Fireside Chat with Brad Smith

Turn it on. All right. So don't worry about me. I just run a technology company. I have no idea what I'm... Oh, it's called a button. Thank you.

Well, I actually project pretty well, so I don't know if you need a microphone or not. Can you hear me okay? Yes. All right. There we go. That's better than the background noise. Now, if we project our voices, will that be sufficient? Yes. All right. Nothing like a plan B. So for me, I felt like at Marshall I was a part of something bigger than myself. I think many of you know the story now, but I was 6 years old when the plane crashed in 1970 and I live in Kenova, so the Tri-State Airport is right there. My dad had one of those police scanners, a CB back then, so we could hear all the noise and things going on and my cousins were a part of the volunteer fire department that showed up at the scene. So it was very much a part of my family's life. And then I had my uncle and my aunt, both of my brothers, my nephew, my niece, and everyone graduated from Marshall. So I always felt like I was a part of a cause greater than myself. But for me, why I'm really proud of Marshall and why I was so proud of Marshall back then is that we are an example of the number one predictor of success, which is perseverance and grit. We rose from those ashes and we were able to achieve the next chapter of glory. If you read the book by Angela Duckworth, it's a 30-year study on the number one predictor of success. Is it IQ? Is it EQ? The answer is no, it's perseverance. And Marshall University is that plus more.

Well, first of all, many of the classes that I think we need, especially as we look to the future, may not have been offered back then. And when I went to school, we had basic COBOL and Fortran. So there's some things that have changed since 1982 to 1986. But if I go back to the classes that were offered, I wish I would have spent more time in business statistics and analytics. That is one of the most foundational skills that anyone needs going forward. Everything is going to be powered by data. You need to seek truth in the data so I think that is a fundamental skill. But if you look ahead, most people now say the four D's are the foundational skills that everyone's looking for. And those four D's are data analytics, number one; design thinking, also known as hypothesis-driven thinking; the third is developing, so development acumen, whether you write code or you understand how code is written; and then the fourth is the arts and design. Because as you look at it, it's not the most sophisticated technology that wins, it's the easiest to use. So if you take those four D's, it's data, it is design thinking, it is design as a craft, and it's development. And those things are foundational for the next chapter.

No. No, I never imagined, first of all, that I'd ever have a skill set that would even allow me to be considered for something like that and certainly not a company as great as Intuit, which I'm in love with. When I was growing up, I had two dreams. I wanted to be a marine biologist because I lifeguarded at Dreamland Pool every summer. And even though there were no fish in the water, I imagined it must be cool to be swimming where the fish are. And then the second thing I thought about is I wanted to be a journalist. I write poetry, I try to write songs, and so I love journalism. My favorite piece of literature is John Milton's Paradise Lost. So I'm a little bit of a geek when it comes to English lit. And when I graduated from Marshall, I had two job offers, one from the Herald-Dispatch and the other one from Pepsi to be a part of the management training program. I sat down with my dad and I said, "I don't know which job to take." He was sitting in the back porch swing with me and he said, "I want you to think about three things. Choose the thing that makes your heart beat the fastest. Work in a company that will surround you with people smarter than you, so you'll constantly be learning. And do not take the job for a title or money because both of those will change over time." Now you might think, "Okay, great. He knew he always wanted to be a journalist, he went to the Herald-Dispatch." But I actually stepped back and thought about what my dad said. And if you know anything about my life story, I was bullied in the ninth grade. It was a horrible year for me and I lost the fight and I went home and my dad enrolled me in martial arts. So from ninth grade to 12th grade, I got a black belt, but halfway up the black belt rank, you become a student teacher. And I found something about myself that I never knew. I loved watching my students advance. I got more thrill out of watching them become great than I did out of me actually progressing in my belt. So when I answered my dad's question, I wanted to be a great people manager. I wanted to bring the greatness out in others and so I went to work for Pepsi and the rest of it was history. I still write poetry. Not very good poetry, but I write poetry.

I have a philosophy which we now share at Intuit that a leader's job is not to put greatness into someone, but to recognize everyone is born with an innate greatness. Our job is to create an environment where their greatness can emerge. And so for us and what we do at Intuit and what I've tried to do is create that environment. The first thing you need to do is create hope that there's a better tomorrow. It can be a grand challenge like let's put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely to Earth, which John F. Kennedy did. Or it could be how do we solve this opioid crisis? But it's something that inspires something great and grand that you have to really think differently about. The second thing you do is you create an environment where success and failure are treated equally, which is a chance to learn. And that's what design thinking is. It's an experimentation culture. Thomas Edison famously said, "I did not fail 10,006 ways that it wouldn't work." And that is the critical success factor. And then the third thing is if you have an environment of experimentation, then it's the meritocracy of ideas and people want to work in a company where their idea has as good a shot of being funded as somebody else who has a lot of stripes on their sleeve. So if you create that environment, you basically create a 36-year-old startup where everyone feels like they're an owner, everyone has a chance to change the company's trajectory, and everyone has a chance to put a dent in the universe. And that's what I've tried to do.

I think we just touched on it. It's really three things. We are a 36-year-old startup. There are 9,000 employees. All 9,000 are trained on design thinking. Whether you're in HR, legal, finance, or an engineer, everyone runs experiments. Whether it's a new candidate experience if you're hiring into the company like Izzy Rogner or you're a finance person figuring out how to deliver a better message to investors, everyone runs experiments. They test the results. The second thing we do is we're creating an environment where we understand kindness is not weakness. We treat people with dignity and respect. We really believe you can be tough on the issue and kind to the human being and that makes us a different company than most. And then the third is we're customer obsessed. We do follow-me homes, which by the way, is not market research. It is ethnography. It is actually observing the individual in their natural environment, watching them use your product to do their taxes while the dog runs in, the kids asking for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and the doorbell's ringing. And it's only then you see what actually happens with the program when they stop midstream and come back and can't remember where they are. Every employee does follow-me homes, and then you get a deep empathy and an emotional attachment to the problem you're trying to solve.

I love it. Let's talk about the current business environment, the way you see it as a CEO. What do you think are the three most important current business trends?

Well, first let me ask, are you still able to hear me in the back? I know I'm projecting my voice to the front. The back's okay, I can hear him. There really are three major trends. I just got back from Sarasota, Florida, where we meet as a business council three times a year. This group's met since 1878. They meet with the administration once a year. This time we had former President Bush and his brother Jeb talking about the legacy of their father. But it's the CEOs you would know, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and all the different leaders, Mary Barra from GM. And we talked about three fundamental trends. The first is artificial intelligence and machine learning because it's disrupting productivity and it's disrupting business strategy. It is not going to eliminate a whole bunch of jobs wholesale. In fact, the data suggests that 60% of all jobs will have about a third of their work automated. So it will require us to reskill and redeploy, but it won't completely eliminate complete categories of jobs. So artificial intelligence and machine learning. The second is platforms and ecosystems. The world has shifted away from just completing a transaction to facilitating interactions. Think of Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon with Amazon Web Services. Intuit now where you have TurboTax and the ability for a CPA to come in with a one-way video and answer your question and then go away and you finish the work. It's basically the more people who contribute, the more value is created. The third is the opportunity to step back and think fundamentally different about business models. Today the business model disruptor is the crowd. The crowd is where you literally have somebody else do something for you that you might have paid an employee to do. A great example is TurboTax right now has 40% of all its customer questions answered by another customer. It's called ask the community. And the accuracy of their answers is higher than our own employees. So the wisdom of the crowd should never be underestimated. Uber did it, by the way. They hired people who said, "You have a car?", Airbnb, "You have an extra room? Just go ahead and rent it." That's the power of the crowd.

Well, I think everyone here knows and we experience it ourselves. Everyone's for change until it happens to them. Then they're not such big fans of change anymore. One of the things we have learned to be most effective is to remind your teams to fall in love with the problem and not the existing solution. The best way to do that is to ask three questions. Anytime anybody has an idea in our company or in the technology sector, the first question their manager usually responds with is, "Tell me three people outside of our industry who solved the same problem and tell me what you learned from them." The second question you ask is, "Tell me three people in our industry who are solving this problem and what did we learn from them?" And then the third is, "Tell me three ideas you considered and I want to hear about the two that you eliminated before you tell me about the one you're so excited about." Because what happens is the reason why doctors actually get a second opinion or patients is because you start to develop lock-in, you fall in love with the solution, you have pattern recognition, it's a shortcut and you end up seeing everything as a nail and therefore everything's answer is a hammer. The only way you break out of that is these go-broad questions, which by the way was developed by the Toyota Production System. It's the Japanese model, which is to go broad before you go narrow. That enables you to no longer be in love with your solution, but to fall in love with the problem and you'll discover there are lots of other ways to solve the problem.

I think we have to first get grounded on what is the value of education and what is its purpose. As you know, it's a passion that I have. I've always felt the only reason I was ever able to do anything in my life is because I had parents who sacrificed and I had a crowd of people who saw something in me that I still don't see in myself and they invested in me. So I happen to believe the two great equalizers in life are education and entrepreneurship. And I'm happy to talk about both at any point in time. But when it gets back to education, if you read the book by Ted Dintersmith, which is "What Schools Could Be," he goes back and studies the origin of today's education environment. Many of you already know this, but it was really designed in the late 1800s to get us prepared for the manufacturing age, the Industrial Revolution. So we rang bells every 45 minutes to teach kids how to follow instructions. And then we basically taught them how to memorize and then go and apply. That's not today's world. 90% of today's business models succeed on their second idea, not their first. 90% of all ideas fail in their first iteration. So we need to start to evolve our education system, I believe, to be a lot more iterative, a lot more evidence-based, a lot more prototypes, trial and error, and step away from what historically may have been the success model of the past. And that's what many of our employers are now saying. So you're starting to see alternatives pop up. You see coding boot camps pop up. You see all kinds of online and in-person curriculum. My hypothesis is I think the three C's will be important going forward. The first is a connected classroom. Give people the choice of being online, on-site, or on campus. On-site could be an extension facility closer to their home. The second thing I think is important is to begin to think more about competency and less about credit hours. Are you competent in the capability and the skills? If you can get that done fast, you don't need to spend as much time. If it takes you a little longer, take a little longer. And the third is completion. Completion for me is just as important not to have a lot of people enrolled, but have people actually graduating. So how do we have the mentorship, the coaching, the counseling to do that? Now, I know I just put down the big gauntlet and I am a non-educator. So I am sure that's going to bring a lot of good conversation, but for me, those are the things that at least as I talk to my peers or think about the education that I wish people coming into our company had, those were the three things.

One of the things I always loved about Marshall, especially the size of Marshall, was it promoted engagement and interaction. So I loved our professor-to-student ratios because we had a lot more classroom discussion. Me and my peers who showed up from these big universities sat with hundreds of people and had a graduate student teaching them. They don't have a lot of the skills that Izzy and some of us who came out of Marshall have because we had interaction with each other and with professors. So the first thing I love about our size is interaction in the classroom, but the second is interaction in the community. And one of the things design thinking does is we have a lot of small businesses and businesses sitting right here in Huntington and the surrounding area who could use help. Why would we ever do a case study to have a student invent a brand or a company when we could actually go down the street and adopt a company and actually try some of the things that we think would be relevant with them and see if we can help improve the business success while we teach the student? So that's one of the things about experiential learning. You actually do your things in the wild. You don't do them in a laboratory. You go out and do them in the wild. And if they don't succeed, there's no better lesson and you pivot quickly because you want to help that business succeed.

I talked about the four D's. By the way, I am a huge believer in liberal arts and I believe in STEAM, not STEM. If the arts are missing, it's a life not worth living. Quite frankly, technology will not be adopted. People have got to have fun and have positive emotion and believe that it's creating a better life. That's why the Apple outperforms the Android. The Android is much more sophisticated technology, but everyone can pick up an Apple iPhone and be pretty sure they know how to use it, including little 3-year-old kids. So the arts are important, liberal arts are important. The four D's are going to be foundational though. Just as we had to learn to write in cursive, even if we didn't choose to be poets and we weren't writing in scribe anymore, we knew how to write in cursive. The next generation needs to understand code if not how to write code. So the four D's: developing, design thinking, design as a craft, and data analytics. But after that, the two most important skills that I test for and we look for are curiosity quotient and collaboration skills. Learned-it-alls versus know-it-alls. People who truly have an intellectual curiosity about the world around them. And collaboration skills. Social media is quickly eroding these skills faster than we can count. And if they can't come in and be a part of a team environment and help the team around them get better, they really struggle. And today, nothing can be done. No company can succeed without partnering with other companies. So those two skills are important. Curiosity quotient and collaboration skills.

First of all, you're going to have to forgive me. I have a hypothesis on many of these questions, but I don't have the answers. This is your profession. You're so much better and you're clearly experienced at this. I've just been on the other side of the equation, bringing these kids in and hoping to help them grow and develop in ways that we see the world. So please, this is a partnership and don't act like I have all the answers or don't let me act like I have all the answers because I don't. Besides, anyone who borrows from me steals twice because I've never had an original idea. You used to call it plagiarism, I call it benchmarking. So let me go back to what I've spent the last five years knowing that this point in time in my life would come where I wanted to step away. By the way, my master's thesis at Aquinas College in Michigan was to somehow be able to come back home and work with Marshall and think about the next chapter for the state of West Virginia. So this has been my goal since my 20s. And that is not to say that I have answers. I simply want to be one of many that leans in and tries to think about this. But if you look at the education system today, our founder, Scott Cook, is really focused on early childhood development, zero to age three. The reason why is every second 1 million neurons are being formed. And they have determined that by age three, they can do a test and they can tell based upon where the kid is that when they show up in kindergarten, what their likelihood of graduating high school is, let alone going to college. So if you don't have that interaction and that formative learning at zero to three, they're already behind. By age five, they're behind a year and a half. Imagine in five-year-olds, a year and a half is a lot. And then you start to lose your confidence. It's the Pygmalion theory. Then we got K through 12. I have a theory here, especially because of where I came from, that we have lost our respect for people who build things with their hands. We've lost our respect for the vocations and the trades. Today, we have to make all of our phones in China because you can take all the skilled tool and die makers in the United States and you can fit them in one basketball gymnasium. China takes 100 football fields for theirs. So we don't respect that anymore. Massachusetts has an entire generation of electricians retiring and no one to take their job. So I really believe we need to bring vocational trades back into the schools so that kids graduate with either a trade or a desire to go to college. This four-year college and bust, I think it's gotten us into a little bit of trouble. And then as we talked about, universities have a chance to reimagine, certainly Marshall as we talk about it. There's an opportunity to think about it in more modular. I've been studying things like at BYU Idaho, which was a school that came from Ricks College and turned into BYU Idaho, Southern New Hampshire University. They've been building curriculum that are modular. That if you decide to stop after two years, you actually have a certificate and you can go out and get a job or if you go on to four years. So it's built in a way where you're not a college dropout, you can do something with what you've achieved. And the neat thing is others are doing it and it's succeeding. I'm happy to share some of that at some point.

I know what we've experienced in our company. We had the best year last year. We're a 36-year-old company. We are a $60 billion market cap company and we had our strongest year last year in 36 years. And that's because we treated every day as day one. 9,000 people showed up and ran experiments. 1,800 experiments were live in the company at any point in time. They produced $400 million in revenue from products that I never even sanctioned. They came from the experiments and I simply said, "Well, that's a winner. Put money down on that." Made us look smart. But the employees were actually doing all this. So we have to unleash the greatness in our people. So what are the things I think higher education and design thinking can do? The first is create an environment where design thinking and experimentation become the norm. The second is begin to transition away from pass-fail into learning that allows you to get the idea better and improve. I know that takes some rethinking, but there's some schools that have been doing it, including Babson College, which is pretty interesting because they teach entrepreneurship. The third is to really help us figure out how to get it as a part of the community where it's evidence-based outcomes and not spreadsheets and assumptions. Where we truly get to try this in the wild. Every employer would love to have free employees. That's why we love internships so much. But if you actually make it a part of the curriculum and have the students run their projects out there, they get free resource and the students actually get to see if it's going to work in the wild or not. So those are the things I think could be outcomes.

No. All right. I'm sorry. I get a little excited. This is great.

Because I love you. I did. Anyone who's checked out a Facebook page or any interview I've ever done, I've had Marshall shirts on that say "I may live in California, my heart belongs to the Marshall Thunder Herd." I tell you, anything I've ever achieved is because you believed in me and you gave me a gift and you created in me a belief that there was something out there that I could contribute. I happen to believe education is a great equalizer. And as I mentioned, entrepreneurship is an opportunity. I think Marshall is a gift. It's a very rare situation. None of my peers have as much affinity for their school than Marshall grads did. Period. I'll tell you two stories very quickly, if I may. They get a little personal. The first is my brothers and I all wear the ring. Anybody heard the reason why? My mom and dad didn't get to go to college. They had the gift of my older brother when they were seniors in high school. And my dad did what he wanted to do. He dropped out, joined the army, got a GED. He and my mom raised my older brother and my two younger brothers. They had a commitment to us. They would get us all to school. And they paid off on that commitment. They got all three of us through Marshall University. In 1996, my dad, who was at the time mayor of Kenova, West Virginia, saved up his money for 18 months and bought three class rings of the same size and gave them to us on Christmas morning. The next day, as I was flying back to New Jersey, he drove me to the Tri-State Airport and I didn't know, but on the way home, he had a heart attack and he passed away at the age of 58, the day after he gave us the ring. So my brothers and I wear these rings because we love Marshall and our mom and dad kept a promise. The second thing I do this for is because Marshall University... Business Week a couple years ago decided that Intuit had a very unique culture and they were trying to choose between us and one other company to have the actual feature cover story with the CEO on the cover. They came in and had a professional photographer taking pictures. After about 15 minutes, the photographer said, "Mr. Smith, I really think your company has a chance, but I have to tell you, our editor hates jewelry. Can you please remove the ring?" I said, "I cannot." We did not get the cover. We got a five-page spread, but the picture has me like this with the ring. So my love for Marshall is not only because I love what you gave me, but I love what my mother and father gave my brothers, and I love what we stand for. So that's why the gift. Sorry for being so long-winded.

There was an article written in Fortune magazine in June 2016. The opening sentence was "Why isn't Intuit dead?" Now of course I was still CEO. I thought I better read the article. It could have been my epitaph a little premature. But the author Jeffrey Colvin went on to say because Intuit has the courage to serially disrupt itself. Something only a handful of companies have done: Amazon, Netflix, Intuit. And he studied these companies and said they share three characteristics. First, they view themselves the way a disruptor would view their business. So they don't beholden themselves to yesterday. They think about tomorrow. The second is they have the willingness to drive change even when the sun is shining. So they drive the change even if things are performing well today. And the third is they do it time and time again. So he wanted to come and follow us and figure out, doing his own follow-me home, how does Intuit do this? He shadowed me for a period of time and he wrote a follow-up article and his answer was because everyone owns the change. So I would say the first thing we've learned about driving change is no one gets to be an observer and be careful of just giving it to a committee. Let me give you an example. We formed three-person teams called action learning teams. Everyone in the company went out and we posed the 10 big questions and you got to choose which question you wanted to study. In this case, you may choose universities you want to study and two or three of you go together. You go out and observe them, then you come back and you write a six-page narrative. Now we're all scholars, we all publish, so a six-page narrative is an Amazon term which is facts per second. You have to remove the hyperbole and the opinion. You have to actually type in the observed facts and things that you saw and write it up as a narrative. Then you bring them in as a group and you have a protagonist and an antagonist argument over each of the issues. So you get to hear the pros and the cons. It's not groupthink. At the end, you use a process where you say okay, based on everything we've heard, what are the three to five biggest things we think we need to do? And once everyone's landed on that, you're still going to have outliers and then you go around the room and you ask three questions. Can you agree and commit? Can you disagree and commit? Or where are you going to go work? Because you can't have somebody not be a part of the process. I know that sounds incredibly ruthless and by the way, very few people get to the "where are you going to go work." Most people look, I disagree but at least my voice has been heard. I've put it on the table but I realize we all have to be rolling in the direction so I'll go ahead and support it. So it really is agree and commit and disagree and commit. But the most important thing out of that change inquiry is the first thing you'll come back with is a lot of what we're doing is already great. So you want to first declare what won't change. "Hey, we questioned everything but there's a lot of special things about Marshall and that's what we all signed up for." So you first declare this won't be different. But then you say these are things that will be different and how we all are going to be a part of it. But the most important thing is everybody's voice is a part of it. No observers.

I would start by saying we should not strive to be a bigger version of what already exists. We should be the prototype for what doesn't exist. I know we have a neighbor to the north that likes to remind us of the land grant university and recent comments suggest that size matters. But if you study Rudyard Kipling, it is not the big that eat the small. It's the fast that eat the slow. That is the law of the jungle. I love our size. We don't have to be this size but we aren't going to get to the bigger size with that shadow coming down from others if we try to just be a bigger version of what we are. I would encourage you to read Clay Christensen's book "Disrupting Universities." I just finished it. He's the one from Harvard who's written about disruptive innovation happening all over the world: "Innovator's Dilemma," "Innovator's Solution." He doesn't have all the right answers I'm sure but as a Harvard professor himself, he was able to objectively say what's wrong with the model. So what I would love to see Marshall do is to become the prototype for the aggregation of the world's best practices under one roof. If you study Steve Jobs and look at the iPod and iPhone, 17% of the iPod was original technology built by Apple. The rest were the best practices of others and he simply played the orchestra and got it to come together in a way no one else did. That's a good thing today. So we say in experimentation, the best experiment to run is one someone already ran for you. Let's go get that, bring that in, get another one and bring it in and think about a completely different model. And by the way if you do that, it drives growth. We will get bigger. We just would be a different version of who we are.

This is an interesting challenge. Our state is declining in population, one of only a half dozen I think in the United States. I think there's two things I would put into context before I offer some perspectives. The first is something I call the 75% reality. This was just a topic of discussion at that business council I referenced a few minutes ago. The 75% reality is this: 75% of today's adults believe the future will be worse for their kids. That is the first time in over a hundred years that that's been the case in the United States. The second 75% reality is 75% of all venture capital money last year went to California, New York and Massachusetts. 75%. So they are not egalitarian in handing out opportunity. The third 75% is 75% of all new jobs being created are created in startups. So if you take those three, West Virginia is not alone in believing the world is not going to be brighter tomorrow. 75% of the world's feeling that way. Venture capitalists are sticking their money in other places and yet the power of the future is entrepreneurship. Then I think our opportunity is not to get lost in the reality of the population. Today the world's population is growing at 1.1%. The US is growing at 7/10 of a percent. West Virginia is declining. But here's three creative ideas for you. I came across one last week. Anybody heard of Tulsa Remote? Vermont's doing this too and what I love about Tulsa Remote is they borrowed the idea from Vermont and made it better. Tulsa's mayor has tried for 10 years to get people to relocate to Tulsa but they could not compete against Nashville and Orlando and Houston and all these up and coming next generation cities. So they tried something different. They found out 40% of the United States workforce that works for Amazon, Intuit and others are remote employees. They are paid by another company but they're allowed to live anywhere in the US because they don't have to go to a job. So Tulsa put out an ad: we will pay you $10,000 to move to Tulsa. They thought they were going to get about 100 applicants. They got 10,000. So they went ahead and said we're going to have to build on this idea. They created a WeWork space. A company that sets up a building and one or two employees from all different companies can come in and they're like a beehive. Even though they're over there working on Apple and Amazon, they're sitting next each other and share a facility. They no longer sit alone in a home office. They get to learn from somebody, go to lunch with somebody. They're not alone. So they set up this WeWork facility and what's happened so far in Tulsa is the average people coming in, the family's income is $106,000. They're coming there, they're falling in love with Tulsa because they found out it's not as expensive to live there as San Francisco or New York. They find out the people are really nice and they're sitting next to people in this WeWork facility and they're starting to form relationships and actually form companies together. So it's created growth in Tulsa. So the first thing I want to talk to the mayor about is could we think about something here? That basically fights population decline by bringing them in. The second is we don't have to be limited by our borders. I know I'm about to put a name out there that many of you've heard and I understand there's pros and cons on this but I've been enamored with Southern New Hampshire University who was landlocked, who completely reimagined themselves and they've grown their enrollment 80% in the last 10 years. They went with online and on campus and they have completely reimagined themselves in a way that's incredible. The third I would say is if we build this school the way Marshall has already been great and we think about things like experimentation and design, I think the next generation of entrepreneurs will want to come here. They will come here and want to start jobs and that will also reverse population decline. There's a school who's done it, Babson College. For a decade I sat next to the president for 4 hours and had dinner with her and asked her to share anything she would be willing to share and she said we'd be happy to expose anything we can to you. They are the entrepreneurship flagship, but they have limitations and Marshall actually has more assets. So I think we could actually do it even better. So the population thing is a reality, but I don't think it's an epitaph. I think it's an opportunity.

This is why I'm so excited about what you've taken on and Ben and the team with what you're doing with the Innovation Center, the iCenter. It's a best practice. When we had the chance to come here a couple years ago, it was a catalyst, but what has come out as a result is a best practice. I've shared it in the valley and other universities are super interested in what you're doing. Now, I think the real key is can we actually systematize it if that's what you choose to do as a faculty? It's going to be something you're going to have to think about. But Astro Teller, the name is real, runs Google X, where autonomous driving is coming out and Google Glass and all the parts of Google that's not the search engine. He just spoke this past Saturday night at an event I was at in Sea Island, Georgia. They asked him, "What are the things you try to create in your environment?" He said, "I want us all to act like 6-year-olds." Because when you're 6, all you have are questions. Why is the sky blue? Why is that candy sticky? Why is this, why is that? Everything is exciting. And then we put you in school and we beat it out of you. Well, the experimentation culture is designed to bring the 6-year-old back in all of us, where everything is a possibility. You're not allowed to pick one idea. You have to pick seven ideas. You run experiments. You get your hands dirty. You fall down. You get a Band-Aid on your boo-boo. You get back up. That's the opportunity. And that creates lifelong learning. If we come out of this university with these design thinking skills, they will be the best-positioned students in the world to work at Amazon, which runs these small teams called two-pizza teams, where they're completely empowered but they have to be able to do design thinking to drive their program forward. Google's looking for the same thing. So is Intuit. So I think we really can create those skills, and that will create lifelong learning.

One of the things, by the way, I think everyone may be aware, John Chambers, a fellow West Virginian, has leaned into WVU, and of course, my family and I are hopeful we can partner with you all here at Marshall. I called John and said, "Look, let's get together, and maybe for the first time, let's see if we can make 1 + 1 = 11." Early days are looking a little rocky, but we'll figure that out over time. But I think the headline is we all fundamentally see the same thing, which is we need to get coding into K through 12. My wife and I just got the chance to get iPads and computers into Ceredo Elementary, the school I went to, so the kids can start to learn. From there, we'll figure out how the rest of the state can get those things. But the other thing I'm inspired by are the schools I've been trying to learn from. They're starting to have a bridge between the engineering school and the business school. I realize there needs to be specialization, but there's also the ability to work across. I do think it is something we should not only start to expect of students coming in, but maybe even in the university thinking about how we work across the two and have coding and business school working together. WVU is doing that right now. As I've spoken to Javier and President Gee, they're starting to do that. So I would just challenge ourselves to say is there something there we might want to think about.

Now, you want to talk about humbling yourself. Can anybody name Harvard's greatest nemesis? Yale. That's right. So what's amazing is the most popular course at Harvard right now is called CS50. The students refer to it as coding for non-coders because it's a basic program that teaches everybody a little bit of coding, but then those who want to go on to be engineering students go into the engineering school, but everybody gets foundational school. It's taught by a non-tenured professor, which is highly unusual at Harvard for a program that successful. Its reputation spread so quickly that Yale University called Harvard and asked if they can license the program. It is now the most popular program at Yale taught by a Harvard professor. And it is now the number one class on both university campuses. Both are making it foundational as a part of a freshman curriculum for people coming in. I think we can license it because I spoke to them. So if we're interested, we ought to consider it.

I won't say that because maybe you went to Ivy League schools, but anytime someone tells me "Oh, Ivy League," I said, "Yeah, the only difference between you and me is your education cost $200,000 more, and I have a better football team."

Thank you. They tried to get it out of me. They sent me to a school in New York, but it didn't work.

Great. I love it. Thank you for the question. First of all, I'm glad I didn't lose my accent either. For a while, they convinced me... In software terms, a bug is something that doesn't work the way it's supposed to, and a feature is something you actually get paid for. Early on, I was convinced by an employer I needed to go to New York and take vocal training because it made me sound less educated to speak the way I did. The first 5 years, I hung my head and thought it was a bug until people started to say, "Who was that kid that presented with that funny accent?" I said, "Wow, this is a feature." And I've gotten paid every day since. Izzy is like me. She may be in California, her heart hasn't left. She and I still get together. I still spend time with her. She calls it the power hour, and we share a book. We read a book each time we get together and do a book report and talk about things. She's coming back here in a couple weeks. Her sister's running for student body, so I'm close with the whole family. She'll be back. If not, it's not if, it's when. But right now, she's got dragons to slay and she's doing it. She's lighting Silicon Valley on fire and it's good for Marshall because she is iconic out there and a strong woman, which I love. The third is I think the answer lies in what we're talking about, which is creating the design thinking because we don't know what's around the corner. Artificial intelligence and machine learning, data and analytics, supply chain, we talked about platforms and ecosystems, the power of the crowd. But all of those came about because people ran experimentations and they fell in love with the problem and not the solution. Our founder was famous when he created Quicken back in 1983 because he watched his wife struggle to balance the family checkbook and said there has to be a better way. He created a product on a DOS screen. Someone said, "You're a technology company." He said, "No, I'm not. I'm a customer-obsessed company. If a pencil would have solved the problem, we would have made pencils." And the only way you come up with AI and the other stuff is by teaching this experimentation. Then I think what will happen is the curriculum will emerge. Right now, blockchain is one of those things. So learning the fundamentals of blockchain, which right now Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is still being formed, but blockchain is the underpinnings of the next chapter of cybersecurity. So I love your question and I think it's really thinking about the capability that produces those new things.

Thank you for the question. This is actually one of the most common questions you get when you're talking to fellow CEOs, but it's also the most common question I get when I'm talking to an employee. We've had to really step back and ask ourselves, and the reality is in the world there are three resources you usually need to make things happen: money, people, and time. You can usually get more money, even if you get a relative to lend you some or a department head or a dean who'll give you a little extra. People, you can usually get people to volunteer, even interns like students going out. But you can never get more time. 24 hours in a day, 7 days a week, 365, that's it. So of all the areas you really need to manage the most rigorously, it's time. A lesson and technique I've learned and applied is take my time and be clear about where I'm going to spend it, allocate my 100 points. For me as CEO, 40% of my points go into product strategy reviews and company strategy and staff meetings, so 40% in running the company. 30% was in growing and developing talent. Every week I would meet with 12 employees in a skip level chat. I would ask them three questions: What's getting better than it was 6 months ago? What's getting worse than it was 6 months ago? And what's the one thing you think I should know that you think I'm not aware of so I can go fix it? So that's 30%. Now I've got 40% in product reviews because we're a product company, 30% in growing and developing talent, 20% is outside of our four walls. I belong on the board of Nordstrom, the retailer, a company called SurveyMonkey. I'm also a CEO Roundtable participant. Every quarter the CEOs in Silicon Valley get together. I attend those meetings and I type Uncle Brad's book report and bring it back to the company and share the lessons I learned from outside. The last 10% is my personal learning. I read the Wall Street Journal every morning, watch the opening bell on CNBC, and read one book a week. I do a book report, and that's where Izzy got this power hour. So if you take that, I'm learning in the product strategy reviews about what are the things coming around the corner and what did a competitor do that I didn't anticipate? I'm learning from the employees when I say "What's getting better? What's getting worse? What's the one thing you think I should know?" I'm learning from the outside companies whose boards I sit on and other CEOs, and I'm learning from the books and periodicals I'm reading. All that keeps you in an uncomfortable position. The best piece of advice I got was the night I was becoming CEO. I spoke to a veteran CEO who was stepping down after 17 years and I said, "What's the secret?" He said, "When you go to bed every night, I want you to think of two things. Am I driving enough change to keep our company relevant for the next decade? Or am I driving too much change too fast that our team can't keep up? And then if you can sleep, you're not doing your job right." So the best thing is the 100-point exercise. Here's how you make it pay off. Whoever does your calendar for you, in my case I have an executive assistant, she color codes every meeting on my calendar: blue for 40, red for 30, green for 20, yellow for 10. Every month she creates a pie chart and I see if my time actually was in the right ratio, and if it wasn't, I adjust. I know it sounds very rigorous, but it's the only way I figured out how to do it because I couldn't manufacture a longer day.

All the employees at the company are taught design thinking. We call it Design for Delight at Intuit. We rolled out 10% unstructured time back in 2008 when I stepped into the CEO role. Google gives 20%. If you take this and put it in the context of the prior discussion, every one of our leaders said, "Are you kidding me? We're already behind schedule getting the product out. I need people to work harder and you want to give them 10% off." Then we learned what Google learned. If you tell somebody there's a project they can work on that makes their heart beat fast, they'll do their day job faster. Many times their 10% time happens on nights and weekends because they'll work on something if they're excited about it. They don't care about whether the 10% came Monday through Friday. That produced this environment where everyone's trained on how to run an experiment, and then they get this time to go run that experiment, and they know that I have a CEO fund, a venture capital fund that I'll fund any winning idea for 90 days. One of the things they ran into is they would have an idea like, "I want to solve opioid addiction." The engineer was in Bangalore, the designer who wanted to work on it was in Paris, France, and the marketer was in San Francisco. They couldn't find a way to work the time zones. So they invented a product called Brainstorm. Brainstorm is basically a virtual collaboration environment where they go in and share documents with each other, update them, and they could all lock in. That allowed this virtual connectivity around the globe. It was born out of unstructured time. They created a tool to solve their own problem, and then we ended up loving it, and now we've licensed it to Bain Consulting and a lot of other companies. It came out of necessity.

May I ask another? Of course. I didn't know if you were looking behind me or not. And this is not meant to make the faculty here uneasy, but very few discussions that I've been involved in really relate to faculty development. It's kind of university leadership and students. You talked about the fear of change. The fear is greatest when it looks like you have to change. Across the country in higher ed, how have successful schools encouraged their faculty to embrace the change and not fear the change?

First of all, I have to say as I've gotten into the education learning zone, I'm certainly not into the education answer zone. Anything I've shared today is either a hypothesis that could be proven and tested or disproven and tested, or it's something somebody else is doing. I come from a family of educators. All of my cousins teach in elementary, in high school. I always aspired to one day teach at college. My view is teachers, faculty, and professors are the secret sauce. But what's happening now is this generation has grown up after the invention of the iPhone. Their brains have formed something called continuous partial attention. This generation can do something that our brains can't do. Our brains multitask. They're able to do simultaneous things at the same time. But there's a shadow to that. Four years ago, the average attention span of a millennial was 12 seconds. It's now 8 seconds. A goldfish is 9 seconds. That's the real deal. If we think they're going to want to listen to us talk for 50 minutes and take notes, that's just not the way they learn anymore. They switch back and forth between devices 27 times in 1 hour when left on their own. They need high interactivity. They can process quickly, not the way we typically did. What I'm seeing happen as I go study other universities is professors respect other professors because they know the domain and the craft. They know the pain you go through, the sacrifice you made. When they go see somebody else trying something different, then they're willing to try it themselves much more so than if they listen to me who's never taught a class. So the first thing I would say is they're learning from each other. I love that Tulsa, Oklahoma borrowed from Vermont. I love that Yale borrowed from Harvard. I love that Southern New Hampshire University is all kind of learning from each other. The second thing I'm seeing is the role of leadership is to put the grand challenge out there, give them a framework, and then step out of the way and let them do their magic. Only interject yourself when there's an obstacle they can't overcome. Peter Drucker once said, "The bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle." That is true in business. I'm usually the one that causes more friction and my job needs to be to remove friction. If we pose the problem, allow them to use a set of techniques to solve it, and help when they get stuck, that's the way this generation wants to learn, and that's the success model I've seen starting to take off in other schools. And that is not to take a shot at the current model. That's a testable hypothesis. We could try it and if it doesn't work, say, "Well, that was a good idea that didn't work."

I think my lessons and my experience are people do not want to run from something, they want to run to something. John F. Kennedy's speech writer once said that if you want to be a leader, you have to be better than a communicator, you have to be a translator of dreams. You need to be a dealer in hope. Our state needs hope right now. I'm personally tired of seeing 50th out of 50, 49 out of 50, 50 out of 50, 49 out of 50, but I actually don't see that as a glass half empty. I see that as nothing but upside. If we truly set our sights on what we can go do that the world needs and the state needs, it's a great opportunity. The most common phrase in Silicon Valley is if you want to have a big business, solve a big problem. If you want to have a little business, solve a little problem. If you want to have a successful university, solve a big problem. I'd start right here at home. We could be the iconic university in the world if we can bring the state out of this perennial situation it's in. I fundamentally believe the answers are there. The reason Izzy Rogner has lit the world on fire and her sister lit the world on fire with internships and all the other West Virginians that have come out is they ain't seen nothing like us. The number one success factor everyone tests out there is perseverance and grit. Take a kid out of this area and tell them that if they can dig their way through this, they can come out the other side, they'll dig. A lot of other kids don't do that. They didn't have to fight through what we fight through. So I'm a big believer we have nothing but upside.

I'm passionate about this and I apologize, this is where opinion definitely comes in. I shared entrepreneurship. 60% of the entire world works in a business with fewer than 100 employees. 75% of all new jobs are created in startups. It's even more in Appalachia. I got a phone call from the state saying, "You sit with Jeff Bezos multiple times a year, can you get us on the list of HQ2?" That conversation lasted about 30 seconds. They're not coming to West Virginia. There's not enough flat land. You can't scale and grow. But you know what can come from here? Entrepreneurs. They're the backbone of our community, the backbone of the world economy. The next Amazon could get created here. I love this conversation that happened last week. We had Steve Case, the founder of AOL. He now has started a program with J.D. Vance. Anyone read "Hillbilly Elegy"? J.D. Vance wrote that. J.D. and Steve Case have started a program called "Rise of the Rest." They went out to the 300-some cities who bid on Amazon's HQ2 and lost. They gave them a grand challenge: take half the money you were prepared to give to Amazon in tax benefits, take half the time that you invested in trying to put together that contract, and put it into your entrepreneurship programs in your universities, and you will create the next Amazon. Our history was in the mountains, and I'm proud of that. Our future is in the clouds and in the opportunities we can create by using these new technologies and entrepreneurship. I think we ought to create the next Amazon right here. Izzy and others can do it, and all these students coming out. So I think we ought to crank up the engine. Let their freak flag fly.

I can only tell you, and it's a derivative of the answer I gave. I'm having to walk a fine line. I'm sure several of you are sitting there saying, "He sure sounds like he has more answers than questions." I promise you I don't. I have a lot of scar tissue, a lot of mistakes, but I do have some best practices we have come across over time that we've borrowed from others that have worked, and I think they're applicable to universities. That's why I've spent the last few years studying other universities. I'm saying, "They're doing exactly what we do at Intuit or at Amazon. Maybe this will work at Marshall." My hope, when Avi and I talked about his vision which I bought into and love what you all are thinking about, is it would be wonderful if the faculty actually picked the universities we want to learn from based upon the things we think could be a part of the future, form small teams, and go out and do what we talked about. Go study from your peers. Seek to understand before you seek to be understood. That's an old Socrates or Aristotle or one of them. Literally observe and learn, then come back and write a narrative and have a discussion to say what are the best ideas and be a part of creating the change. That's the lifelong learning that will happen. What also happens is when you're out there, you're going to discover the new trends. Every year, Steve Jobs would fly to China and attend their version of the consumer electronics program. He would see a technology in search of a problem over there, but over here he knew the problems, and sometimes those two would intersect and he would bring their technology and match it with our problem and create something called an iPhone. If you go out, you will observe things. Some will be a great idea just not ready for primetime, and other things you'll say, "I just saw something at that school that is really suited for West Virginia." No one's listening at Intuit in San Francisco because they have all these riches, but that could really solve the problem here. So if we found a way to do a 100-point exercise on our time and have X% of our time as faculty going out and learning from the best will makers or taking coding boot camp... I'm about to sign up for a 6-week program at MIT called "Artificial Intelligence for Non-Coders." Board members are signing up for this. I'm going to sign up for it and go see if I can learn and expose my brain to something I didn't know. You are lifelong learners, but sometimes our curricula focuses on the same thing. Someone once told me, "You don't want to have 30 years of 1 year of experience." The same thing every year. The best way to do that is fall in love with the problem again.

Oh, yes. It's funny you said that. I was about to go to two models that have really inspired me: Toyota leaning into the community colleges in Kentucky and the Kaiser Foundation leaning into community colleges out west. They've said the schools aren't producing the skills we need, and I would love to ask if you could create a curriculum or a major in your school that does this. What they're doing in return is they're guaranteeing employment. Imagine going through a school and knowing you don't have to worry about a job coming out. That's just an incredible idea. I think that would be a beautiful match made in heaven. The reason I'm excited about design thinking for Marshall is because this is the way the technology sector and the artificial intelligence sector operates: experimentation. If we become the place that this is known for, other than Stanford's idea design school, I think we could have this channel into guaranteed employment. I'd be happy to bring some fellow CEOs out here and have career fairs if we figure out a way to make that happen.

I really don't know. You talk about a blind squirrel finding an acorn. I don't know, but I did get some advice along the way that helped. First of all, I have always been intellectually curious. I had three formative moments in my life. At the age of six, I watched a mountain burn, and I watched the community come together. I learned that life was a team sport, that we're all angels with one wing, and the way we fly is by holding on to each other. So right off the bat, I knew the power of community and the power of "we are" instead of "I am." The second is in the fourth grade, I lost a spelling bee to a little red-headed girl I had a crush on. She wrote a note and said, "You can't be my boyfriend because you're stupid." She is a doctor in Cincinnati, Ohio now, so she wasn't wrong. She was definitely smarter. But I went home that night, my IQ didn't go up, but my work ethic did. I began studying for the midterm the first day of the semester. Grit. The third was in ninth grade when I had a bully that I mentioned earlier. My dad enrolled me in martial arts. I learned two things when I stood up and lost. First, courage isn't the absence of fear, it's a willingness to stand up and face the things that scare you and learn from those lessons. The second is to always be a champion for the underdog. I used what I learned in martial arts to make sure anyone around me was no longer a victim. I think those three foundational lessons helped me. But the piece of advice I got was to always volunteer for the job nobody else wants. Everyone hires these young people and they all want to work on AI and ML and blockchain, but they also have these legacy software technology products built for the PC. If you go volunteer for the job nobody else wants, first of all, you're going to learn something because it's usually getting less resources every day since they're pulling them off and putting them on the new thing. So you have to get scrappy and innovative, but you also earn a reputation for being the go-to person. The bosses start to say, "Every time we tap Smith, he's willing to go in and do it. And somehow he makes a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Let's figure out how to put him on this thing." Next thing you know, you start to get opportunities that everyone else is wondering "Why not me?" Because you always want to do the cool stuff. You weren't willing to do the tough stuff. I really learned it from my dad. When my dad became the mayor at 53, he had been downsized after 26 years at Nestle. He didn't want to voluntarily step down, wasn't ready, we didn't have the money to retire. He became the mayor back home and did something no other mayor in Kenova had done. He rode the sanitation routes every Tuesday with the people who picked up the trash. I asked him, "Dad, why do you do that?" He said, "Two reasons, son. You'll get to know your people if you spend 8 hours in the cab of a truck with them, and you'll get to know your city better if you ride up and down the alleys." So when I got hired by Pepsi, my first job was to manage 16-sters who delivered soft drinks in the morning. I rode the routes with them in Michigan. When it was snowing, I helped them load the trucks, stack the cases. In every contest that came up, they gave a little extra effort for me so we won every contest, and I got promoted. It was simply because I helped them when they needed help, and they helped me when I needed help. I think that's it. And we teach that at West Virginia. That's us. We are Marshall, baby.

May I say one thing? Please. I am so proud to be associated with you. Of all the things in my life, all the things in my family's life, my mother and father, there is no greater source of pride than to know that Marshall University is preparing the next generation to do amazing things. I've had the chance to surround myself with some pretty fun people along the way, but none better than you. You are doing God's work, and I want to thank you for what you do every day, and I want to thank you for allowing me to come in and talk to you today. Thank you.