve Jobs on October 5^th proved to be of such moment that it eclipsed headlines about wars, politics, and economics. The outpouring of grief rivaled the passing of Princess Diana, the assassinations of world leaders, and the loss of Edison and Einstein. Emotions surged because Jobs was so closely identified with techno-cool, the marriage of design and engineering. But cool and technology have short half-lives. There is more to the memory of Steve Jobs, that he heralded a new mind-set, that he was a secular messenger of the New Millennium. To Google on the words, “Steve Jobs prophet” summons up close to three million citations.

Why does Steve Jobs warrant our exaltation? Those whom we exalt today become the templates for our children, who watch and listen for useful examples for their own lives. For those of us who lead and teach, it is important to be caught up in positive examples. Was Steve Jobs a prophet? Did Jobs leave a business legacy that is both durable and original?

Perhaps, though not in ways that the cultural adulation might warrant. He was a complex guy who grew up in a nontraditional path: an adopted child, a college drop-out, an experimenter with drugs and Buddhism—all of this was the fertile soil of a nonconformist. What makes a dramatic personal tale perhaps obscures some valuable lessons about strategy and leadership drawn from Jobs’s career.

Jobs focused relentlessly on the experience of the end-user of a product. He was not trained as an engineer but he became an effective advocate for the intuitive use of engineered products. The vaulting popularity of Apple’s products is testament to their ease of use, delight, and sense of discovery of ways in which technology can enrich one’s life. This focus on the customer’s experience is a leading attribute shared by a range of high-performing firms in the global economy. A Fellow at the Darden School, Jim Gilmore, and Joseph Pine discuss the huge significance of this focus in their book, The Experience Economy. Jobs was one of the premier practitioners of focus, not merely on the customer, but on the customer’s experience.

Jobs was a champion for design. In most manufacturing companies there is a relentless competition among proponents of low cost, high efficiency, and winsomeness of a product. Corporate infighting and bureaucracy often grind the artful product ideas down to utilitarian size, worthy of the old Soviet Union. But a new school of thought suggests that all really worthy innovations gain their start through processes of design thinking. These processes tackle difficult problems by combining empathy, creativity, and rationality. Rationality gets you low cost and high efficiency; empathy and creativity help to ensure the winsomeness of the product. Business Schools are now adapting their curricula to include instruction in design thinking. My colleague, Professor Jeanne Liedtka, and Tim Ogilvie, offer more discussion of design thinking in their new book, Designing for Growth.

Jobs was a pro-active leader of consumer sentiment. One hears a great deal about how companies must listen to the market and respond to consumer wants. This leads to a reactive stance on product design. Also, a classic riff on capitalism is that it depends on selling consumers goods that they don’t really need, such as static-free socks or cheese-flavored pet food. Steve Jobs took a different view. In a famous statement, he said, “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Jobs spawned a range of new products to test and spark the interest of consumers. Some products failed (the Apple III, and the Lisa, for instance). Jobs was willing to take risks in order to educate the consumer and ultimately find out what the consumer wanted.

Another lesson regards the sense of mortality with which Jobs regarded his own life. In his famous graduation speech at Stanford University in 2005, he told the students to “remember that you are going to die” and therefore have nothing to lose. This liberating mortality encouraged the students to stay hungry, be foolish, take risks, and fail often. He claimed not to be motivated by the love of money—indeed, his salary from Apple was $1.00 per year (plus stock options)—and he said that he did not want to be the richest man in the cemetery. But what is unusual is that this same sense of mortality did not prompt him with a spirit of philanthropy that would create a legacy like Rhodes, Carnegie, Ford, Rockefeller, and others.

Perhaps the memory of Steve Jobs will give license to incivility in professional life. Every prominent person has detractors. Jobs has more than a few who described him as: “despotic jerk,” “imperious,” “strong-willed contrarian,” “arrogant,” “combustible genius,” “control freak,” “abrasive,” “unapologetic brutality,” “temperamental,” “mouthy,” “tyrannical,” and “a great man, not a nice man.” Does successful innovation demand business leaders who behave this way? Is this an icon our students and children should emulate? I think not.

Steve Jobs casted a very long shadow. He was not a prophet or messenger; he was a do-er, someone who implemented his own visions. He was a heroic figure, like a character out of an Ayn Rand novel. A tough guy who bent technology to human uses, not vice versa. In him, some fault lines ran deep. We should remember him for his virtues and adopt styles of leadership that avoid his flaws.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had several conversations in which a prospective applicant said something like this:

“Are business schools really worth it? Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Sergey Brin/Larry Page (Google) didn’t go to business school. If you want to start a company just do it! B-school turns you into a big corporate type and deadens the entrepreneurial spirit. Just hang out in Silicon Valley or one of the other rich entrepreneurial ecosystems and learn how to start companies there. Who ever heard of a company being started in B-school?”

And so on. Perhaps you’ve said or heard some of the same things—often at a lunch table or beer bash, loudly enough to gather a number of listeners. The combination of selective facts and romantic brio seem to make this an irresistible argument. But what is not acknowledged offers a compelling argument to go to business school if you want to start and grow a company.

The applicant’s first error is to lump all b-schools together. A task force that I recently chaired reported that some 12,600 institutions in the world award degrees in business. Ninety percent of these are unaccredited and largely unknown. Of the ten percent, a subset is selective, meaning that they admit less than half of the applicants. The accredited and selective schools tend to be better endowed, to have stronger alumni networks, more prominent faculty, and attract stronger students. And then within this subset are schools that have strong resources for entrepreneurs. For instance, Darden has one of the strongest centers for entrepreneurship and innovation—the Batten Institute—which operates a small business incubator, arranges venture internships, supports a range of courses, hosts conferences and competitions, and is the nexus of a network of entrepreneurs and venture investors. Our incubator has started some 60 companies and counting. Just this week, Princeton Review and Entrepreneurship Magazine ranked Darden #3 among the top 50 graduate entrepreneurship programs in the U.S. Schools like ours serve entrepreneurs very well. To paint all b-schools with the same brush is to deal in stereotypes. Don’t make that mistake.

The applicant’s second error is to generalize from a small sample of special cases. It is fun to summon up the names of a few famous and successful entrepreneurs, but are these representative of the whole population? For each case, it is possible to offer a counterexample of entrepreneurs with MBA degrees. Frank Batten founded the Weather Channel; Phil Knight co-founded Nike; Scott McNealy co-founded Sun Microsystems; Henri Termeer grew Genzyme from fledgling to major biotech firm; Meg Whitman grew eBay from a tiny startup to an online behemoth; Warren Buffett grew Berkshire Hathaway from a small failed textile manufacturer into a major conglomerate.

Plainly, one should not assume that entrepreneurship is only associated with founding a company. We know that many of the same qualities are associated with growing a company. Why should we expect entrepreneurs to toil only in fledging startups? Large companies, seeking to rejuvenate their cultures, want to hire people with entrepreneurial spirit. At Darden and its peers, most MBA graduates are hired by mature firms, but this does not mean that they are not entrepreneurs in fact or spirit.

Yet another error is to imply that once you work for a big company, you’ll always do so. In my MBA graduating class, about 95% of the students went to work for the S&P500 firms or equivalent upon graduation; by our 20^th reunion, only a small fraction remained there. Among Darden alumni, I observe that by the 10^th or 15^th year after graduating, many alums will have made the leap to a small startup, a family-held firm, a firm they have bought, or a small professional services firm—these alums usually wind up in senior leadership positions, which affirms Darden’s strength in producing general managers. And they are also entrepreneurs.

Most of all, I challenge the applicant’s suggestion that “hanging out” or “just doing it” are always and everywhere more developing than a business education. Such arguments are variations on the virtues of the “school of hard knocks.” Mind you, I have enormous respect for experience as a teacher. But the school of hard knocks is loaded with, well, really hard knocks. The failure rate of small business startups is quite high. Census data suggest that about half of all startups are still alive after three years, and only 29% after 10 years. In that time, you can burn through a great deal of effort, relationships, and money (usually gained from family and friends). For every knockout success like Steve Jobs, there are hundreds of thousands of small business failures each year.

A great B-school education won’t guarantee success, but should improve the odds. It will accelerate your growth, compressing years of hard knocks insights into a short time. It will build your business acumen and help you understand the pitfalls and risks on which other businesses have foundered. It will leaven your romanticism about entrepreneurship with a very practical grasp of what it takes to succeed in business. Perhaps most importantly, a business education will disabuse you of the notion that entrepreneurial success is a matter of the great lone individual, the genius, the maverick like Jobs/Gates/Brin or whoever else you idolize. Instead, b-school will teach you that entrepreneurial success is substantially about teamwork, networks, and business relationships; success is not about opportunism but about living into a purpose for your life with intentionality and integrity.

Philippe Sommer, Darden’s Director of Entrepreneurship Programs says,

“If you know you want to be an entrepreneur you are already in a different place than many who come to business school. Entrepreneurs come from families that are entrepreneurial! Is it in the genes? No, it is the observation of the experience. These folks have seen the pros and cons of being an entrepreneur and understand that the failure of the venture is not the failure of the entrepreneur. If this is not your background, then it is incredibly scary to think about being an entrepreneur. Many of the students in our MBA program did not understand what are the real benefits and risks of being entrepreneurial. That is one of the things an entrepreneurship program like ours will teach you. You may find you love being entrepreneurial and now have an option in life you might not otherwise have had. I often say I don’t teach “entrepreneurship,” I teach “self knowledge.” We have many students who come to our program having started a business and sometime succeeded quite well and other times failed. What they all realize is if they had known more about how to run a business they would have avoided many of the mistakes they made. That’s a pretty good reason to get an MBA. After all if Mark Zuckerberg had started his business in business school he might have avoided the stupid things he did to his partners and not spent the rest of his career litigating with them and in the end paying them to correct his mistakes.”

Should you go to b-school or head off into the entrepreneurial ecosystem? I’ll let you decide, but you should consider some questions first. Do you have a clear business idea, including clarity about the product/service, the customer, the suppliers, and the investors? Do you have the grubstake of cash to sustain you through a long spell? Are you so impatient to get going that you can’t bear the thought of organized learning? If the answers to these questions are “yes,” then get going and good luck. But for most twenty-somethings I encounter, the answers are pretty hedged. They are eager to learn and glad to have the help of teachers and mentors. They hanker for more than they’ve been doing and want to have an impact with their lives. But they are still searching for the spark, the big idea, the project into which they can channel their energies. For them, B-school makes good sense. You decide.

I’ve just returned from Alaska, where I was hiking around fjords and glacier fields. I got to reflecting on the economic booms that advanced the 49th state, such as the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-1899). The stories of Jack London and poems of Robert Service shed a great deal of light on the erratic behavior fostered by the boom and the subsequent bust. Among these, Robert Service was especially critical of the dilettante prospector, the person who gave up too easily in the face of harsh climate, hard work, and uncertain results. Service’s critique is as relevant today as then — especially so for MBA summer interns and recent MBA graduates.

The economic climate right now feels like one of those turning points from prosperity to adversity. Most astute observers of this summer’s economic bailout of Greece by the European Union doubt that it did much more than defer a major reckoning for all of Europe. In the U.S., it is hard to find many enthusiasts for the deal in favor of Congress’s debt ceiling deal. Standard & Poor’s just downgraded the creditworthiness of U.S. debt. Economic growth is anemic. Equity market indexes are down materially in a short space of time. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. I recite all of this as prelude to an admonition to current MBA students and recent graduates: now is no time to play the dilettante. The job market for your skills may be softening. Be earnest about what you do. Make a commitment to a company and trust that such commitment will be repaid.

For summer interns, this means finishing the summer on a high. I’ve written about the need to be very intentional if you want to get an offer of permanent employment (see this and this). The dilettante will be coy with the summer employer, waiting to be wooed. Or the dilettante may feel a modicum of disappointment: the city, the employer, or the jobs aren’t so cool after all. There’s nothing specifically wrong. It’s just that the high expectations weren’t fulfilled. The perfect becomes the enemy of the good. Imagining how one might say “yes” to an offer of employment becomes very hard. Saying ‘no’ to possibilities amounts to what Robert Service would call a “quitter.”

Similarly the recent MBA graduate may have become intoxicated by the nascent recovery of 2010 to believe that job-hopping is back in fashion. Top B-schools are observing a rise in reneging by their grads on job offers and a cavalier attitude toward employers. I have advised MBA graduates to take the long view and avoid the job-hopping that gives CEOs and Chief Talent Officers the fits.(See my blog posting on the five-year hitch.) Most graduates do hang in there. Data from our surveys of Darden graduates show that about half of our grads remain with their first employer at the four-year mark after graduation. Among the half who changed, a minority were motivated by extenuating circumstances (got married; didn’t get a visa; industry-wide layoffs, etc.) The majority who changed did so for better “fit,” better situation, or more compensation. I am in favor of talent going where it is wanted and rewarded. But a recovering economy and certain booming industries (such as health care, energy, and high technology) make it easy to gain an inflated sense of self-worth. Especially in today’s worsening environment, I am concerned about the job-hopping that is motivated by the same dilettantism that Robert Service condemned.

Here’s a hypothetical example. A company successfully woos an MBA and moves this person a very long distance to the headquarters. MBA shows up for work, registers as an employee, and begins the settling-in process. Then, MBA abruptly quits, a matter of days or weeks into the job. No apology. No repayment of expenses. No extenuating circumstances. No particular empathy for the company; the company’s talent development plans are interrupted and may necessitate a re-entry into the job market. Perhaps all along, MBA had been angling for a job offer from another company in the same industry in the same city and finally got the nod.

Reneging on an employment agreement reflects very bad judgment. This MBA negotiated in bad faith with the employer and defaulted on an implicit contract to provide labor in return for salary, benefits, moving expenses, and a range of other set-up costs. In the long run, most markets are reasonably efficient. What goes around comes around. This person will face a reckoning sooner or later and it won’t be pretty. The MBA assumes that markets and firms have no memory (but they do!) And the MBA’s new position (granting a minor pay raise or better title) may be gained with a loss of seniority only to find himself 3-6 months later dealing with a LIFO situation – yes, “last in first out” – when layoffs occur. In this very uncertain labor market, we’ve been encouraging people to make a move only after careful consideration of the prospect and comparison of all their fit factors.

Alaska affords distance and great perspective on big headlines and errant behavior. Boom-bust cycles draw in the opportunists and dilettantes during the booms and wash them away in the busts. Those left standing had staying power derived from a very different attitude about careers, service to employers, and ultimate purpose. The economy that is emerging now will reward the earnest people and penalize the dilettantes. Plot your career steps accordingly.

Here are the remarks to Darden’s Class of 2011 that I gave at the graduation ceremony.

At this time of year, friends, family, and professors tend to ask the annoying question, “Have you got a job?”  You probably resisted answering it for as long as you could.  But they persisted: “Have you got a job?” 

The full-time students left a job, spent 21 months at Darden, and are on the launch pad back into professional life.  It is natural for acquaintances to ask, “Have you got a job?”  MBA for Exec students find this a relevant question too: most if not all have a job and yet aspire for more.  They came to Darden to reach higher.  For them, the whispered question is, “Are you set for your next job?”

Well, I’m here to tell you all something extremely important, that a mentor of mine, Peter Gomes, used to say: by “job” we don’t mean simply something that gives you a salary.  We really mean: “Do you have a purpose?  Do you have a calling?  Do you have a vocation?”  I want to suggest to you that whether or not you have a job, everyone has a vocation and that vocation is to live a life that is worth living. 

Michael Novak wrote that business can be a “calling,” something more than just a job.  He said, “Business is a demanding vocation, and one is not good at it just by being in it, or even by making piles of money.  The bottom line of a calling is measured by pain, learning, and grace.  Having a good year in financial terms is hard enough; having a good year in fulfilling one’s calling means passing tests that are a lot more rewarding…Doing anything as a calling—especially doing something quite difficult—is a lot more fulfilling than merely drifting.”   John D. Rockefeller said that if your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.  A calling is about impact in the world.  It is about service to someone.  Quite often, it is fulfilled in a non-obvious place, rather different from the herd of fashion and conventional thinking.  A vocation is not necessarily easy, costless, or convenient.

A vocation isn’t just about money, power, or fame.  We have Darden graduates who garnered all of these, but did so as a consequence of a calling to delight customers, invent new products, or build vibrant organizations.  Some have jobs at the very top of their field where their service as leaders is prominent and impactful.   Others served a calling in equally important, but less obvious, ways. 

•    Trammel Summers, a graduate of the Class of 2009, an excellent student, declined a job offer with the top firm in his field, in order to work close to home here in the South, so that he could help to care for his brother who suffered a brain injury.
•    Christine Shim of the Class of 2004 left her investment banking job to work for a year at a fraction of the banking salary with Michele Rhee, who dramatically restructured the Washington, D.C. public school system. 
•    Lee Murray of the Class of 1985 pursued a business career.  She had some ideas about how her city could be run better.  So she ran for Mayor.  After her successful election, she brought new processes and controls that served the city well.  
•    Finally, two Darden graduates of the Class of 2009, Chip Ransler and Manoj Sinha, founded a firm that commercialized new technology to generate electricity from agricultural by-products.  Their successful entrepreneurship brings electricity to poor villages in India and harnesses a vision of renewable energy.  

I can offer many other examples of Darden alums who chose their jobs out of a sense of vocation.  You should too.  That is my advice to you at this commencement of the rest of your life. 

Your time at Darden has had a lot to say about vocations and living a life that is worth living.   For instance, a definition of the life that is worth living will vary across people and across time.  We should respect the diversity of such views as we engage with co-workers and members of a community.  Your learning teams have been a microcosm of such diversity.

And your time at Darden probably has affirmed that the definition of vocation isn’t a fixed idea—it will vary as you grow through time.  I’ll wager that your 21 months at Darden are proof positive of this.  If vocation varies as you grow, you must listen carefully and continuously for the vocation to which you are called.

A vocation is not some abstraction that you put in a box somewhere and look at from time to time.  It should be with you every day and affect even the smallest decisions.  Your conception of a vocation will drive choices, in the moment, in real time, in a way that is meaningful.  For this reason, all the tools that we teach you at Darden come together in a strategic way when you have a purpose, a vocation, a calling.

In the wake of the subprime crisis, we heard fresh attacks on capitalism, many of them centered around the sense of alienation of people from the work they do.  The way to withstand such alienation and to reflect thoughtfully on the extraordinary economic promise of capitalism is to live and work with purpose. 

The mission of the Darden School is to improve society by developing principled leaders for the world of practical affairs.  We believe that living with purpose is an essential ingredient of having impact as a leader and achieving happiness for yourself and those around you.  Helen Keller said, “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

Do you have a job?  That’s not the right question.  Do you have a vocation, a calling, a purpose?  Only you can answer that.  As your Dean, my final admonition to you is to search for, and live, that purpose in all you do.

Godspeed to you.  And thank you.

“Teaching is like sending a letter with an imperfect address.  You never know where or when the message will arrive.”  — C. Roland Christenson.

Christenson, a mentor of mine, passed away years ago; but lives on in my memory for wisdom such as this.  A recent experience would prompt me to modify it to say, “You never know when or where the message will be sent or delivered.”  This modification speaks to the choices teachers make and to the role of chance and serendipity.  Consider the experience I had last month.

It began with an email in October from Christina Feng, a teacher at Martin Luther King High School at 65th and Amsterdam in New York City.  She wrote,

“Dear Dean Bruner,

I’m a Teach For America alumna teaching high school business, economics, and government to disadvantaged, at-risk 12th graders. I love what I do, and this year, to better facilitate my students’ understanding of the business world, I am having my students run a boutique mergers and acquisitions advisory firm. We are just in the beginning stages of our work, but we are getting very into it.  I am writing to see if we could welcome you as a guest in our classroom…I want to show my students that they deserve the attention of talented and successful people like yourself, and that they too, can enter the world of finance, no matter what their own personal backgrounds may be.  I look forward to your thoughts.

All the best,
Christina Feng

P.S. I’m requesting funding through Donorschoose for a class set of your book, "Deals from Hell." Any and all help spreading the word would be appreciated!”

Christina’s invitation grabbed my attention.  First, helping disadvantaged kids finish high school has to be a national priority.  Failure to get a diploma is a key predictor of adult poverty.  [For more on poverty and its drivers, see, Creating an Opportunity Society, by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill.]  I’ve done my share of criticizing K-12 education in the U.S.—so, I thought that this might be an opportunity to lend a hand and at least learn more. 

Second, I was surprised by Christina Feng’s audacity.  Running a simulation of an M&A advisory boutique with a group of disadvantaged kids?  Assigning them to read my book Deals from Hell, which is clearly written at a collegiate level?  Asking me to fly to New York, teach, and fly home?  Plainly, her “knock and the door will open” attitude contradicted some widespread (and often wrong) characterizations of public school teachers.

Third, it sounded like fun.  Christina has a lot of energy for her students—indeed, she is a nuclear stockpile.  I like the company of such people and don’t mind picking up some spare radiation.  Would it be humanly possible to teach anything meaningful about M&A in a 90-minute class to 12th-graders?   One disability of all “experts” as teachers is that they know too much.  I can talk for hours about the technicalities of M&A.   The challenge to speak plainly and concisely is a wonderful opportunity to grow.

Therefore, on February 16th, I found myself in Christina’s classroom.  I had suggested that we teach by the discussion method rather than by lecture.  I shared with her some merger negotiation exercises that we use at Darden.   She offered to develop a new simulation, based on the hypothetical acquisition of the New York Times (NYT) by Google. 

Simulations are complicated and take a long time to develop.  But Christina pulled it off.  She developed a narrative for the companies and the negotiations.  And she directed her students to some online sources of data.  She formed the students into three bargaining “worlds” where each world consisted of one team representing Google and the other representing NYT.  And she set aside plenty of time for the students to prepare for the negotiations and then to bargain.  Finally, she had the students read a few chapters from Deals from Hell (one copy for each student, kindly donated by my publisher, John Wiley & Sons.)  Thus, when I walked into her class, the students were pretty well steeped in the exercise and ready to talk about their experience.

After introducing ourselves to each other, I went from world to world, asking the students to describe the negotiations and their result.  All three worlds reached agreement.  The work in each world showed reasonable analytics (mainly based on P/E ratios) and strategic thinking.  Especially interesting was the fact that in two worlds, the buyer (Google) agreed to a price that exceeded its reservation or “walk-away” price.  I probed.  We learned that the seller, NYT, “anchored” the negotiations by quoting a very high asking price at the outset.  This led to more questions about how human behavior (both the strategic kind and the unintended kind) can influence negotiation outcomes.  With the analytics and the behavioral considerations in mind, we began to consolidate an image of M&A as a very messy, risk-prone affair.  As we discussed the risks in the Google/NYT combination, the students asked me about the Deals from Hell.  This gave a natural segue into closing comments about success and failure in M&A and about the students’ future.

As a coda to my class, I urged the students to finish high school, get the diploma, and go as far as they can up the educational ladder.  If they are assured of graduating, I urged them to help someone who is faltering.  I said that there is a very strong correlation between educational achievement and economic welfare.  One example I mentioned was the evidence contained in the following graph (provided by the folks at Calculated Risk.)   It shows a clear association between unemployment and level of education attained. 

I urged the students to get more education: vocational school to learn a trade; an associates degree at a community college; and/or a four-year bachelor’s degree.  I said that money should not hold the students back—there are sources of loans and financial aid.  The intellectual challenge should not hold them back—there are tutors, advisors, and other sources of support that can help.   Time should not hold them back—it is possible to find part-time educational programs.  Sure, it is hard work.  But there is no free lunch.  If you want to make a better life for yourself, you must make the investment.  I said that now is the time in their lives to reach for the brass ring: don’t wait. 

The students applauded.  Many of them asked me to autograph Deals from Hell, (catnip to an author).   Afterward, Christina and I went to a quick lunch—she insisted on paying for my salad; I insisted back; she insisted harder.  We said goodbye; I hustled back to the airport to catch the plane home.  But like the aftermath of any good case discussion, the process of reflection for me continues.

This felt like time well-spent.  I helped to deliver a message consistent with Darden’s values about reflective learning, excellence, hard work, and diversity to a group of high school students at a moment when they are looking for role models and wrestling with their futures.  I think we actually succeeded in conveying some important ideas about M&A.  And it was a great deal of fun.  Check out this photo: these kids have personality.  (So does Christina, at the extreme right.)

The ultimate test of the worth of a class is whether students learned something important.  I’ll never know for sure; this is the existential uncertainty of any teacher.  As my mentor said, it’s hard to know when and where the message will arrive—and as I would add, it’s hard to know precisely what messages were sent.   When it comes to promoting learning, how you are teaching can be as important as what.  It sure seems to me that the simulation and class discussion really nailed a how.  I saw a wonderful high school teacher who thought deliberately and audaciously about a variety of ways to send important messages.  Christina Feng is an inspiration and gives me hope for the future of public K-12 education in the United States.

And to the students in Christina Feng’s class: YOU RULE!