Is Innovation Cultural or Strategic?

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Future youe. I'm joined with my co host, Michael Horn, and we're here at the annual ASU GSV Summit in beautiful but cold San Diego. And we're joined by one of the leaders of the summit who is the president of Arizona State University, Michael Crowe. It's great to have you here with us.

Thanks a lot, Jeff. Happy to be here.

So a question that we ask all of our guests is most people know you as the president of asu. They probably know a little bit about your background when previous to ASU at Columbia. But how did you get started in higher ed? Why higher ed as an industry for you?

So long ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to, for whatever reason, when I was 19 years old, these guys hired me to be the translator of a really complex technical project with the Iowa State Legislature. So the university project was called the Iowa Coal Project. It was during the energy crisis, and they were trying to find a way to be more reliant on American fossil fuels, but at the same time restore the land when you extracted it to the higher levels of agricultural productivity than it occurred naturally. And for whatever reason, I got picked to be the guy that was going to go down to the legislature as a kid two days a week as the technical representative of this project. And so I got involved in politics, I got involved in science, I got involved in solving problems. And then when I saw all these things working together, I knew that there was a class of institution that actually worked to produce things that didn't exist, ideas, solutions, whatever. And I just got hooked from that moment. I said, well, this is what I want to do.

Well, so in the interest of full disclosure, I'm a special advisor to you at Arizona State, where I run a program called the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. And one of the questions, Michael, that I get asked all the time is how does ASU do it? Right? And some people wonder about the role of culture versus the role of strategy and design in ASU's transformation. So as you look back on all the changes at ASU over the time that you've been there, how much do you attribute it to cultural change and how much do you attribute it to strategy and design?

Well, culture drives design, culture drives strategy, culture drives outcomes. So all those things are related. We sort of knew that going in. And so what we offered, what we proffered with our initial idea for the new American University was a differentiated culture. That differentiated culture, then if you're going to move in that direction, requires a differentiated design to get there. And those two things have to go hand in glove with each other to be able to advance. There's no other way to produce organizational change. There's two ways. New organization, separate culture. New organization or cultural transformation through redesign. So we chose cultural transformation through redesign.

Now, I was going to jump in and just say this new American university that you all have been creating and created, you've described as sort of a fifth wave, if you will, of innovation in terms of universities that America has had more broadly. Can you just talk through that idea and what are other examples of the fifth wave institution institutions besides asu?

Well, quickly, just to build up to what the fifth wave is. So the first wave were the American colonials, Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, places like that that were unique manifestations of a British model. They weren't the British model, but they were unique manifestations. There's hundreds of those schools still around and moving along. Well, wave two was the idea of a public college, a public, what we called Greek academy. There's hundreds of those still cooking along. Wave three was a hugely unique American model, which was the land grants, which was colleges focused on the practical, colleges focused on the children of the working class. The fourth wave was the extremely unusual emergence of the American research university, which was a combination of the British college and the German technical institute being brought together. And the fifth wave, as we call it, is the emergence of a new kind of scalable, adaptable, high speed, transformational kind of public university. There are a few that are emerging. Mitch Daniels now allows me to refer to Purdue University as a new emergent 5th Wave University. He's definitely moving on the notion of how do you build a scalable land grant? So he's a wave three land grant that became a wave four research that's now emerging as a wave five. Not he, but Purdue, other schools like Florida International, a very large university, Central Florida, Georgia State. Those would be three southern institutions, because of scale, because of demographics, because of social scale and transformational drivers are beginning to move in these directions. So there's a handful of schools that are out there.

So some of those earlier waves you had described were defined by, at the national level, you know, for example, the Morrill Land Grant act, which created the land grant universities. Do you feel like we're now at another period of a massive change in the economy around the world, that we kind of need that national university again, that that idea of a national plan for higher education?

Well, not national university, as in, you know, run by the federal government, because that was defeated at the time the Constitution was written. And five other times before 1850. And then in 1862, the Morrill act was now transferring that responsibility to the states. And so the public university responsibility was transferred to the states. It is time for what we call national service universities, universities committed to the complexity and scale of the United States as a part of the mix. If every university just stays as a regional, if every university stays as a narrowly scoped, unscalable thing, we can't build enough of those institutions. And so we need institutions that will embrace the broader national complexity and then use technology as a mechanism to scale and adapt to that social complexity.

But how do we persuade people to that scale is good, right? Because in the US we tend to equate equality in higher education, right or wrong, with small.

We do that because the universities, the original colleges, were all highly exclusive and state exclusive. So the model of success of the past was really, you don't need that many people to go to college. College is really a thing for just a handful of people. And let's build schools that can take those handfuls of people and educate them. That changed a little bit over time, but not when you compare it to scale. So even the big public universities in the states today, they seem big, but they're not big relative to the scale of these states.

So if we go deeper on that scale question, and you say, let me show you quality, how do you think about outcomes and actually proving efficacy, given the immense scale that you all are driving toward?

That's relatively easy because you know how your graduates are doing in the market. So they're a knowledge product in the form of a person going into a market. We have unbelievable demand for our product. We have really high performance for our people product in the market in terms of their compensation, their wages, graduate schools that they go to. So what we look at in terms of quality is we look at what's the return on investment to the individual, which in Our case averages 12% per year over an individual's lifetime. 23% for engineers, 7% for teachers, and

you're literally able to track that through public data, etc.

We have income data for every graduate of our institution that still lives in Arizona. 227,000 individuals.

Wow.

And so we know their entire financial history, not personally, but.

But at an aggregate level.

Aggregate level. So the answer is yes. And so we have ROI data, we have return data, but in addition, we've also done the surveys on quality of life outcomes. We also know how we're doing. You know, we're doing extremely well in all postgraduate awards. Fulbrights, Truman's, Marshalls, Rhodes, extremely well. I mean, as well as any set of institutions in the country. In fact, we're for all of those. We're in the top handful of schools in the country. If you then look at employment, employability, all these kinds of things. And so the interesting thing is, what we found, in fact, is that scale works to our advantage.

Say more.

It works to our advantage because we allow. What we're doing is we're expanding numbers of programs, I.e. alternative pathways for students to learn in and for teaching, learning and discovery to occur in. So if a program reaches a maximum size, well, that's its maximum size. And so then we move to another program and then to another program and then to another program. And so the quality of each individual program is determined by the faculty. Let's take electrical engineering. So we offer an electrical engineering degree on campus. We have a couple thousand students with us in full immersion. We have 65 or so faculty members in that program, which is a part of one of our six engineering schools in a 21,000 student engineering college. So our engineering college is overwhelmed with demand right now. Even at 21,000 students, those electrical engineering faculty members are among the top 10 in terms of funding for research. Have 2,000 students on campus with them, which is larger than most engineering schools, and another 1200 students online with them in the first accredited online undergraduate engineering degree. For a different set of students, older students, those 3,000 plus students and all of that research are going on. Basically their level of productivity is just off the charts. So their productivity is very high. And then the efficacy, the impact on those particular students. I line up our electrical engineering graduates against any electrical engineering graduates anywhere in the world. We're the number one employer, number one source for employees to the Intel Corporation. We're a strategic ally with the Raytheon Corporation, we're strategic with Boeing and Orbital Sciences and so forth. And so the answer is we're not seeing any relationship that's negative between scale and outcome.

So what's stunning about that is just it goes back to the original conversation we were having about how do you get a university to move in that direction and embrace scale as a function of quality and actually a function of really fulfilling a much broader mission for society. It sounds like my, my curiosity is always we look to you as just sort of a guru of innovation and that a lot of university presidents around the country I always say on speeches that there's probably a handful who want to be the quote next. Michael Crowe, how do you create an institution, though, that, you know, as you think about legacy, and whenever you decide to do your next gig, they're looking

at my gray hair.

Well, no, hey, I might. I might. I might have. I might have more, right? So. But asu, you know, how does it continue to be that beacon of innovation in that new American university? How do you create the systems and the cultures so that it perpetuates?

So go back to this notion of these waves. And so no one would say to any of the big land grants, well, how are you guys going to make it? So they built culture, they built structure, they built purpose, they built design. You know, what we're talking about is the emergence of a new kind. You would imagine that out of the United States would come a research university community that happened. You would imagine that some of those research universities then would figure out how to use technology and culture change to scale. So what will happen is that it won't just be asu, but there'll be a range of schools. It might be 10, it could be 20, it could be 30, it won't be many more than that. Who will then begin to take on this broader set of broader educational and research objectives together. So to the question of our legacy, you know, we're spending immense amounts of energy on training the next waves of leaders, not only for asu, but at other institutions. We're spending huge amounts that we've just created a position within the university called Knowledge Enterprise Architect. And manu AIP is our faculty member who's in that role right now, and she's working on the design logic of the institution so that the blueprints, if you will, for the university going forward, codifying this. So codifying, and then also putting in place, how does this design process occur? So what we're doing is we're rethinking the purely traditional model. So, yeah, we still have genetic material from Plato's Academy, we have genetic material from Cambridge, we have genetic material from Harvard, and President Elliott's effort to build the manifestly different curriculum with the. With the electives and so forth and so on. So we have all of that genetic material in us, and we're still writing genetic code. And so in the writing of the genetic code, it's that process that one has to pass on to the next. Now, most institutions, for whatever reason, don't keep writing genetic code. They take their genetic material and they manifest that. And so what we have figured out how to do and what we have to make sure that we maintain in the culture is the process by which the design activity can be continued.

Michael We've been at a lot of gatherings of college presidents over the last couple of years, and the conversation always turns to where higher education is today and where it's going. And a number of presidents tend to look backwards, right? And they said, oh, if we only could have the level of funding we had in, you know, the 1970s, if we only had, you know, these issues to deal with, we would be so much better off. As you think about the future, and we've also been at gatherings about the future of work. As you think about the future, both of higher education, of the economy of work, do you tend to be an optimist about that or a pessimist? Because a lot of people, I think, in higher education are pretty pessimistic, it seems, about the future, which is kind of surprising because higher education has always been really good about creating the future. Maybe not predicting it, but creating it.

A weird thing about one of the things that, as I, from time to time, have thought about, how did I get in this business of academia? The only discouraging thing to me is the element of negativity that comes with the skeptical mind. And so it just drives me crazy. And so I'm a big believer in Steven Pinker's work and his idea of enlightenment now. And, you know, how did we get here? And so we got here through the efforts. William Manchester wrote this fantastic book called the World Lit Only by Fire. That book talked about how we got out of the Dark Ages. It was academics and monks and educated people and the transference of knowledge and so forth. And so our institutions have an absolutely essential role to shape the future. In fact, if someone asks me, what's the business that we're in? What does a university or a college do? We are protectors of the future. That is our assignment. We are the adaptive mechanism in the broader social system that we're a part of. What that means, then, is that those that look to the past. That's a fatal calculation. If you look to the past and only think, when could we get those resources? Well, those universities were mostly white, mostly male, very different from the society as it is today. So there's no reason to even look backwards. What one needs to do is look and say, with Harvard as a research university, how does Harvard become great in the 21st century, which will be different than the 20th century? How do we build these New kinds of universities and how do we make them work? And so this notion of, of innovation and driving forward has got to be normatively positive.

One last question. You're always recommending books to me to read. Everybody I talk with at ASU says you're always like leaving them these large volumes. You're the cums of a teacher, I guess, in that way. So what are you in terms of an assignment? What are you reading now? What do you think that people listening to this podcast who are thinking about the future of higher education, what do you think they should be thinking about or reading right now?

Well, I'm always reading four or five history books at the same time. I just finished the book on Grant. I finished this fantastic book on Napoleon. You know, the book Enlightenment now by Pinker I think is fantastic. If you don't have time to read it, just study all the figures and ask yourself why you've been so stupid and why you complain about anything. And so because why would you complain about anything once you look at where we are? And so I think that there's power in reading things. I just ordered 100 copies of the next issue of National Geographic, which is this fantastic issue on race. The COVID of the article shows twins. One is dark complexion, one is light complexion. They're fraternal twins from the same mother with parents of the same complexion. And so it's. And what it does is it goes at and attacks in very important ways the fake notion that race is a biological thing as opposed to race is a sociological construct. So books and ideas that drive forward a deeper understanding of who we are and what we are and where we came from and how we're going to get there. Those are, those are the kinds of things that I really get excited about. There's some fantastic science fiction that's being written by Kim Stanley Robinson where he takes physical laws and follows them always as he thinks about the future. There's a book, New York 2140. What will the world be like then in New York City, very different than now. There's a book 2312, where he's 300 years into the future looking at where we are as a species and how we have evolved. There's another book that he wrote called Aurora, which is about a long distance, multi generational space journey that people go on. But the interesting thing about all of it is, is how he is scientifically and technologically accurate in how he portrays these things. And then he articulates from those things the way that literally who we are and what we are and how we get to where we're headed.

That blending of a humanistic view that you have with the optimistic sense of the future and what we can create and what we have created to this point, I think inspires us all. And so thanks so much for joining us today. Appreciate it.

Thanks.

And we'll be back on Future you.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. For more information and to apply to our next cohort, go to Georgetown asu. Edu. This episode was also made possible with support from the Entangled Group, where innovation meets operations. Entangled is a venture studio focused on helping the education ecosystem transition to support the knowledge economy. We build companies and nonprofits that support higher education institutions as they innovate to carry out their critical missions for society in the 21st century.

Welcome back to Future youe, where we are live at ASU GSV in sunny but slightly cold San Diego. Although I can't say it's cold because for me it's from escaping Boston, where we were having snow two days ago. So, you know, go figure, Jeff. But delight to be back here, just coming off that conversation with Michael Crowe. Wow, fascinating on so many levels. He strikes me as a Teddy Roosevelt type character of like the book a day sort of mindset. But let's start with something, Jeff, that I'm curious about because you sit inside of Arizona, Arizona State for part of your week, you know, every week, what's the culture like from your perspective that they've built? Like, what's it actually inside the belly of the beast, so to speak.

I think the culture that he's built and it's really around kind of these design principles, this charter that they talk about at asu, where it's about, you know, who you include, not who you exclude, which is a big theme of his. It's around research, kind of for the public good. And everybody knows that, right? And that to me is if you go to most college campuses and ask anybody from the highest employee to the lowest employee about the mission of that university, they probably can't tell you what it is. But if you go to ASU and you talk to anybody, they kind of know what their North Star is, right? They know where they're focused and everybody is moving in that direction. So even though it is this huge conglomerate in many ways. Right. It's a huge bureaucracy, what's amazing to me is that in some ways it's easier to work through than some of the other universities that I've worked with, because everybody knows why they're there and what they're doing now at that same time. He's been there for 15 plus years now, but there's a lot of people who were there well before him, and many of them will be there afterwards. And so I think one of the dangers right now, not only at asu, but at many places, is how do you avoid the backsliding of that culture.

Right.

Because it's been such an innovative place for so long, is how do you avoid those, especially those people who've been there for a long time, of trying to pull it back to where it used to be.

Yeah. And obviously we were trying to ask that sort of, in a subtle, not subtle way of what happens and how do you preserve that legacy of innovation? Do you have a sense of that? Have they created the structures and things like that that would outlast such a big personality, frankly?

Yeah. You asked him what's next? It's a question that he doesn't usually answer, but he talked a little bit about some of the programs that he's putting in place, both internally and externally, to try to get the next generation of leaders, not only at ASU, but at other universities, ready for innovation. I think it's something that he's been focused on over the last couple of years. We tend to talk about succession planning in higher ed, and I think most people think of it as a list of names in a drawer. And he doesn't see it that way. He sees it as, again, trying to create designers of this knowledge enterprise, as he mentioned. So to me, it's about these programs that not only internally, but externally, that he's trying to create.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. The one pushback I would have on him is he described, you know, you can innovate with an autonomous model or you can innovate the core. It seems to me that he's actually doing both of those things, whereas he said we're just innovating within the core, which is probably what you're supposed to say as a president. You know, he's created ed, which is basically the division that's housed ASU online, their innovation with Starbucks, where as a Starbucks employee, you can get access to an Arizona state education paid. A lot of the innovation has come out of that realm. And they've also been innovating in the core, on campus, on ground programs as well. And they've been figuring out ways to expand across the country, so doing a lot of things. And they're featured very heavily in the book that I most recommend right now to people, which is a book called Dual Transformation, about how do you continue to transform and perfect the core to position yourself for success. But at the same time, they call it transformation B. Launch this autonomous entity that will be the future of the institution. And it seems to me he has managed that perfectly from my perspective. And ED plus could create that structure that outlasts such charismatic leaders. He has been with such a strong vision that allows it to continue to do what it does and sort of has an escape velocity all to its own.

Yeah. And it helps them scale. Scale in a way that it would be difficult if they just did it from the. From the core. And, you know, he talked a lot about scale. Yeah. Because, you know, as I, as I asked him, you know, we tend to define higher education, or the prominence of higher education in the US by small size. And he gave us that little history lesson of institutions, by the way.

I was thrilled he did, because I think often people say, oh, well, Harvard's high quality. And I love the way he said it's high quality because of sort of what they've created and who they serve. And as you said, a history lesson. But then he gave us a bunch of measures of how he thinks about quality, and holy cow, they're pretty persuasive.

Yeah.

And so I think that. So how do we define, you know, given the US News and World Report rankings so much, and if you look at the top of those rankings, they're mostly small, small colleges, even universities, you know, colleges within universities that are, you know, maybe enroll 6,000, 10,000, maybe at the most, you know, 12 or 14,000.

Right. That would be large.

That would be large for those top, top rankings. Given the challenges that, you know, he discussed and other guests on Future youe have discussed facing American higher education and how we have to educate people. How do we re. Kind of define this? How do we kind of have people rethink? How do we define success in higher education? So it's not just about small size, but that institutions that are scalable, like asu, are given more prominence.

Yeah. I mean, I think that return on investment metric is obviously a big one. How do you improve someone's life? Distance traveled is something that our friend Ryan Craig talks a lot about, which I love, which is. And it's totally synergistic with this notion of who you include, not who you exclude, meaning I don't care where you've come from. Can we take you the farthest path to launch you into a successful life? And I think that's a very good way. You know, no one's figured out a great way to snapshot, quantify it, such that I get it in my gut and can say, that's a great institution. But the basic notion, to be cynical for a moment, is that Harvard isn't necessarily great because of what they do while you're on campus, but because of what they do in the admissions office before you get there.

And it's the signal that they give you, the signal of that degree that leads to lifetime, you know, employment and networks that you wouldn't have otherwise.

Right, exactly. And I think what, you know, Michael and Arizona State, the endeavor that they are in and saying, we don't care about your background, fundamentally, we will take students wherever they are with what they have, and we will put the right levels of access to educational opportunities in front of them and the right personalized supports. And I mean that both academically as well, from a mentorship, counseling, career perspective to get you where you want to go and to, you know, really build your passion and fulfill your potential. And it's pretty. It's pretty compelling when you hear it that way.

Yeah. I mean, so at the end there, we asked him about the books that he's reading, and he gave us a list of that. I mean, he is an incredible reader in terms of, you know, giving us a stack of books sometimes. He's always writing me little notes about things I should be reading. And I'm thinking, I have no time to do this before season president. He still seems to be able to do it. I mean, you know, as he.

Yeah, I was reevaluating my day as I was listening to him.

You know, he talked a lot about science fiction, which, you know, he talked about the optimism he has about the. About the future. And I think a lot of his views about the future of higher education and the future of the world are shaped by science fiction, and that these big ideas that he tends to promote comes from that. But I also think he's a, you know, he's a student of history, clearly, because he talked about the Grant book and other books that he's been reading, but he's also a student of the history of higher education. Right. The fact that he was able to tell us exactly how American higher education evolved in the us. And you don't see that often, I don't think, among college presidents these days. Right. I think the Clark Kerrs of the world and others kind of understood where we've been and where we're going. And I think most higher education leaders today, unfortunately, do not have enough of appreciation for the history of American higher education and how that infrastructure and how that scout of the or the foundation of that will lead us to this next generation.

Yeah. And I was struck by how he uses the history not as a memory to go back to, but a memory to understand and to build on and then to build the future that you want.

Yeah. Because I think most people in higher ed are very nostalgic. Yeah.

It's nostalgic.

He tends to be on the younger side for a president. Right. So when he started at Arizona State, he was still in his 40s. You know, the average age of a college president today, according to academic, is someone. It's usually he in his 60s. And at the AAU universities, it's usually in the late 60s. And I think a lot of them, I think a lot of them really harken back to a time when there was greater public support for colleges and universities. The public thought more of it. We thought it was an individual good. We thought it was a public good as well as an individual good. And I think we all hearken back to that nostalgia or they harken back to that nostalgia. And I think that, as you said, his history is of higher education is thinking about how we can build this for the next generation.

Yeah. So we might say he embodies the ethos of Future youe. And on that note, I'll just encourage all of you that are listening if you enjoy the podcast, please rate us and subscribe to us wherever you are listening. And we'll look forward to seeing you next time. And until then, thanks for joining us on Future youe.