It was my great privilege yesterday to be a guest lecturer at MIT in Cambridge. My friend Irving Wladawsky-Berger met me at Kendall Square and we walked to Building 4 passing among throngs of students. You could feel the energy of young people in the air — students who are bright, hard working, and on a mission to get a great education and make their mark in the world.
MIT Building 4 – Cambridge, MA
Irving is now Visiting Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT’s graduate school and he is teaching a course called “Technology-based Business Transformation”. (See Irving’s blog — it has some profound content — worth reading). I talked about two topics: “Launching a Potentially Big Idea” and “The Future of the Internet”. My slides are on the presentations page for anyone who may be interested.
The best part of being a guest lecturer is the interaction with students. The couple of dozen students in this class all have undergraduate degrees, mostly in engineering, and have been out in the real world with jobs for five years or so. They worked for Global Crossing, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Nokia, and other fine companies. They are eager to learn and ask great questions. The majority of the questions were about how to make companies change — how do you get around the momentum of not changing? How do you convince the marketing department to buy into your innovation and help move it forward? How do you effectively communicate new ideas to the market? How do we get telecommunications companies to listen to the voice of the consumer that wants choice, not two year lock-in plans with proprietary implementations. How often to colleagues need to get together in person to effectively collaborate? Would IBM have adopted the sweeping strategic embrace of the Internet if it had not just had a near death financial experience in the early 1990’s? Probably the hardest question was what company can a student work for after finishing grad school where the company will foster innovation and be receptive to big ideas that may change old models.
None of these questions have simple answers. Irving and I did our best to share our combined 80 years of experience business experience. I doubt if we had the precise answer to any of the questions but hopefully we planted seeds that will help the students keep asking questions and more importantly try things and be willing to fail at times. Both Irving and I encouraged them to use “trial by fire” as a way of innovating in the market. It took decades to do that before the Internet. Now it can be done in days.
Epilogue: Not only was this a rewarding day with students it was also a delightful excursion. The flights from Danbury to Hanscomb Field and return was beautiful with nearly unlimited vizibility. I also learned some new parts of the T (Red Line) that I had not been on before. Since I have a few more trips to Boston planned I ordered a Charlie Card online.
