Transformational Education > New technologies
Transcript
One of the things that I hadn't really focused on was that several years before, apparently someone had negotiated with IBM for PCs. And every student in the PMD had a PC. So there were 120 or so students, 120 PCs, each freestanding, each in their room, each unused. And each of them running MS-DOS. And as I always said then, and still believe, MS-DOS was not meant to be used by human beings, so it was natural that nobody would use it. But the faculty didn't use it either.
As the year went on, I began to say, "It's harder to get this program to be distinctive than I thought. And the students are different than AMPs, and they're clearly different than MBAs. They are in the middle. Maybe it could become a good teaching assignment if we got students who wanted to work harder -- because they were on the make a little more than AMPs -- with content a little closer to operations, maybe, than AMP, which is sort of broad policy kind of stuff. And, you know, what are those computers doing over there?"
At that point, a friend of mine told me about Macintosh. And it was ironic, because I had originally told him about the PC, and said, "You can solve some of your little analytical puzzles by getting a PC. And if you don't know how to do it, call up the local college"-- this was in California -- "and hire any freshman, and they'll come over and do your projects for you. And they'll get nothing, just the fun of it. They'd like to see a businessman, and use a computer with a business. Do it." So the guy did it, and it worked, and he got some little project solved. But that was MS-DOS. And he didn't have to do it, he got the kid to do it. But he said, "You know, the Macintosh has just come out, and that's really interesting."
So I decided that one of the ways that I might be able to change PMD -- not the only way, but one of the ways was to somehow change the computer experience, and to make it much more central. And that that might attract innovation, and investment by both faculty and students, and be totally distinctive. And make it something that would expand the market maybe, but much more it would become an intellectual attraction, instead of what some might say was a tired program in many ways. And maybe it would be a big market, which I had always been frustrated that I couldn't figure out ways to get a bigger market.
So I went to Fouraker and said, "I have an ambition to make the PMD program the most computer-central program that we have, where it's computer-central to managers, not to geeks. I don't want to use something that is not used by human beings, because I think, based on all my experience, that general managers don't do a lot of computing. They don't do much calculating. They do back of the envelope kind of stuff, maybe. And I don't mean to demean the certain cases where you need to compute details. But general managers are coordinators, they're communicators, they're human beings, they're involved in relationships. And I want to try and make the computer at the center of a program dealing with human beings and general managers -- I want to use the computer to revolutionize PMD. And I can't do it with the PMC -- with the PCs. We've got them, but nobody will use them; students or faculty. So therefore, I want a Macintosh for every student, and all the faculty. And ultimately, I want them in the faculty homes too. So this can be a total immersion 24 hours by 7 thing."
And I came along then a short while later and said, "I would like to use the Macintosh to change the PMD, and I propose to buy them, not to get them free." Because we knew that they wouldn't give them to us free. They don't give much away free at all.
It turned out we had two alternatives. IBM said they would give us newer machines, and the faculty member in charge of computers at that time came and told me that IBM was willing to do it free. They would give us the computers for nothing. And Apple was going to charge us eight hundred thousand dollars. And I said, "But I need a computer that can be used by human beings, and I want to go Apple." And so it boiled down to me saying Apple, and IBM saying zero. And ultimately McArthur, whether he knew it or not, agreed, and we wound up buying the Apple.
I think John -- what he said in meetings was that the school prided itself on betting on successful entrepreneurs. And if Colyer wanted to bet on this, he was going to back me. That's what he said. And so he spent eight hundred thousand dollars. Which was quite a thing, because his notion was that the prices of computers always go down, so why should I buy one, was his theory. "Why should I buy one at the beginning of a two year MBA program? At the end of the two year MBA program it's worth half, or maybe a third. Let the students buy it."
So he tried to keep the investment by the school for the school's account in computers down. He thought the servicing would be immensely -- the support would be immensely expensive. The faculty would view it as entitlements. The economics were bad, the technology was -- he just thought it was a bad idea.
Well, that started quite an exciting adventure related to technology. I was never thought by anybody, including me, to be a technologist, probably, but I was an engineer. I wasn't totally ignorant of things like that. I was a chemical engineer at Cornell. And while I didn't like engineering as a career path, I at least wasn't a poet. Let me put it that way.
And I said, "This should be a network." And I don't know why we focused on that, but we had a self-contained program. We had a program in one dormitory. We had students who followed one calendar, one curriculum. We had a team of teachers who taught together for that entire twelve or thirteen week period. We had a little laboratory, in a way, carved out of the mighty Harvard Business School. The computer difficulties for an MBA program are immense, because the students commute, many of them. Not all, but many. We had no commuters. Everybody was in the dorm.
So we had the luxury in PMD, if we chose, to hardwire -- and we did. We built a copper wire network throughout the dorm, and to all the faculty office buildings where our faculty were. And we arranged to set up machines at the faculty homes, which cost a little extra, because we were paying for all the machines. And the faculty didn't know that they wanted them. And all of a sudden, one weekend a semi trailer showed up, and a whole bunch of young Apple employees, in T-shirts and shorts, came into our dorms. And they opened the windows, and they started throwing boxes out the windows, and installing -- and over a weekend they installed 120 computers, and all the faculty computers. And we had the first hardwired network, at the Harvard Business School, of Macintoshes, of all things. It was a miracle.
At a planning group meeting a few days later, McArthur asked me, "How are you coming on the computer?" I said, "Well, we did it last weekend. We put them in." "You what?" "Well, we installed the network last weekend."
And the Apple kids were amazing, and they turned out to be led by a guy named Rob Strickland. Rob Strickland was a young guy that I first met when they were making their pitch to us to sell us the Macintosh. And he stood up behind his computer, and typed away on the computer, looking at the computer upside down. Talking at the same time, as a sales engineer would do. And I told him I was so impressed that he could type upside down, and talk at the same time that that was really user-friendly. And I was so impressed I wanted him to come and work with us. He was a sales engineer. Apple doesn't put sales engineers to work in clients. You open the box, and turn it on. That's it. Well, if we opened the box and tried to turn it on, our faculty wouldn't know what to do, because they're not computer-literate.
So the faculty, as you might imagine, weren't that enthused. Because their first thought is, "How do I use it in my career? How do I use this in my consulting? How do I" -- and they couldn't see any way. The machines were a little small and stuff. I finally got them, at one lunch, to go over and look at a demo. And we had the class cards on -- the Apple guys had a whole bunch of ideas. Because out in California they just run around spouting to each other ideas they can do with a computer.
We decided to put the class cards, at their suggestion, where we wound up with a picture and the card, with information: name, and company. And later on, after one or two iterations, they said, "You know, we could put sound on this, if you want." "Sound?" They said, "Yeah." "Well, why would you do that?" Well, one of the issues was we had a lot of students from outside the United States, and we couldn't pronounce their names. But as long as we had cards, we didn't have to pronounce their names. And I thought, "Hey, that is really neat. If we could get them to pronounce their name. And have the student click on it. They see the picture. They see where they come from, the name of the company, their background, and what they do in their company, and they pronounce their name. First of all, it will be a little sizzle, little -- but it has a power to it, because it invites us to call them more frequently by their name."
A trivial little item, but came forward from the user-friendly computer, through the ideas of the Mac people. Bouncing off the head of somebody like me, who was looking for a way to smooth the path in. And ultimately, we began, one by one, to develop other teaching materials, which sometimes were just a movie.
I had another Apple guy who came from South Africa. And he was going to South Africa, and he offered to take a camera, and go down there. And he went down and photographed, with a video camera, Soweto, and some other things, and some people from a company, I guess, in South Africa. And we got a movie. But it wasn't just a movie, it was a movie we had made, with a handheld camera. And people looked at that. They could look at it in their bedroom. But we didn't know how to teach it. We didn't know whether it should be only in the bedroom, or only in the classroom, or both. We didn't know: if we gave it to them in the bedroom, what did you do in the plenary session? What was the function of a plenary session?
So I finally went back to the people at the top of Apple, and said, "You guys have a great opportunity to try and demonstrate the usefulness of your computer to businesses, and to general managers. And that's what we have in PMD. They're general managers, they're human beings, and they communicate, and they do this, and they do that. They don't do much calculation, but they do all the things that you guys do: audiovisual, and communications, and stuff.
"And this experiment is going to die, deader than a mackerel, if we don't get some support. And there is no support at HBS. It's not a question of money, it's a question of talent. We don't have anybody that knows your culture. And so if you want this to work -- and we thank you for installing the network, but it isn't worth anything to us if you don't come and help us make it work."
They said, "Well, we don't do that. You open the box, the machine works." I said, "Okay. If you want to get into the business world, here's a window. We're willing to bet. Are you willing to bet?" And finally John Scully, and Kevin Sullivan, who was the head of HR, they finally decided that -- they hated to do it, it was the camel under their tent too. They didn't want to give free service to anybody, but they ultimately approved giving three people fulltime to come and work with us in PMD.
Not at HBS, but at PMD. And over the next, whatever it was, seven years or so, they were there, and did a lot of development, and handholding, and training of faculty, and training of students. They ran the training programs. You wouldn't do it for kids in college, but you had to do it for our faculty, and you had to do it for our students, who were middle managers, not kids.
So they ultimately invested three man-years times seven, or something; twenty man-years, probably. And it was essential to get us going. We tried all kinds of things. We tried giving out the assignment schedules electronically. We used an email system. Very quickly email drove away the telephone. Nobody in PMD used the telephone from the time they got here, until the time they went back home -- except for maybe the first hour, until they figured out the computer. Email just took over, because you could time-shift, and all sorts of other things.
You had to type, and they weren't very good at typing. So we wondered a lot whether -- how serious that was. The faculty couldn't type, most of them. We wondered how serious that was. So we were learning, at the most fundamental level, of how to use this machine in the context of our kind of education: for human beings interested in communications, and rapid-fire, low-intensity calculations.
We wound up developing I would guess probably maybe fifteen or twenty really quite different examples of how the technology could be used.
We made CDs of some of the stuff. And I remember showing it one time to Arthur Rock, who was one of the original investors in Apple Computer. And I showed him a disk, and it had the Harvard Business School logo on it, and the name of the teaching material. I think it was Eastern Europe, or something, where we had all kinds of economic data, pictures, maps, all kinds of stuff. And he passed it around the room, and he said -- Arthur Rock said, "You know, the amazing thing about this is it has the Apple logo on it," as he passed the disk around.
These computers were small and slow. They aren't what you get now. But they were infinitely better than the PCs for the type of thing we were trying to do. The faculty got a little bit committed. Some more than others. I would say the ones -- and the question of promotion came up. Could you get promoted by doing what we were doing?
So it was the beginning of a subversive effort to try and make computers user-friendly computers -- and these were graphical user interface computers -- central to not only the administrative life, but the interactive relationships between students and faculty, the pedagogy of the program. We were building classes entirely around the computer. We were then going into the classroom, which had to be wired with a different material to show off the stuff in the classroom.
But we had to figure out how to use it. Because if 120 students have each done something pretty sophisticated and unique, and they can swap it among themselves through emails, and then some poor faculty member goes into the plenary session, and there's 120 geniuses well-informed, and he's struggling right along with them to keep up, it challenges what the role of the teacher, the plenary session, and so on is. So I thought we were really doing the Lord's work. And that the potential power of the computer was beyond question in our environment, even though the computers themselves were kind of slow.
In 1993, Business Week published a statement that said PMD was one of the most -- one of the ten most innovative programs in Execute Education in the United States. And I thought, "Wow, this is maybe, I don't know, the seventieth or eightieth version of a long, twelve week program. And to have them decide that this is the most innovative when it's that old, and twelve weeks," I thought that was the Promised Land. I was very pleased.
Transcript
One of the things that I hadn't really focused on was that several years before, apparently someone had negotiated with IBM for PCs. And every student in the PMD had a PC. So there were 120 or so students, 120 PCs, each freestanding, each in their room, each unused. And each of them running MS-DOS. And as I always said then, and still believe, MS-DOS was not meant to be used by human beings, so it was natural that nobody would use it. But the faculty didn't use it either.
As the year went on, I began to say, "It's harder to get this program to be distinctive than I thought. And the students are different than AMPs, and they're clearly different than MBAs. They are in the middle. Maybe it could become a good teaching assignment if we got students who wanted to work harder -- because they were on the make a little more than AMPs -- with content a little closer to operations, maybe, than AMP, which is sort of broad policy kind of stuff. And, you know, what are those computers doing over there?"
At that point, a friend of mine told me about Macintosh. And it was ironic, because I had originally told him about the PC, and said, "You can solve some of your little analytical puzzles by getting a PC. And if you don't know how to do it, call up the local college"-- this was in California -- "and hire any freshman, and they'll come over and do your projects for you. And they'll get nothing, just the fun of it. They'd like to see a businessman, and use a computer with a business. Do it." So the guy did it, and it worked, and he got some little project solved. But that was MS-DOS. And he didn't have to do it, he got the kid to do it. But he said, "You know, the Macintosh has just come out, and that's really interesting."
So I decided that one of the ways that I might be able to change PMD -- not the only way, but one of the ways was to somehow change the computer experience, and to make it much more central. And that that might attract innovation, and investment by both faculty and students, and be totally distinctive. And make it something that would expand the market maybe, but much more it would become an intellectual attraction, instead of what some might say was a tired program in many ways. And maybe it would be a big market, which I had always been frustrated that I couldn't figure out ways to get a bigger market.
So I went to Fouraker and said, "I have an ambition to make the PMD program the most computer-central program that we have, where it's computer-central to managers, not to geeks. I don't want to use something that is not used by human beings, because I think, based on all my experience, that general managers don't do a lot of computing. They don't do much calculating. They do back of the envelope kind of stuff, maybe. And I don't mean to demean the certain cases where you need to compute details. But general managers are coordinators, they're communicators, they're human beings, they're involved in relationships. And I want to try and make the computer at the center of a program dealing with human beings and general managers -- I want to use the computer to revolutionize PMD. And I can't do it with the PMC -- with the PCs. We've got them, but nobody will use them; students or faculty. So therefore, I want a Macintosh for every student, and all the faculty. And ultimately, I want them in the faculty homes too. So this can be a total immersion 24 hours by 7 thing."
And I came along then a short while later and said, "I would like to use the Macintosh to change the PMD, and I propose to buy them, not to get them free." Because we knew that they wouldn't give them to us free. They don't give much away free at all.
It turned out we had two alternatives. IBM said they would give us newer machines, and the faculty member in charge of computers at that time came and told me that IBM was willing to do it free. They would give us the computers for nothing. And Apple was going to charge us eight hundred thousand dollars. And I said, "But I need a computer that can be used by human beings, and I want to go Apple." And so it boiled down to me saying Apple, and IBM saying zero. And ultimately McArthur, whether he knew it or not, agreed, and we wound up buying the Apple.
I think John -- what he said in meetings was that the school prided itself on betting on successful entrepreneurs. And if Colyer wanted to bet on this, he was going to back me. That's what he said. And so he spent eight hundred thousand dollars. Which was quite a thing, because his notion was that the prices of computers always go down, so why should I buy one, was his theory. "Why should I buy one at the beginning of a two year MBA program? At the end of the two year MBA program it's worth half, or maybe a third. Let the students buy it."
So he tried to keep the investment by the school for the school's account in computers down. He thought the servicing would be immensely -- the support would be immensely expensive. The faculty would view it as entitlements. The economics were bad, the technology was -- he just thought it was a bad idea.
Well, that started quite an exciting adventure related to technology. I was never thought by anybody, including me, to be a technologist, probably, but I was an engineer. I wasn't totally ignorant of things like that. I was a chemical engineer at Cornell. And while I didn't like engineering as a career path, I at least wasn't a poet. Let me put it that way.
And I said, "This should be a network." And I don't know why we focused on that, but we had a self-contained program. We had a program in one dormitory. We had students who followed one calendar, one curriculum. We had a team of teachers who taught together for that entire twelve or thirteen week period. We had a little laboratory, in a way, carved out of the mighty Harvard Business School. The computer difficulties for an MBA program are immense, because the students commute, many of them. Not all, but many. We had no commuters. Everybody was in the dorm.
So we had the luxury in PMD, if we chose, to hardwire -- and we did. We built a copper wire network throughout the dorm, and to all the faculty office buildings where our faculty were. And we arranged to set up machines at the faculty homes, which cost a little extra, because we were paying for all the machines. And the faculty didn't know that they wanted them. And all of a sudden, one weekend a semi trailer showed up, and a whole bunch of young Apple employees, in T-shirts and shorts, came into our dorms. And they opened the windows, and they started throwing boxes out the windows, and installing -- and over a weekend they installed 120 computers, and all the faculty computers. And we had the first hardwired network, at the Harvard Business School, of Macintoshes, of all things. It was a miracle.
At a planning group meeting a few days later, McArthur asked me, "How are you coming on the computer?" I said, "Well, we did it last weekend. We put them in." "You what?" "Well, we installed the network last weekend."
And the Apple kids were amazing, and they turned out to be led by a guy named Rob Strickland. Rob Strickland was a young guy that I first met when they were making their pitch to us to sell us the Macintosh. And he stood up behind his computer, and typed away on the computer, looking at the computer upside down. Talking at the same time, as a sales engineer would do. And I told him I was so impressed that he could type upside down, and talk at the same time that that was really user-friendly. And I was so impressed I wanted him to come and work with us. He was a sales engineer. Apple doesn't put sales engineers to work in clients. You open the box, and turn it on. That's it. Well, if we opened the box and tried to turn it on, our faculty wouldn't know what to do, because they're not computer-literate.
So the faculty, as you might imagine, weren't that enthused. Because their first thought is, "How do I use it in my career? How do I use this in my consulting? How do I" -- and they couldn't see any way. The machines were a little small and stuff. I finally got them, at one lunch, to go over and look at a demo. And we had the class cards on -- the Apple guys had a whole bunch of ideas. Because out in California they just run around spouting to each other ideas they can do with a computer.
We decided to put the class cards, at their suggestion, where we wound up with a picture and the card, with information: name, and company. And later on, after one or two iterations, they said, "You know, we could put sound on this, if you want." "Sound?" They said, "Yeah." "Well, why would you do that?" Well, one of the issues was we had a lot of students from outside the United States, and we couldn't pronounce their names. But as long as we had cards, we didn't have to pronounce their names. And I thought, "Hey, that is really neat. If we could get them to pronounce their name. And have the student click on it. They see the picture. They see where they come from, the name of the company, their background, and what they do in their company, and they pronounce their name. First of all, it will be a little sizzle, little -- but it has a power to it, because it invites us to call them more frequently by their name."
A trivial little item, but came forward from the user-friendly computer, through the ideas of the Mac people. Bouncing off the head of somebody like me, who was looking for a way to smooth the path in. And ultimately, we began, one by one, to develop other teaching materials, which sometimes were just a movie.
I had another Apple guy who came from South Africa. And he was going to South Africa, and he offered to take a camera, and go down there. And he went down and photographed, with a video camera, Soweto, and some other things, and some people from a company, I guess, in South Africa. And we got a movie. But it wasn't just a movie, it was a movie we had made, with a handheld camera. And people looked at that. They could look at it in their bedroom. But we didn't know how to teach it. We didn't know whether it should be only in the bedroom, or only in the classroom, or both. We didn't know: if we gave it to them in the bedroom, what did you do in the plenary session? What was the function of a plenary session?
So I finally went back to the people at the top of Apple, and said, "You guys have a great opportunity to try and demonstrate the usefulness of your computer to businesses, and to general managers. And that's what we have in PMD. They're general managers, they're human beings, and they communicate, and they do this, and they do that. They don't do much calculation, but they do all the things that you guys do: audiovisual, and communications, and stuff.
"And this experiment is going to die, deader than a mackerel, if we don't get some support. And there is no support at HBS. It's not a question of money, it's a question of talent. We don't have anybody that knows your culture. And so if you want this to work -- and we thank you for installing the network, but it isn't worth anything to us if you don't come and help us make it work."
They said, "Well, we don't do that. You open the box, the machine works." I said, "Okay. If you want to get into the business world, here's a window. We're willing to bet. Are you willing to bet?" And finally John Scully, and Kevin Sullivan, who was the head of HR, they finally decided that -- they hated to do it, it was the camel under their tent too. They didn't want to give free service to anybody, but they ultimately approved giving three people fulltime to come and work with us in PMD.
Not at HBS, but at PMD. And over the next, whatever it was, seven years or so, they were there, and did a lot of development, and handholding, and training of faculty, and training of students. They ran the training programs. You wouldn't do it for kids in college, but you had to do it for our faculty, and you had to do it for our students, who were middle managers, not kids.
So they ultimately invested three man-years times seven, or something; twenty man-years, probably. And it was essential to get us going. We tried all kinds of things. We tried giving out the assignment schedules electronically. We used an email system. Very quickly email drove away the telephone. Nobody in PMD used the telephone from the time they got here, until the time they went back home -- except for maybe the first hour, until they figured out the computer. Email just took over, because you could time-shift, and all sorts of other things.
You had to type, and they weren't very good at typing. So we wondered a lot whether -- how serious that was. The faculty couldn't type, most of them. We wondered how serious that was. So we were learning, at the most fundamental level, of how to use this machine in the context of our kind of education: for human beings interested in communications, and rapid-fire, low-intensity calculations.
We wound up developing I would guess probably maybe fifteen or twenty really quite different examples of how the technology could be used.
We made CDs of some of the stuff. And I remember showing it one time to Arthur Rock, who was one of the original investors in Apple Computer. And I showed him a disk, and it had the Harvard Business School logo on it, and the name of the teaching material. I think it was Eastern Europe, or something, where we had all kinds of economic data, pictures, maps, all kinds of stuff. And he passed it around the room, and he said -- Arthur Rock said, "You know, the amazing thing about this is it has the Apple logo on it," as he passed the disk around.
These computers were small and slow. They aren't what you get now. But they were infinitely better than the PCs for the type of thing we were trying to do. The faculty got a little bit committed. Some more than others. I would say the ones -- and the question of promotion came up. Could you get promoted by doing what we were doing?
So it was the beginning of a subversive effort to try and make computers user-friendly computers -- and these were graphical user interface computers -- central to not only the administrative life, but the interactive relationships between students and faculty, the pedagogy of the program. We were building classes entirely around the computer. We were then going into the classroom, which had to be wired with a different material to show off the stuff in the classroom.
But we had to figure out how to use it. Because if 120 students have each done something pretty sophisticated and unique, and they can swap it among themselves through emails, and then some poor faculty member goes into the plenary session, and there's 120 geniuses well-informed, and he's struggling right along with them to keep up, it challenges what the role of the teacher, the plenary session, and so on is. So I thought we were really doing the Lord's work. And that the potential power of the computer was beyond question in our environment, even though the computers themselves were kind of slow.
In 1993, Business Week published a statement that said PMD was one of the most -- one of the ten most innovative programs in Execute Education in the United States. And I thought, "Wow, this is maybe, I don't know, the seventieth or eightieth version of a long, twelve week program. And to have them decide that this is the most innovative when it's that old, and twelve weeks," I thought that was the Promised Land. I was very pleased.