On August 6, 2012, after an 8-month trip, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) was ready to plunge through the thin Martian atmosphere and land its rover named Curiosity onto the red planet. More than 3 million people were watching as this landing was streamed to the web, making this the biggest web-event NASA has ever set up. Hundreds of thousands were watching the landing in Times Square, and in universities and museums worldwide. Currently, Curiosity has almost 1 Million followers on Twitter. I see editorials about how cool science and engineering is in some of the top news blogs!

MSL’s technological challenge was unprecedented: Due to the comparatively large gravity of Mars and Curiosity’s large mass and precision instruments, the well-known parachute-airbag technology used by previous rovers was no longer possible, and a totally new technology had to be devised. During “seven minutes of terror” the system deployed the largest ever-built super-sonic balloon and used a robotic sky-crane that delivered the robot precisely and softly. According to JPL director Charles Elachi, the accuracy of this landing was equivalent to shooting a football from Cape Canaveral to the Rose bowl across the country and reliably hitting a specified chair. The speed at entry was such that it would cross from D.C. to L.A. in 10 minutes, and was slowed down accurately and precisely to a soft touch-town in Gale Crater. It was new technology at its best – risky, tough and successful.

People were excited all over JPL when I visited 2 days later, yet the mood was somber. The lab had achieved something amazing nobody on Earth could match. The team of scientists and engineers who built this exploration system should be proud! Pictures of the operations room erupting in cheers had gone around the world – but the cheers were replaced by anxiety regarding the future of the program and its participants.

For example, I talked to a former student who was among 20 or so Michigan alumni participating in MSL. He is a guy who rejected more job offers from top companies than anybody I know, just to work in space exploration. Our discussion was short as he suggested that his time at JPL is over after the MSL landing. He wanted to use me as a reference as he embarked on a job search since there is not one flight program in development at JPL after MSL. Sadly, this is the first time in fifty years!

The fact is there is a chance that more than half of the people cheering that night in the control room will have to leave their jobs and move on, although they are the only ones in the world who know how to build and land a rover such as Curiosity on a different planet. And with them will go the know-how they gained with Curiosity.

Under the current budget assumptions, and delayed by massive cuts to the Mars program by the Obama Administration and budget overruns in other projects, the next landing of a US rover on Mars will happen ten years from now – at the earliest. And there is a lot of nothing in the mission queue today. For reference, the cost of Curiosity was $8 per US citizen – basically less than a movie ticket. But, can we afford this in the US? I hope the answer is yes!

I am convinced it’s never a good idea – even in a time of financial crisis – if bean counters make strategic decisions. Bean counters can create short-time relief with long-term severe consequences. Every organization needs bean counters, but they need to be deployed tactically and deliberately – they cannot and should not be trusted to make strategic decisions for companies, for universities or for governments.

The result of this management mentality is superbly documented in Bob Lutz’s book “Car guys vs Bean counters” and so many other texts that are starting to pop up. In times of crisis, the best solution is leadership, not management. Leaders think about vision, big goals, about people – yet instead, bean counters worry about small things, about policy enhancements, about control.

The most important question about Curiosity is “what now?” and today nobody can answer that. The US has had a man-made working rover on Mars  for 15 years and can land over a metric ton as of recently – we can seriously start thinking about putting habitats now on Mars. There are many major challenges remaining, but it is ambitious and tough, visionary and hugely impactful. Among other things, such a project could help motivate millions of people to pursue science and engineering as careers, something we so dearly need to repower our economy and build out the US innovation infrastructure.

Needless to say, I would make a condition to fire a lot of NASA so-called managers, bureaucrats and bean counters before making such massive investments. They have slowed the agency down and have made some parts of NASA look nasty and full of ugly bureaucracy. But, I would not fire a single one of the people who built and landed Curiosity, because it’s these people who can be at the beginning of a new era of innovation and exploration with all the challenges, failures, learning and victories that come from a great nation that challenges itself to step up to challenges.

I am not worried about my former students finding jobs elsewhere in industry. Many entrepreneurial companies would be glad to have them – I encourage them to come back to Michigan and join a cool startup. But, I worry about the demise of one of the proudest parts of the US government, NASA, and the fact that we cannot answer today, after one of the best and proudest accomplishments of US space flight “What now?”

Note: This is to the many amazing UM alumni who were personally involved in making MSL a success – you guys rock! I am so proud of each and every one of you! Also, Curiosity includes electronics systems built by the engineers of the Space Physics Research Laboratory of the University of Michigan. Congrats guys – you did it again!

On June 5^th and 6^th planet Venus passed in front of the Sun like a dark sphere, observed by millions around the world. It did so for the last time for over hundred years and created a once in a lifetime celestial miracle.

Venus is almost the same size as Earth, but one of the least habitable planets in the solar system. It’s thick atmosphere and associated greenhouse effect heats up the planetary surface to a temperature that makes lead melt and exceeds the temperature of its planetary neighbor, Mercury, even though that is at half the distance to the Sun and therefore gets bathed by approximately four times the heat from the Sun. The Venus atmosphere is so thick that we actually never see the ground – visible light never makes it down!

Venus is a visible part of our sky, often the brightest point in the night-sky and often the first celestial body besides the moon and the Sun that pops out at dusk. We do not need telescopes to observe Venus and many cultures have mapped its orbit around the sky. As opposed to stars which march across the skies in highly predictable arks like soldiers, the path of Venus in the sky is much more complicated because both Venus and Earth move. It’s like observing a carousel from a racecar going around a track. Venus goes around faster, but Earth also moves and so – depending on their relative positions – Venus seems to slow down and speed up, drawing out a peculiar and unique structure into the sky. No other celestial body draws out a structure the same way!

Several ancient cultures have noticed Venus’ uniqueness and have logged its complicated cycles in the sky, sometimes over times exceeding the lifetime of a single observer, meticulously noting the observations of our solar system neighbor and admiring its complicated structure, but also their repeatable nature. Some saw Venus as a sign from the Gods, some as a bringer of love. I am sure they were as amazed as I am when I sometimes see Venus appear in the evening, almost like a bright and shiny hole in a velvet colored evening sky!

If the Earth and Venus went around the Sun on the exact same plane, Venus in front and behind the Sun, as observed from Earth, would happen much more often. But, they are not and that’s why my children will never see a Venus pass again, except if they manage to survive well over 105 years. The solar system created a unique moment in time that we can admire and remember all of our lives. The solar light on Earth ever so slightly decreased for a few hours as the planetary body blocked solar light from deep space.

Such transient decreases of stellar lights are now used by researchers from hundreds and even thousands of stars all over our galaxy to detect planets. It just so happens that – among the myriads of stars light years away – the light of a star is slightly decreased because a planet, just like Venus or even Earth crosses in front of it and happens to block the light that this coming across our galaxy towards the Earth. We do not yet know whether there is light on this or any other extra-solar planet, but we have learned to detect these planetary passes and in part answer some of the toughest questions in science such as: are we alone in the universe?

For many, children and adults alike, this Venus pass was a miracle not because scientists do not understand it, but because of its uniqueness and its wonder. It is a sign of the futility of life, the humbling fact that our solar system clock has gone around before we came and will do so afterwards. For others it was also a moment in history when we keep learning about the universe and do so in a way that humanity has never done – ever. It was a celebration of science and its ability to magnify miracles.

For me, it was a day of sadness because I was in a city somewhere in China in which children could not see the sky or the Venus spectacle because of severe air pollution. The gray smog hung over the high-rises like a curse and nobody looked up because there is nothing to see but ugly gray. This was not a particularly unique day during my trip – I tried looking at stars many times. Sometimes it was the smog and sometimes it was the bright buildings in cities – I almost never saw the stars.

Because of this experience, I felt fortunate for seeing the stars during my childhood. We did not have much, but I grew up with the feeling of almost being overwhelmed by beauty and mind-boggling scale that is imprinted up high for all of us to see. I learned looking at stars, dreaming about the future, and also observed airplanes and spacecraft up high and thought about how cool it would be to perhaps once know more about them.

Yet, in so many cities around the world, millions of children grow up without the sense of awe inspired by a night-sky and without the stars. For them, the sky is smaller and less important and so often also their dreams and aspirations. I believe it is important to learn about the miracles of nature and I think we need to clean up these cities so millions of children again can see the sky and admire its beauty just like the ancient Chinese astronomers thousands of years ago, logging the miraculous changes in the sky.

I believe we are a better world if we admire the miracles of the sky and we help our children understand its beauty. I also think entrepreneurs and politicians need to work together so, during the lifetime of so many children in polluted cities, so they see the sky open up and they see these bright stars and learn about their stories.

When giving talks to Chinese and US audiences, the most important difference is related to the questions and answer session after the talk.

Consider a recent talk at a leading Chinese university. I allocated 30 minutes for the talk and 15 minutes for questions and answers. Knowing much of the most important and most relevant content is submitted during a discussion session.

I am not as good as Alan Mulally, CEO of Ford Motor. He gave a talk for 5 minutes and turned to a Q&A session for the following 50 minutes. I am also not as good as Desh Deshpande who gave a 10 minute talk and proceeded to do a Q&A session by collecting 4-5 questions at once and then answering all of them at once, never forgetting a question and weaving the answers together to point the relative relation of the questions. These guys make Q&A amazing!

But, I was at the end of my recent talk and there was applause. And then, there was nothing but silence. Students looked at their notes, slightly embarrassed, and the professors in the audience looked increasingly worried. Clearly, there might have been a language barrier that prevented some students from understanding or also speaking English. But, the top university official in the audience did not think so. After waiting for an embarrassing two minutes or so which felt like holding my breath under water for 5 minutes, a university leader jumped to his feet. He proceeded to start a passionate lecture to the students in Chinese about the importance of questions and learning. I did not understand everything that was said, but the faces of the students showed that the message stuck.

To me, questions are the most important part of education and of learning. Questions answered by a teacher expand students thinking, they test whether teaching achieved its desired purpose.  But, questions are also the entry into a debate, a pathway towards a challenge of a previously stated opinion.

Thus, asking questions is not only an important part of learning, it is also part of a culture that challenges opinions and seeks to create new. A place where there are questions is a place of learning, of creating and of innovation. I like to be part of cultures that encourage questions. As a boss or a leader, I would rather be challenged than be wrong. I would rather learn from a freshman than stagnate.

Yet, asking questions – especially asking questions in a group – is a truly cultural value. I remember many childhood lunches and dinners in a very traditional part of Switzerland during which children were asked to sit quietly and not speak except when being spoken to. I never asked questions not because I did not have questions, but because we were not supposed to ask. Cultural values around the world are more or less welcoming of questions.

But, cultural values and behaviors can change – anybody who has ever hung out with me knows that. I do ask questions, perhaps too many questions, even though I did not start out like that.

Here is what I would do if I taught in China. I would teach a class where I would request 10 questions to be asked or answered during every single lesson. I would tell each student that this is going to happen and I would pick a row in the audience and ask the first ten people to ask questions. Trust me, it works! Why do I know? I was instructed like this in my first math class at the University of Bern. We all worried, first we agonized the entire lesson. But, we were ready to answer and ask questions and by the end of the semester it was all normal. We did not need the rule anymore.

Entrepreneurial environments are environments in which opinions are challenged and questions are being asked. As entrepreneurial change agents, we are responsible to set that culture by setting an example by asking and by answering questions. And I truly believe that this is one of the challenges many universities around the world will have to address sooner or later.

Do you work in an environment that welcomes questions? Do you know of strategies for leaders to engage their teams to challenge and question?

I recently spent over two weeks in some of China’s leading universities, primarily focusing on top engineering programs. I talked to professors, to administrators and also to politicians. As part of my work as a US scientist and also as an entrepreneurship leader at the University of Michigan, I also corresponded with professors, academic leaders and politicians within the United States. Over the past few months I asked all of them – Chinese and US leaders – the same question: “What do you consider the biggest threat your university is facing during the next few years?”

When asking this critical question to academic leaders within the US and China, the answers could not be more different: American universities are worried about money, and Chinese universities are worried about innovation.

For public US universities, a rapid drop in state support and tuition increases that, in part, address the resulting budget shortfalls, have created a situation that looks untenable for universities. After participating in a to two-week class at the University of Michigan about aspects of running a US university, a high-level Chinese academic leader told me: “It is incredible how much time universities spend on getting money. It’s a huge distraction.” He proceeded to talk about the 100+ fundraising staff, the proposal efforts that exhaust a significant fraction of time of every single University researcher, and also of policy efforts that involve many staff-members to help with favorable budget allocations at the state and national levels.

He was rolling his eyes. Just a couple of years ago he wrote a single proposal for game-changing engineering and science infrastructure and he got the equivalent of 300 million dollars. He needs to spend all this money in five years, a duration prescribed by the Chinese government, and resulting in gigantic opportunity, but also a huge perturbation to the lives of many. The manager of this project just smiled and said: “This is going to be my life from now on. That’s just how it is.” He is in charge not only of the science infrastructure which includes top material science laboratories, plasma simulation chambers, particle accelerators, and many more, he is also responsible for building the laboratories, the buildings and in fact the science park these facilities will be placed in. I met assistant professors that are trying to start new careers aligned with these facilities, leaving behind promising work in different fields.

In another Chinese university, the president pointed to the window and said: “Do you see this high-rise out there? We just combined the nation’s top chemistry department and the nation’s top chemical engineering departments together in one center that is expected to be word-class. This building is totally new.”

In contrast to our Chinese colleagues, US universities have a different set of financial situations. With the exception of Cornell’s bold move towards a new campus in New York City – a move that let Stanford and other competitors tumble backwards like a boxer who got just hit in the head – I cannot think of a single massively big change at a US university. In particular, I cannot easily think of a top university betting on leadership in a way that rivals what top universities do right now in China.

Needless to say, it’s a lot easier to think boldly if a small set of people in the nation’s capital can make decisions and a challenging budget appropriations and multi-party decision process is not so much part of the equation. Also, leadership is as much a cultural value as it is related to money or funds and China has to learn a lot about that.

Indeed, US universities are still the very best in the world regarding quality and shear number of world-class programs. They are not in an initial building and aspirational phase of their academic prowess. But, their biggest worries right now relate to money – how can they do what they think they need to in a time of uncertainty and retreat and not advance. That is particularly true for public universities, which educate~80% of engineers, lawyers and doctors – in short, the universities most responsible to staff our economy.

Instead, all Chinese universities I visited worry about a key issue that is very different – innovation. In so many ways, China has grown its educational system and even in large part its economy by copying others. But, Chinese leaders also know that leadership does not come from copying – it comes from creating new. That search for true innovation which I encountered consistently everywhere I went should take advantage of what’s special about China and its people is core to the thinking of administrators, politicians and researchers alike.  It’s not a thought process focused on small ideas, but one that has the potential to result in something great.

When reflecting on this, I started to be concerned about many of the amazing US universities. We clearly start in a better place than Chinese universities in so many different ways. But, I cannot forget Google founder Larry Page who once told me: “You always want to be best but you mostly want to focus on the highest first derivative so you know you will be best in the future.”

I think US universities are best right now, but I don’t think we worry enough about the first derivative, which is all about leadership in the future, driven by innovation!

I have spent the last week in China. While here, I have given eight talks to well over 1,500 people, I have met nearly a hundred colleagues and made many new friends. But, most of all,  I gained admiration for a country that in the midst of a gigantic transition; rebuilding a society that is very different than anything in its past. The next posts will be vignettes of my experience here.

Consider two cities in China, one is Shanghai, the New York of China, and one is Harbin. Both are big cities – Shanghai has a population over 23 million, and Harbin has close to 10 million. Both house amazing universities – SJTU and HIT – both of which are of the most prestigious kind, the so-called C9 league.

Yet, when visiting these cities, meeting students and professors, one would never guess that they are actually in the same country. Harbin feels like a top-university but in Russia, certainly affected by the fact that it is only a few 100 km away from the Russian border and has a history deeply intertwined with Russia. Shanghai feels like a bee-hive, a city undersized for its exponentially growing population. Both cities have traffic that will make you pray, will shock you or make you feel like you are in a bad dream. But, they could not be more different!

Consider a fancy dinner in Harbin – it starts with borscht (translated in Chinese as “Moscow soup”), and then provides a mix of Chinese and Russian specialties, some of the most creative meals I have had in my life. This dinner is topped off with Harbin beer, a beer with a very German feel and I have grown to enjoy!  If you go to a Chinese lunch, you should not be surprised being served a plate of sausage pieces that are eaten with Chopsticks. And, some of the best food is full of red peppers – incredibly spicy and tasty.

Have a similarly fancy dinner in Shanghai and you will be surprised by the sweet and amazingly rich set of plates that start and end with seafood. The diversity of food is great, but I would have thought of every dish as a Chinese dish, and I did not taste one dish that was truly spicy. The differences are huge – like comparing German and Greek meals – sausage and souvlaki.

Consider going to the gym in one of the fanciest hotels in both towns. In Shanghai, I was on the top-floor, working out on a treadmill overlooking a city. I had CNN and ESPN to keep me entertained. In fact, there were locations I could not actually tell that I was in China. Driven by its hugely growing economy and deep business connection to the outside, the hotel is adjusted and could compete with the best US hotels I have ever been in. The staff’s language was very good in most cases. The receptionists could easily work in a top US hotel and not stand out.

The best hotel in Harbin is a gigantic building and I stayed on the 27^th floor. But, when going to the gym on the 2^nd floor, I first immediately backed out of the gym because I thought I walked into two guys’ private class  – a little bit reminiscent of the first workout scene in the Rocky movie. The workout stuff was largely broken or in a state that I actually worried for my safety using it. I found a working rowing machine and was able to bring myself to sweat, but I never went back there. Obviously, the market pressure of people like me who chose their hotels according to their gyms did not affect the best hotels in Harbin. I did not see a single non-Chinese person and the only guy who ever talked to me spoke to me in Russian. He was disappointed.

Many Americans think of China as a single cultural space with people who are largely the same.  They talk about the Chinese economy in a similar fashion they talk about the Swiss or Greek economy – as something that has deep commonalities and defining characteristics. They could not be more wrong! China is full of differences that reflect history, geography and climate and also level of economic transformation. A person from Harbin has a completely different set of experiences and background than a person from Shanghai and for that matter from any other location around the country. The differences are as large as or larger than those in Europe or the US.

China is not China – it is not what you expect and it is in no way monolithic. It is, however, a country that is searching and transforming its future as we speak at a scale that I never imagined.

Last week, my wife Erin went to the wake of one of her former students. A young woman and college student who was killed in a automobile accident. For whatever reason, a car on the opposite lane swerved and hit the woman head-on, and she was unable to react in time, ending her life in a fraction of a second.

In light of the terrible loss for this family and a waste of an impactful life, it is even sadder to recognize that there were over 100 wakes that day across the US for similar reasons. In fact, there are more than 6 million accidents in the US each year, with over 2.9 million injuries and over 30,000 deaths – approximately one death every 15 minutes!

The good news is that most of these deaths are entirely preventable. Here is why:

The three top reasons for fatalities are: 1) Driver behavior or limitation, 2) poor road maintenance, and 3) equipment failures. Actually, only ~5% of accidents occur from equipment failures and poor road conditions are by far the lesser of the two remaining causes. The top reasons for fatal accidents are all due to drivers: 1. Distracted driving, 2. Driver fatigue, 3. Drunk driving, 4. Speeding, 5. Reckless or aggressive driving, 5. Accidents due to weather.

Many have argued that most of these causes of death and disaster can be substantially reduced if we have smarter cars, especially cars that cannot crash into each other. This is precisely the work that the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute has been working on. In fact, the research towards smarter cars is getting a huge boost through a $22 million program that will develop sensor technology and interaction protocols that will prevent cars from crashing into each other. This is exactly what we need right now, and this is what the University of Michigan should be leading to help the US car industry and to prevent these horrible deaths and agonizing experiences.

There are two reasons I am writing this blog.

First, I would very much like to see more Michigan entrepreneurs working on this problem than on some mobile game. There is nothing wrong with mobile games, but most of them do not save lives! I would like to find a way to throw our entrepreneurial talent towards this problem and learn from our companies and researchers. What can we do to use technology and get rid of accidents from distracted driving? Right now, technology is adding to these distractions – how can we instead use it to eliminate distractions? I would like to find ways to create huge activity in this space and to get many of our budding entrepreneurs plugged into this. Trust me – this will happen! They only question is who will make it happen and how quickly?

Second, I would like people who live and work in North East Ann Arbor to consider their participation in a safety pilot that will be used to learn about connected vehicles and help transform how cars drive, interact and use intelligence to prevent crashes and take lives. Please sign up to this pilot today – I did.

Michigan Entrepreneurship is Impact Driven Entrepreneurship and I actually am struggling to think of a technology space besides medical technologies that have more potential impact than smart transportation!  I also am having a tough time thinking of an environment that is better suited to work on this than right here in Michigan!

A few years ago I was in a gym working out and met a University of Michigan professor who, as our conversation progressed, appeared to be pretty agitated. He was talking about his deep worries that I was contributing to a University that is taking their “eye off the ball” and focusing on students with entrepreneurial thinking, as opposed to focusing on liberal arts, the only true way of education. “Professors,” he said, “know what’s best for students – the students do not know that for themselves. And any and all discussions about changing curricula will be survived by the lasting values of liberal arts.”

There were at last three issues that bothered me in his statement. First, I never think of entrepreneurial thinking and liberal arts as an either-or-proposition. In my experience, the best entrepreneurs are often the ones that have a deep understanding of the human condition and the arts. They understand the excitement of learning and are driven by curiosity.

I have often been amazed how broad the interests of entrepreneurs really are. For example, I remember talking with one of the Google founders about learning, about art, about dentistry, about cars, and about the history of the solar system – all in the same discussion. Yes – entrepreneurs are slightly ADHD, but many of them are also thinking deeply, just the way liberal arts are teaching us to face the world.

The second worrisome issue is that every student’s family sending a child to school is making a purchasing decision and therefore makes a choice about the “what and how” of their education during a few years at our great university or others. For many families this is the largest purchase in their lifetimes, with cost exceeding the values of homes, cars and boats. Thus, the mere suggestion that they should “just ask the professors” just sounds wrong.

Asking professors may lead to a great source of information, but in no way the only source. I hope an incoming freshmen or a new graduate student taps into the many resources available to make these life-altering choices. That said there are some things professors are pretty good at. We know what it takes for a certain educational objective. For example, if a student wants to be an engineer and struggles with mathematics, my experience tells me that there is a disappointment in their future. It’s like trying to be a carpenter and not being able to cut wood – it usually does not work out.  But, this is not the only input a prospective student needs.

For example, the worst thing we could do is to limit our students from pursuing their passions. In my opinion, that would defy the very purpose of higher education. On a side-note: I consider the restrictive schedule of some of our engineering disciplines as a serious limitation of student’s success. By over-prescribing a student’s academic plan, we risk that she does not find her passion and pursues the dreams that brought her to our programs in the first place. Using such a highly restrictive education, we risk building a copy of an education a professional needed 10-20 years ago, but not give the students the chance to get the education they will need in 10-20 years.

My third worry is the basic assumption of my well-educated colleague that nothing fundamental is going to change education. When I asked him whether he thinks technological progress might affect what and how we teach at top universities, he replied that it would only affect universities in a very small way. “So, suppose we have implants that make us understand every single language on this globe, would we change the way we teach languages?” I asked. His reply, “No, not really.”

That’s when I could not help shaking my head. Anybody that suggests that our lives are not affected by the internet, the computer and social networking just seems to have slept through one of the greatest revolutions of our lifetimes. And, anybody who thinks it is comforting that educational systems have not sufficiently adapted to this progress, and uses this to predict a future without major changes has not learned much from history! One could argue that is something liberal arts education is all about.

After some fruitless back-and-forth I suggested to my professor friend that he should spend some time each day praying that nobody figures out how to deliver the very content in his biggest classes on the internet for a much lower cost. Once that happens, the very business model his unit relies on would be undercut.

A few weeks ago, the University of Michigan teamed with a few top universities to provide free class content and distribute it through a platform developed by a Stanford spinout company, Coursera. This announcement turned a lot of heads and remains hotly debated. “Come the educational revolution,” proclaims a recent editorial by columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman, and the blogosphere was lit up in a discussion that is both full of passion and also very much varied in approach and key conclusion. So, what will happen now?

This is one of these moments for the wisdom of America’s favorite baseball manager, Yogi Berra: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future!” We will learn what this means and look back at this time.  But, I am certain that this time will be become one of the big inflection points in higher education, a time that creates new and seriously attacks structures in higher education that have outlived their usefulness and need to be disrupted.

These notes summarize a talk to representatives of the Division of Student Affairs and the Order of Angells on the relationship of leadership and entrepreneurship. The previous posts are provided here, here and here.

My final post relates to the relationship of leadership and entrepreneurship. To me, they are deeply linked at the hip. Great entrepreneurs have to be great leaders – in fact, there are very good scholarly assessments supporting this. There are some aspects and skills of entrepreneurship that go beyond the typical leadership training.

Whether I would call leaders entrepreneurs relates very much more to their vision and purpose than it does to any other academic detail.  So, again it’s about vocabulary.

The leader of a group that raises the funds and volunteers to go build a school  in Brazil is a Social Entrepreneur in my book, and I suspect to many around the country. The same is true for almost any impact-driven student organization. They have leadership challenges identical or almost identical to social entrepreneurship ventures. A leader who builds an entity to take a Michigan invention and translate it for use in the entire world is an Entrepreneur in my book, needing to address all the entrepreneurial challenges a company has to address.

Thus, I don’t think the concepts are identical, but it would be a huge mistake to not recognize the substantial overlap in all of this. We would be a better campus, if we empowered our leaders with entrepreneurial visions and leadership aspirations and if we did so by focusing on student organizations.

To compare leadership and entrepreneurship, we may want to do so in four dimensions already addressed before (and following Cogliser and Bringham, Vecchio): Vision, Influence, Leading in the Context of Innovation/Creativity, and Planning.

Vision (followers/larger constituency)

Vision is the main component when inspiring followers toward exemplary performance or other goal-directed behavior as well as organizational performance.

Vision attributes (brevity, clarity, abstractness, challenge, future orientation, stability, and desirability or ability to inspire) and content (growth imagery) are related to new venture growth. Followers need to be motivated through involvement, participation, and a professionally meaningful mission.

Influence

A commonality across many of the various definitions of leadership is the ability to influence others toward a goal. Rational persuasion is widely used for both upward, lateral, and downward influence.

Entrepreneurs not only see opportunities (understand the ways and means), but are able to marshal resources to carry out their vision. Use of rational persuasion and inspirational appeals are likely to be effective when the request is legitimate and in line with the entrepreneur’s values and the constituencies’ needs.

Leading in the context of Innovation

Leading creative people requires technical expertise and creativity, employing a number of direct and indirect influence tactics.

Entrepreneurial leadership should involve idea generation, idea structuring, and idea promotion.

Planning

In complex, dynamic environments where people must coordinate their activities, planning represents a key influence on performance.

Entrepreneurs have a clear need for the mental awareness of future actions to anticipate potential reactions to strategic choices.

In summary, there is tremendous overlap of lessons of entrepreneurship and leadership.

These notes summarize a talk to representatives of the Division of Student Affairs and the Order of Angells on the relationship of leadership and entrepreneurship. The previous posts are provided here and here.

Before addressing leadership support, I want to provide some context of my leadership experiences.

My first leadership experience was in running a sports team. I raised the funds and managed the team. We won our league’s championship and moved up. It was great.

A few years later, I became a student leader and then a student representative to the university. As such, I was part of hiring decisions of all professors in my area of specialty, and also had influence in other policy matters. Basically, I was a pain for professors, pointing out that teaching quality should be a significant part of a professor’s tenure and promotion decisions.

But, most of my early leadership experiences came from being in the military. I do not know of any place besides perhaps a successful tech startup where a 20 year old can be responsible for 200 people. The last part of my service was as a leadership support officer.

After some very good training by leadership professionals, I wanted to put these new skills into practice. I would return with a camera crew and I would observe the military leaders at work. I would observe and analyze this persons’ leadership style and – in the evening – I would prepare an analysis while providing support and feedback to them. It was initially an experiment of the Swiss army, and everybody was worried that the officers would be self-conscious and distracted by us. That did not happen. Instead, they urged us to come back and continue to coach them.

Given that background, when I observe student organizations, they usually falter in a few simple ways, or they become massively successful…

The first one is about setting vision and purpose. What are we about? What are we not about? I spend 1-2 meetings on just this question. Here, the key is not to push but to ask questions. There *needs* to be unity behind this.

The second one is about ways to influence. I like student orgs because that’s what you learn there. You cannot use rank and degree. You need to think about value for the person whose behavior you want to affect. Influence also relates to the marshaling of resources. How do we create and communicate this vision.

The third one is leadership of innovators. This is the challenge. How does one take ideas, shape these ideas, and promote ideas

Finally, there is planning and running things. I am focusing on simple mechanics. How do you run meetings? How do you plan events? There is a value to intermediate goals and reserves… Part of this is also conflict resolution. 

So, I spend 1 hour each week with my teams to assess and assist. I make a clear and conscious choice not to own the organizations. I will not make personnel decisions, but discuss what the key issues are regarding people or key decisions.

I have found that there is a huge difference between teams whose leaders get such training and mentorship compared to those who do not. There are many big things that can be achieved by empowering our best, and we should make this part of our DNA of student organizations around UM.

Entrepreneurs create new where there is nothing and change in the face of adversity and often against all odds. Entrepreneurship is therefore fundamentally about hope in a world that dearly needs hope. To me, that is one of the most important reason to be actively involved in creating entrepreneurial programs and work harder than is considered normal :  by empowering students, faculty and staff in their entrepreneurial quests, we kindle fires of hope that can turn into sweeping blazes of change for the good.

Hope is one of the strongest values we can have in our lives, together with faith and love. “Three things will last forever–faith, hope, and love–and the greatest of these is love,” says the bible. Having hope is holding on to a good outcome in the presence of negative evidence and inadequacy. It’s about believing that the best is yet to come and, in fact, we can affect that it does come. It is like looking at the stars while sitting in the gutter (according to Oscar Wilde).

Entrepreneurs are people who put hope into strategy and into action. The stories are countless, the evidence plentiful: Hope does in fact create better futures. In fact, many great achievements in the word came from discouraged women and men who kept on working, holding onto hope.

Whether they want to create social justice with their entrepreneurial venture, or work to save lives around the world, whether they want to create joy in people’s lives, or simply want to make lives easier and better through their new technologies, impact-driven entrepreneurs are what makes me hopeful even after a week of heart-wrenching news and visiting some political people in Washington DC.

What gives you hope? How do you turn your hope into action and positive impact in this world?