Harvard Business School

Transcript

So if you roll back to '95,  and you need to roll back mentally in your own head to a time when email only traveled within a company to when this thing called a browser was relatively new,  and people didn't quite know what to do with it.  We were a leader.  We saw the possibility.  We created things like a digital course platform.  We wired our classrooms with audio and video.  We put student services and cases online,  whatever that meant at the time.  And held this leadership position really for about half a decade.

And then legacy caught up with us.  We made so many new and innovative technologies that we had to support,  our ability to innovate began to tail off as the need for support grew.  And so when I arrived,  the core issue was how do you make room to innovate again?   How do you take what we have,  in terms of our experience base,  and how do you propel that forward for the 21st century? …

We created a hundred and thirty technologies that run the School.  Because we created them,  we're the only ones who can care for them,  feed for them,  and keep them healthy.  I call it the hungry monster syndrome.  You've got to feed him,  and he kept getting bigger,  and bigger, and bigger.

And so when we made these solutions it made sense,  because they didn't exist anywhere in the world.  When we made a course platform,  you couldn't go buy one.  Today,  there are 450 to choose from.  So the question is,   "What should we still make?   What gives us advantage?   What's unique to us?"   Versus,  "What in our portfolio that we made is now a commodity,  and should we buy or lease from somebody else so that we don't have to take care of it?"   And so that's the legacy,  and how you get rid of legacy.