Disruptive Innovation & The Future of Education with Michael Horn

We talk a lot about, you know, growth mindset and agency and executive function and all these like habits of success, whatever. And then you get into a class where you're like, okay, now I just labeled you a C. You have no ability to change that. That label's gonna stay with you. Kids watch what we do far more than they listen to what we say. The world has just told you all that stuff about growth mindset. We don't actually believe it. And so we're gonna stamp you back down. And so I, I think maybe even more than like, what it can unleash in kids. It's like what our current schools curtail in kids. And that's not the world in which I want to live.

Hello and welcome back to the Hannah Frankman Podcast. On today's episode, I'm speaking with Michael Horn. Michael is a professor at the Harvard School of Education. And he's the author of a number of books, including a book called Disrupting Class, which was co-authored by the late, great Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, that delves deep into the problems that plague our K-12 education system and the areas in which it is most ripe for innovation and change. Much of Michael's work centers on the innovation of education, the future of education. And in today's episode, we talk about some of the biggest trends that Michael is watching in K-12 and higher education. We talk about how he thinks about good and promising innovations in the education world, and we talk about why the changing job market is going to affect how education evolves, particularly in the higher education world. Michael was a delight to talk to. We could have gone for twice as long as we had space to record, and I hope you enjoy today's conversation as much as I did. Michael, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. This is like, uh, I, you know, following you for a few years now, seeing you pop up in my feed. So I'm excited to be here.

The feeling is so mutual. I feel like you're one of those people. I feel like there's a bunch of people that I've sort of developed relationships with on social media without ever having actually interacted with in real time. And you're very high on that list. So I'm super excited to have you here. This is honestly the best hack of having a podcast is you just get to meet all your favorite internet people.

It is totally true, right? You, you, once you are someone who puts thoughts out in the world, like people want to come onto your platform to share thoughts and you get to just like, oh, that's a cool idea. I'd never thought of it. Or you meet someone interesting. Anyway, it's, I love it as well.

It's so fun. And you can reach out to people who don't even know who you are, but you've built enough of the internet social credibility signals. Like you have enough followers or something that people will look and go, yeah, you're probably worth my time to talk to. And all of a sudden you have an effective cold outreach strategy. It's really fun.

That's awesome. Love it.

There's so much that I'm excited to ask you about, but before we dig into any of the education-specific stuff, you wrote, I believe it was your first book was co-written with Clayton Christensen. Is that right?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

Okay. So you wrote a book with Clayton Christensen called Disrupting Class. I had no idea when I started digging into your Substack and your internet presence that this book, like it didn't connect, it didn't click in my head that this was all the same world coming out of Harvard.

Wow.

And I had read some of Clayton Christensen's work early in my career and found it very formative to how I was thinking about building a career in the startup world. And as an entrepreneur, I read his book, How Will You Measure Your Life? Was particularly formative for me. He had a couple really great frameworks in there that I reference all the time. I'll still give talks and reference Clayton Christensen's work and say, you know, talk about the emergent life paths and other things that he referenced in that book. So I got very excited when I realized that this was all the same world that you were also a part of. Did you also study under Clayton Christensen? 'Cause you went to Harvard Business School.

Yeah. So this is wild, by the way. I'm literally holding up my lesson plan from yesterday was my last class. And it's, um, and I do the How Will You Measure Your Life modified for education. Cool. As the last class, or the last 30 minutes of the last class, I should say. And the one is, what theory will you use to guide your career and/or life? And mine is the emergent first deliberate strategy. Your actual strategy is the product of the thousands of little decisions you make. So literally, you said that and it's right next to me right now. That is wild on multiple levels. Let me answer your actual question. So I, yeah, I was a student at the Harvard Business School. I took Clay Christensen's class. 2005, the fall. I honestly didn't really know who he was, and the class completely changed how I saw the entire world. And literally November one day of the class, he was like, "Anyone interested in writing this book with me where I'm going to apply my ideas to public education? Please stop by." And I stopped by, frankly not for that, but at the very end I was like, "So I kind of have a writing and public policy background. Came to business school to get away from all of those things, but the." Did you really mean co-author a book with you applying your ideas to public education? I'd like to do that. And so signed up and yeah, we wrote the book together and, you know, that launched my career in more ways than one.

I'm dying to know more about the class that you took with him because I've only ever encountered his work through books, which is, they're amazing. His work is, and I don't think I fully appreciated when I first read How Will You Measure Your Life, the extent of the impact that he'd had on different industries that I was studying and different, ways of thinking about the world that have probably infiltrated more in the world that I'm in than I even realize.

Yeah.

But I'm very curious what he was like in the classroom.

So he was— he was an amazing teacher. He was like, just— that was what I think he was meant to do. He was a soft-spoken individual, 6'8, so it was sort of a contrast when you walked in. Slow sort of style. I mean, I feel like it's sacrilege to say what I'm about to say, but I often compare him to Abraham Lincoln because it's said that when Abraham Lincoln would start speaking, you're like, wait a minute, this is the great orator? It was like a high, squeaky tenor voice, right? And then he would get into his cadence and you'd be sort of lulled into the stories and analogies, right? And Clay was the same way. You'd start being like, huh, this is the guy who's amazing? And then you'd get lulled 'cause he was such a good storyteller. He was such a good, like, way of wrapping yourself in the thoughts and then being like, okay, yes, that was steel I was just reading about, but now I see how it applies to A, B, and C, right? And he would always, and he had his funny throwaway lines of like, for those of you who haven't made a lot of steel in your lives, which is basically everyone at the Harvard Business School these days, right? And, but he'd be like, it's an important thing because I'm teaching you outside of your industry. industry. You come in with no preconceptions, and now we're going to help you far transfer, which education should do but very rarely does, actually take this set of theories and ideas and start to bring it into other realms. And so, and he loved to teach by asking questions. So that is probably after your heart with the symbol that represents rebel educator on the internet. But He, you know, he very rarely would give you his answer or what he thought the answer was. He would teach by asking questions. That's the Harvard Business School method in general, but he was really good at it to the point where you'd be in a one-on-one meeting with him, like as I was writing the book, and I'd be like, I thought of this new idea, and he'd ask you a question back. I'm like, no, I want your freaking opinion. Like, is this a good idea or not? Right? But, but he was— he Loved to ask questions, and he he the way he as a student had learned in at HBS was whenever someone made a good comment in class, rather than write down the comment, he would write down which what question did they just ask themselves to come up with that insight? Such an interesting way, right? Like of processing. So that was the second thing, and then I guess the third thing I would say about him as a. Teacher. There's many things we could say, but the third thing I'll just say is his love and passion and like empathy for his students was just— it like, it knew no bounds. Um, and he, he— it comes through in how you measure your life, obviously, but he, he just deeply cared about the lives of each individual and really wanted to impact it. And it was It was genuine to the point where he felt like he could learn lessons from anyone he met anywhere as well. And, and so maybe that's a fourth, which is I, I felt badly for the students that only got to take the class one year. I, I got to sit through it 3 years in a row. And seeing the evolution over time was amazing because we would have arguments in class about, you know, one of the theories he had developed, and there'd be an anomaly, something that just didn't add up. And the next year, like, it would be, you know, and the students would be like, oh man, he's just wed to his theories. He's not gonna change 'em. The next year that class would be different because he was like, you know, we argued about it, we debated, but by doing so, we uncovered something that was not quite right. Let's evolve it. How cool is that for someone like him to have that humility? Always learning. It was awesome.

Using the classroom as a studio for the discovery of knowledge, both as the teacher and the student. I love that. That's what it should be, especially at the university level.

Especially at the university level, right? You can make the argument, as, you know, some of our friends on the Twitterverse will, or Xverse, whatever you call it these days, that, you know, at the K-12 level, particularly like learning reading or something like that, you know, This is more straightforward. But I think especially as you're working on deeper concepts and conceptual ideas that, you know, you want to be able to apply across, yeah, I think that's right. That's what you want to have happen. You don't want this sort of static set of lectures driven at you.

Do you, how do you feel about that model in the earlier age levels? So I feel like once a child gets to high school, it's fairly easy to make the argument that Learning should be a collaborative experience, and the kids have enough agency at that point that they can formulate a hypothesis on their own and take it to the teacher and argue with them. And it's maybe harder to intuitively apply that to the early years when kids are learning things that are a little more indivisible and indisputable. Like, you can't really debate with your teacher what the letter A sounds like. It just, I mean, there are multiple answers, there are multiple sounds, but there's a set of correct answers. Right. But at the same time, there's this sort of habit that you want kids to build where they're ready to engage with ideas and grapple with them and be humble about being wrong. How do you think about that in their earlier ages?

Yeah, I mean, I'm probably the wrong person to answer the question except to say that, you know, my kids go to a Montessori school, and the way I've thought about it, I tend to not always be in love with every practice of Montessori, but I love to, but I'm in love with a lot of the principles undergirding it, if that makes sense. So one of those principles I think is what's the appropriate question for the kid and their age and stage? And so I think engaging kids with the questions that they have and digging into that is something that it's sort of scaffolded, right, for the background knowledge and level of expertise. And one of the things we know from learning sciences is, Yeah, like a novice learner, individual practice is going to be really important. They can't handle all the social activity because it overloads the working memory and they're going to sort of miss the point, right? And as you become more of an expert, you can ask deeper questions and be more collaborative, et cetera, et cetera. Um, but I, I guess to me, building that habit of like, no, you get to own the pace of your learning. It's the effort you put in. What's the question we're bringing to bear? Maybe I have to model how to ask the question, but frankly, I suspect You all have questions yourselves about how you fit in these constructs, right? Like how, you know, um, I, I, that's sort of loosely how I, how, how I think about it. And, um, I guess the last piece of it is kids are intensely curious about, uh, you know, initially themselves, but then very quickly how they fit in with the world around them and wanting to model. Themselves like the adults around them. And so you as an adult, at least being curious and exhibiting that and taking them seriously, I think has an incredible spillover effect. So it's not that I'm not, I'm arguing, you know, have a Socratic seminar on the, on, on the sound that A makes, but, but I think as you get into the topic, there are very cool ways you can bleed that in that are, that are appropriate for, for the, both what you're teaching and what the student's trying to, you know, their age and stage.

So you talked about, you described Clayton Christensen's class as being formative on really every level to your thinking and your career trajectory. What did you take away from it that made you want to take it 3 times and sent you on this path of co-authoring this book with him about education and then going deep down the innovation and education rabbit hole?

Yeah, I think at the surface level, it was all these things that seemed counterintuitive that I couldn't explain in the world around, you know, why someone had failed or things of that nature. The theories sort of— they started to give answers to, right? And they gave answers to them at the level of countries, at the level of companies, at the level of teams. And then how will you measure your life at the level of individuals? He hadn't written the book yet, but even then, his last class was always, how do you apply these ideas to your individual life? And I remember, just to give you a sense of the impact, like I left the class, I called my mom up, and I literally, like, I think I, for the next 60 minutes, like went at her, like play-by-play everything he had said. That's how much it affected me. And then 3 years later, when I was sitting in the class again, we were wrapping up Disrupting Class. I had just started dating my now wife. I brought her to the last class 'cause I wanted her to have that. And then in our vows, wedding vows, is this statement about we will have a deliberate strategy around how we live our lives together. We both said it, we both looked at Clay in the, you know, out there in the audience a few years later. So I just think it explains so much. It worked at so many levels. And, and it became how I started to see and process information in, in, in the world. Um, and I loved that I was able to, you know, not be an expert in lots of things, but have, you know, be able to have interesting takes, um, because of them, even if I didn't have the subject matter expertise per se of everywhere. So that's the sort of why the ideas, um, why education. When we wrote Disrupting Class, Um, the, the pitch he made to me was, uh, write the book with me. It'll take a year, and then I'll help you get whatever job it is you actually want to do afterwards. Okay, that sounds like a worthwhile deal. The book took 2 years to write, and after year 1, we co-founded, uh, with one more classmate of mine who was working on healthcare with Clay, um, uh, the Clayton Christensen Institute, the nonprofit think tank. And like, you know, the 2 years were up, the book came out, and all of a sudden it was like, I had another job offer at a media company in Asia, which was sort of my original idea of coming to school. And all of a sudden it was like, wait a second, you get to build teams that are going to try to have this impact with a set of ideas that deeply believe in. from Disrupting Class, I think I kind of got to do this. And each day I did it, became more and more invested in making the change to something that's more learner-centered and driven, and a world in which all individuals can build passions, fulfill potential, and live a life of purpose, which is my purpose now at this point. You know, my ideas on education have certainly evolved a lot since Disrupting Class, but And I've been, you know, a learner throughout it. But I think that's the answer is like that mission has deepened every single day and where I do it or how I do it maybe changes. But I don't know, I've never had a day where I woke up and I wasn't excited about both the ideas of innovation and then trying to make a difference in the work.

If I recall correctly, the Christensen Institute has a small set of areas or fields that are the focuses of the work that you do there that are, you know, the argument is that they're the highest impact or highest leverage areas for innovation to occur. Yeah. And education is one of these areas of focus. Why? I mean, you don't have to convince me because I obviously care very strongly about the future of education and think it's deeply important, but I'm always very curious to hear people's arguments for why they think it's an area of high leverage or high impact. And I'm curious, I'm curious to hear yours because— Yeah. I know you've looked at this not just through the lens of being passionate about education, but looking at both the patterns of innovation and also the opportunities for innovation across a lot of different fields and sectors. Why is education one that feels most important and interesting to you?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think my, like, one of the reasons I also work in higher ed and the job market and workforce is because I think my sense of the likelihood of transforming K-12 schools has changed as I've sort of understood their, its dependencies on these other systems in society. And I've become personally much more passionate about the role of the family. Yeah. in, in all of this over time as well as a bigger lever than I think I had hoped or appreciated perhaps when I got into the world. So I, I say that with like a caveat, but, um, I, you know, schools are where kids spend 13% of their waking hours till they're about 18. That seems like a small amount, but it's not an insignificant amount. Um, and if we are building them up in a world in which Sit and deliver, you know, sit and get, deliver whole class. Um, we don't care if you've mastered material, you move on to the next because of your age. Like, I, I, I just think we are so underinvesting and underrealizing the promise of these kids coming through. And I just, I see it with my kids now, like the fact that they get to move on upon mastery and be completely driven by their own curiosity and clock speed, if you will, right? And desire to dive deep. And it just doesn't suck. I was playing the game when I was in school. I was good at playing the game, really good. You

ended up at Harvard.

Right? I knew how to, and I told this yesterday to my students as well. I was like, a lot of you got here because you're really good at box-checking and you know how to play the game. Your grade in this class is not going to be about any of those things. And if that's why you were here, like you should have heard me in the first class and you shouldn't be here. But that's a different that's a different thing entirely. But like I just see the impact it has on my kids right now and their intrinsic motivation and their belief of what they can do and accomplish in the world. That's a really cool lever that. that, that many more of that. I, I mean, I think all individuals worldwide should have that opportunity regardless of where you've been born or your zip code. And, and so I think schools, I, you know, they're probably not the most important lever in that equation, but they're a pretty big one and they're, they're, they are a big lever that can stamp it out. So, so just one more word on that. We talk a lot about, you know, growth mindset and agency and executive function and all these, like, you know, some people call it social emotional learning. I don't love the phrase, but some, you know, habits of success, whatever. And so then like our schools, they implement an SEL unit or an SEL class or something like that. Growth mindset, very important. Carol Dweck, here's her research. And then you get into a class where you're like, okay, now I just labeled you a C. You have no ability to change that. That label's gonna stay with you. Kids watch what we do far more than they listen to what we say. The world has just told you all that stuff about growth mindset, we don't actually believe it. And so So we're going to stamp you back down. And so I think maybe even more than what it can unleash in kids, it's what our current schools curtail in kids. And that's not the world in which I want to live. I want to develop a world of kids understanding their strengths, what they're good at, how they can contribute to the world. And where they believe they can dream and do some really cool stuff to, you know, to go accomplish it.

You mentioned some of the other sectors that also make a difference in how much education the K-12 system can actually be innovative— innovated upon. Can we dig into that? Because that's interesting.

Yeah, please. Where do you want to go?

Well, I think just like, let's drop down from 30,000 feet to like 20,000 feet and just expand on this a little bit. What are some of these other things that you see in play that make a difference in how optimistic you are about the K-12 education system being able to shift? Because it is a behemoth. It's a big thing to try to move.

Oh my God. Yeah. Sorry, I'm gonna get in trouble now with people who follow me. All right. So, yeah, so let's do higher ed, right? Like, why did I drift starting in— so the book comes out in 2008. Really weird experience where you read Disrupting Class. It is very clearly about K-12 schools.

Mm-hmm.

And all these people in colleges and universities and trying to disrupt higher ed start coming to me and like, I loved your book about higher ed. I'm like, I didn't write a book about higher ed.

Every anecdote is about a high school.

Everyone, right? Literally. Yeah. Loved your book about colleges. What? But what I started to sort of like realize was the definition of a good high school is that which gets its students into a quote unquote good college. And if our definition of what a good college or university is, or the mission of colleges and universities are messed up, which I believe they are, then that means that the definition of a high school, good high school is messed up because it's dependent, right, on that end state. That's gonna mess up your middle school and your like, the whole system is geared toward the wrong sets of things as a result. And then you say, okay, well, so we just gotta solve college and university. But like, you know, people don't like to hear this, but sort of the end customer of colleges and universities are our employers and society. And, um, and if that world and how those connect with each other are messed up, well then the colleges and universities are gonna be messed up. And then that means the K-12 system is gonna be messed up. And so, I think I'm staying at 20,000 feet, but like that whole—

We can drop down farther.

Yeah, no, but that whole—

It'll become interesting.

Right, right. That whole dependency thing is real and very restrictive. And I think it creates a very difficult box sometimes that K-12 schools sometimes incorrectly think they can't innovate out of. I say sometimes incorrectly because I actually think there's a lot of ways around it. Um, in the present system. I don't think they get the, the hall pass, if you will. But, uh, but I do think that there's no question the default is very difficult, um, given how colleges and universities are— what we think of as a good college or university in this country. I mean, I, I just was quoted in this article for Forbes by this writer, and like I was extolling the benefits of Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University that educate several hundred thousand students between them in very different ways online. And he was like, well, you know, their graduation rates are like 50% compared to Harvard at 90-plus percent. I'm like, completely wrong metric to like compare these apples to oranges, right? Because the value of the Harvard is in the admissions office of who they excluded. Not did they take anyone regardless of entering ability and bring them the farthest, which, you know, so we could take this a number of ways, but I just think we need a real reset around what we think value is in that sector, and that pervades into the workforce and so forth.

So then is the argument that as the job market changes and the things that employers are looking for shift, which is happening very dramatically in a variety of different ways. Remote work, the decreasing length of the average employee's tenure at a company, the rise of automation, the workforce deficits. There's so many different things that are at play here that are shifting. Like, you know, kids growing up now are not going to be working in the same world as their parents, let alone their grandparents. That shift in an employer's need then shifts the incentives in both higher education and also K-12 education. Is that the general argument?

That's where I've come out on this, is that I think the ripple effect of employers realizing that they're not getting individuals with the skill sets or dispositions that they need will over time start to cause them to look elsewhere. I think you're starting to see that, like the Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz rant about higher ed last year. Well, I largely liked it, but you know, you could have your quibbles with the point. But either way, if they stop having trust in the product of those universities, they're going to start to look to other things. And I think you're starting to see that with people get really interested in Northeastern University's co-op model or the return of apprenticeship as a conversation in this country. It's still not widespread, but, or experiential learning, right? As a critical way to actually learn or like, you know, the job is the credential sort of mindset. Or the biggest one, which is Rachel Romer, my friend who founded Guild, where I worked for a couple years. You know, she says the 4 and 40 is dead. You go to college for 4 years and then have your 40-year career. Instead, it's like the every 4. You're constantly reskilling and upskilling these days, given the rapid pace of change. That's a really cool thing if you're an educator, or it should be, because that means a lot of people need more education constantly and learning. Right? That's so exciting. It's not a great thing if you have an institution focus on the mindset because your business model is built around something very different that I think is misfiring.

One of the things that I have talked about some, and not nearly enough, honestly, considering how important I think this is, is the extent to which everything K through 12 is predicated on the assumption that success means Acceptance in a good college.

Hmm.

It starts— because you talked about that being an enormous part of how people are measuring the success of a high school, but everything in K through 8 is preparing a child to succeed in high school. So it keeps going back. The farther back you trace, you are still doing things that are structured under the assumption that they're part of a progression that will eventually lead to high school, which is then preparation for getting into a good university. And depending on where you're going to university, sometimes the highest bar of success is whether or not you were accepted in the first place, not whether you finish or, you know, what degree you got or anything. Yeah. Yeah. If you get into Stanford, you're done. You drop out of Stanford, you're cool. Like, yep. You'll probably have a big Twitter audience. Like, it's, you're, you've made it already. Um, How much do you think, like, when you think about this, do you see shifts in alternatives to college being the area that you're most excited about? Do you see a potential shift away from the university system altogether? Do you see just big innovation in the higher education space being the sort of crux of a lot of the other change? Or are there other places that you also see the most sort of instability in the conventional model or in the most room for cracks to start showing and new things to start emerging?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think, so general statement, I think what's true across K-12, higher ed workforce at the moment is that all of our lives in them are becoming less linear. Right. We, you know, the student in Arizona who starts in the neighborhood public school, jumps to homeschooling, moves to a microschool, into an independent school, then fractionalizes their time between the neighborhood public school, 2 online courses, and a tutor. Like, that is becoming a norm. These college and university experiences we're starting to understand are less linear, as we were just talking about. And so too are careers, right? So I think that's the common through line across all that. So then to answer your question, And I think in my mind, like, I kind of think the elite selective or highly rejective, whatever you want to call them, colleges and universities that, look, I'm a product of, they're probably here to stay in some measure because like elite brands that create their value by not by volume, but by who they exclude. Don't get disrupted. They can get commoditized, by the way. That would be a good thing, I think. But they don't— they tend not to get disrupted because of the societal sort of— people like to join rarefied clubs. There's sort of a tribe mentality around that. But higher ed writ large is not those universities. There's only 25 or so highly selective institutions in the country. Most people who go to higher ed do not go to those institutions. And I think the very cool thing about higher ed compared to K-12 is it's, there's a lot more room for disruptive innovation. There are millions of people who need education, cannot go to a college or university. Can you serve them with a more affordable thing that helps them make progress in their lives? Yes. Is it one thing? I don't think so. Like, I think Southern New Hampshire, Western Governors University, they're a big part of this story. They are not the only part of this story. It's gonna be them plus the apprenticeships, plus the apprenticeship degrees, plus like, short-form, you know, online courses on YouTube, plus like experiential projects that we get certification credit when you, you know, create a portfolio of work that gets assessed as being a master of some set of skills. Like, it's all of these things, I think, together that are going to disrupt how we think of making progress as post-18-year-olds, shall we say, in our society. And I think that's a really good, healthy thing. And I think it'd be a really good and healthy thing if we attached less importance to the products of those elite universities that, again, I believe will still be here, but at the moment are commanding outsized force in sort of the zeitgeist of our society, in my view. Say that as a product of one of them, you know, of two of them. So that's sort of my thinking around that question. And then I think as you see different pathways flourishing again into the world of work or into what we think of as a successful life, which isn't just money, then that should hopefully open up people in the K through 12 system or parents and so forth to say, oh, there are different viable pathways to that, which I think has frankly always been a hallmark of America. We've just narrowed it considerably over the last 40 years. I think in some ways we're getting back to the dynamism that is at the root of the country's success over time, which is that we say, we don't say there's only one way to get You know, into those strata of society. And to me, that's a positive if we can return to that world.

What are the forces that, you know, 40 years ago caused this constriction into a very singular path?

Yeah, I think technology, globalization, automation were big things that changed it, right? Before, you could drop out of high school and still get a great job that offered a middle-class salary and have a great family life and so forth. All of a sudden, as we entered the knowledge economy, really in the late '70s, early '80s, marked by those 3 things— technology, automation, globalization— all of a sudden, the shift in what we were expecting changed. Our sense of the tracking that was occurring that was sending some kids into voc tech that was not having the same outsized Outcomes changed. And so I think that that's sort of what narrowed us into this college-for-all mindset. Great intentions, but, you know, a system that was— it was built to serve the few. All of a sudden we were asking it to serve the many. I think we were asking it to do a job for which it was never built. And it did that job pretty poorly, which I think is why you've seen the— Yeah. Crazy cost increases over the last 40 years, and frankly, not the commensurate return on investment that you would've hoped for with an investment like that.

I probably have slightly more radical views on this than you do. I, my first foray into the education world was working for a startup apprenticeship program. So it was a white-collar apprenticeship program. It was sort of similar to the tech bootcamps that were emerging at the same time.

Yep.

I love it. This company was founded in 2014, so like very early in this beginning of the sort of popularity wave of thinking about something like a bootcamp or apprenticeship as opposed to a 4-year degree. But the idea was that we were helping roughly college-age kids. We'd work with everybody from high school dropouts who hadn't even turned 18 yet to people who'd already gotten 4-year degrees but couldn't get the job in the space that they wanted and were looking for additional support. put them through a bootcamp where they'd learn the skills that they needed to land a non-technical job at usually a tech startup, but we worked with other types of companies too.

What was the company?

It was called Praxis.

Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.

So I worked with them for, yeah, I worked with them for a few years and got just really deep into the practicalities of what is actually happening in the jobs market when someone is looking at the resume, or, and we were very anti-resume. We were very pro, go create a pitch, go be proactive about getting a job. You don't have to have skills, but—

Totally with you. Totally with you.

Totally with you.

Yeah.

You can convince someone that you're more interesting than all the people with the fancy resumes if you show you're actually really bought into the job and critically thinking about how you're going to be able to be valuable here.

Yeah. On top of which, 70-plus percent of jobs are filled by network. So we're not actually going through the online job posting thing where you submit resume and cover letter and pray. That's not actually how jobs are filled. belief is AI is actually gonna make that even higher because now what you have is these postings that are ridiculous laundry lists of hoops and skills and credentials and, you know, 5 years experience for an entry-level role. Really? Does anyone actually believe this stuff? But then like, so we're looking for unicorns on one side and on the other side, essentially the AI is doctoring resumes to look like superheroes to try to match these unicorns seeking jobs. And the recruiters, like, they don't believe any of these resumes coming in because they know that they're all sort of keyword matching, right, to get through applicant tracking systems. And so my belief is that they're going to be far more likely to search for trusted people in network that have a portfolio of real work that you can show me. Well, that all comes to— we have a chapter in the book, Craft Your Career Story. That's pitching you, right? That, that, that's telling your story and how you can contribute. So I, I totally with you.

I think there's, there's so many different things that you have to unpack from the complicated package though, that is higher education. And I'm also curious how you think about that because there's the very practical skills-based job preparedness service that it is supposed to provide. And based on the number of college graduates who have trouble getting sufficient jobs to live at the quality of life that they want to be living at as college graduates, which is very reasonable, hard to do. College is not preparing them well for that. I think it's pretty obvious that that can be replaced very fairly easily with something like a skills-based bootcamp, especially if you're tapping into something that has a network that, like a community that has a network where You can get introductions and job referrals. It's gonna make it a lot easier to get your foot in the door. We can debate that if you disagree with that, but I think in general, that's like a fairly easy problem to solve. Easy in a very relative sense. But, you know, there's a structural framework for how to do it. People are doing it successfully. It's clearly working. It's a very fairly linear thing where, you know, you have a high school graduate who has a minuscule skillset to be qualified for this entry-level job. there's this delta of things that they need to learn how to do, and you can walk them through the progression of learning those things. But there are other things that college is also providing, and one of them is just the transference of knowledge, especially, you know, college in its ideal form as it is intended to be.

Yeah.

You're supposed to be delving into the liberal arts too, and learning how to think and learning the art of not just completing tasks and understanding how a social media ads manager works or how to complete a sales call and log in in Salesforce or, you know, whatever the tasks are that you would do in your job, that the thinking skills that are required for long-term growth. And, you know, it's debatable whether or not the average college degree is doing this well, but that's sort of the goal of a college education. It's not just career preparedness, it's also knowledge.

Yep.

And when you look at the careers of people who've been very successful, there's a heavy influence of philosophy and economics and history and an understanding of great literature that does influence the thinking of people who go out and build meaningful careers, but also build meaningful things that are useful for other people. And I feel like, you know, being inside of Harvard Business School, you probably have a particularly astute sense of that. You know, the work of Clayton Christensen that was happening inside of Harvard Business School was deeply influential to a lot of what was happening in Silicon Valley in ways that most people probably aren't aware of. But there was a very heavy flow of ideas back and forth from the business sector into the academic sector and back again. Yeah. So I feel like there's, there are problems there that even college isn't really solving on the average sense, I would argue. But that's also a problem that needs to be solved for.

And I agree.

The solution is slightly less obvious perhaps. And I'm curious what you see there. Like if college starts to unwind its stranglehold as the path that everyone is supposed to be on. How does that element of an education get replaced, or is it even important for it too? Or is that, you know, was it intended for only some people for a reason because it's not necessary for the average career?

Well, so this is the big question, I think, right? So, so let me just backtrack a little bit. I think we actually agree more than you might think on everything you just said.

Okay, good.

Full stop. I think the challenge and why I think higher ed will continue to play some role regardless at least in the present moment, is a lot of those business models around the bootcamps and so forth where they've struggled was in the cost. Like, they lowered the time and cost, but what that meant is you had to be replenishing students much more frequently, and you had to lower the cost of acquisition of students such that, like, you could support this lower cost, you know, faster, cheaper model, to use Ryan Craig's words. And so they got like the disruption partially right, but didn't get the full business model to really sing together. And so that's like what we haven't solved for yet. The reason I think the apprenticeship-based degrees or programs or these more experiential learning could change that potentially is if the the experience of working is actually rewarded as learning and you can get paid for it and really reduce the cost, I think then we open up sort of these insights and experiences that bootcamps and others sort of showed us can be done to a much wider swath of the population. And then imagine if we take some of these federal financial aid loan dollars that go exclusively to accredited colleges and universities, and by the way, accreditation shows nothing about the quality or value of the institution. It just says, did you, you know, hit these 9 out of 10 input-based things and a 10th that theoretically focused on outcomes, but not really. And if, and so if federal financial aid dollars can actually start to flow toward things of real value, which I believe you'll actually see from the sorts of programs you just described, then I think it gets really interesting really quickly. So then I think we have to say, what's the value of a place like Harvard or Yale or Stanford theoretically? And theoretically, I'm going to use that word because I think the value should be in the research, not just the teaching. And in fact, I would argue, I think Harvard Business School is a special use case. We can talk about that later. But like most research institutions, really lousy actually at the teaching part. The reason they attract individuals is they have the best researchers, and then they have great social networks around them in terms of the graduates. And so people sort of accrue value to them. Maybe overly cynical, not by much. And so that's sort of what perpetuates. And then you ask the question, well, how much of the research is really creating new knowledge that is applicable in the way you just described, right? Like, the cool thing about Clay Christensen's research was it was not for its own sake or to get cited in 3 journals. And in fact, one of the reasons he was sometimes, you know, parodied, um, in academic circles was they're like, oh, it's too application heavy. And he was like, and he was like, no, like, like, if I'm not actually impacting practice, then I'm not doing my job. That's a really cool mindset, but it's the one that they all ought to have. I'm sure there's exceptions, but they, you know, most of them ought to have is like, what's the utility of this in a real way, right, in the world? And so I don't know the answer to this question, I guess, but I have this sense that like we've been thinking a lot over the last, call it 10 years, a little longer than that, 15, 20 years around how do we disrupt the teaching and learning functions of the university? We've not thought nearly enough about how do we disrupt or rebuild the research functions of the university to make it, you know, like what's the time span, right? Research historically wasn't always done in a university. Bell Labs, IBM, other places were really good at this stuff. Google has some pretty far out stuff that it does today. How do we think about the business model for research that's useful? How do we break out of a peer review model that I think is is hopelessly broken. Um, how do we, you know, get real research that, look, it doesn't have to all be like breakthrough scientific ideas. It can be philosophy, right? But like philosophy that actually impacts how we live our lives and helps us ask good questions around purpose and meaning and have ethical considerations as we build AI agentic, you know, things and so forth, right? Um, all to say, like, I think there are some big questions that haven't been grappled with as it comes to those areas. And I don't think we're doing nearly well enough in that sector. And so I would hope in the years ahead we could see disruption or have an open mind of a society of how those, what I think are necessary functions that many universities and many professors have done admirably at, but how do we make it more sustainable and more applicable and more fruitful and less obviously wasteful in certain corners of the academy. The last piece you asked is who needs to sort of benefit, I think, from this broader knowledge and critical thinking skills and writing.

More like liberal arts literacy, like having read some of the great books, understanding philosophy and economics, the broader tools of thinking, not just field-based

Yeah. So number one, I think our K-12 schools need to do a much better job of this early on as well. I agree. Like, so I'm like not willing to give the pass, if that makes sense, to them. Full stop, I think. And then number two, Actually, let's stay on number one for a moment. Like, why our society functions the way it does and produces the results that it does and has created so much prosperity in an unprecedented way over the last 250 years. Um, that is, you know, until then human society was relatively a flat line in terms of growth or prosperity. Like, we should talk about these and teach these and, and like important ideas, right? Um, That that you you shouldn't. My view, like you should have a real appreciation for that. I think before you even get to college, I I don't have a great answer frankly on the on on on the broader question. I I my own belief is sort of twofold. When I look at like a Western Governors University, its former president Bob Mendenhall once said to me like. Honestly, the skills that are theoretically at the underpinning of a liberal arts education are also done at Western Governors that is more IT, nursing, teacher-focused, and so forth, because we believe you can't be great at those professions unless you actually can think critically and so forth in them. We just spend a lot more time defining them so they look less like sort of, oh gee, you get it. So that could be one of the answers. I think a second answer might be, how do we lower the cost of getting access to all the things you just talked about so that they are things that genuinely pull us in and we aren't sitting there fighting about how do we afford what is fundamentally an unaffordable experience for most individuals? We instead are like, we create affordability by lowering the fundamental cost of getting those things out in the world. Books are one way we do that, but how do we do it in more engaging media that is more in tune with what the science of learning says, or the evidence is showing us over time? I think we could do that as well. Coursera is one way at it, but I don't think it's the best way, shall we say? And I think that's probably part of the answer too, and making it in form factors and topics that actually pull people in because they're genuinely curious. I think we need to be a little less dismissive of some of the YouTube stars and others that have really figured out how to use stories to teach great lessons from history and economics. And also think about like, how do we have a thriving ecosystem around them? So individuals can find their ways to the lessons and stories that have stood the test of time.

You very, very recently released a new book called Job Moves, which is behind you. Your display is very aesthetically pleasing, by the way. I like this very much. I'm curious about the relationship in your mind. I mean, obviously we've talked about the how much you feel like the changing job landscape affects the future of education, but I'm curious how you landed there and how writing a book about how to make career pivots emerged out of the other work you were doing more broadly in education and how writing the book has also shifted how you think about the future of education.

Yeah. So the latter in substantial ways, I think experiential learning is a much bigger part of the vision I have for education than I had. And, and, you know, and until the last 5 years. Um, so we can come back to that in a moment, but, uh, there's a, there's sort of the story I tell myself and then there's the personal story of how this book came about. Um, uh, the story I might tell myself, and I don't think it's wrong, um, is that like through the acquisition of Entangled Ventures into Guild, I became much more interested in Like workforce, sorry, educating and upskilling people in the workforce. And then that sort of led into a natural question of like, how do we sort of self-actualize through the work we do? And what does it mean to make progress in one's career? And this felt like a, you know, if my mission is to help individual, you know, build a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, live a life of purpose, school is one conduit to do that, but it's not the only one. And so career felt like a natural adjacent. if you will. I think the other part of that story though is, so it's based on the Jobs to Be Done methodology, which Clay Christensen created with Bob Mesta, who's one of my co-authors on this. Bob and I wrote the book Choosing College together also, where we applied this thinking to understand why do students choose to go to any post-secondary experience. It wasn't just college. In retrospect, I hate the title of the book, but And so then he had been teaming up with Ethan Bernstein, who teaches at the business school at Harvard, uh, on why do people hire their next job when they switch? We, we think that employers hire you, but you also hire the job. You get to choose, do I want to work here and for the, you know, the benefits and pay that it offers? And so we started doing, uh, this deep understanding of what are the, what causes people to say, today's the day I'm going to switch jobs. And I will tell you, for me personally, coming from the choosing college world, I started using some of the insights on my own career and I was like, holy crap, like, this is like, this is pretty powerful. And it, and then Bob interviewed me when I got a job offer to be a president of a new university. And it helped me say no to that job offer. Because I realized it was out of lockstep with the progress I was hoping to make in my, not just career, but also my broader life and how they integrated together. And I was like, there's something here. So we did a lot of research on it. And then when the pandemic hit right before Clay Christensen had passed away, January of 2020, Ethan, Bob, and I were all disciples of Clay, if you will. And We said one way we can honor his legacy is to write a book together. And we also felt like we were coming up with something. COVID hits, the Great Resignation hits. We really like hunkered down on the research in a big way and then started prototyping lots of processes to help and coach people as they were switching jobs. And after about 4 or 5 rounds of that, came up with something we felt like was pretty good and we should

If you were to give the, the sort of elevator pitch summary, I wish we had another full hour just to delve into the book because it's also extremely interesting. I know, it's fantastic. Um, but if you were to give the elevator pitch on some of the core ideas that you are furthering with the book for people who are listening, because a lot of people listening to this are, I think there's 2 angles of interest that the book would have for people listening. One is, you know, adults who are parents who are listening to the show because they're thinking about the education of their kids, but they're also in their own careers and they're thinking about navigating the pivots of their own career trajectory, but also thinking about the application of the changing job landscape as sort of the target of the education they're designing for their kids. Like eventually their kids are going to grow up and need to navigate this too. So thinking about these sort of things is also relevant from that. Yeah. perspective, what would be your, your quick elevator pitch for the book for people who are listening to this who might find it interesting to read?

Yeah. So I, the big statement would be, look, you get to hire your next job, but to do that successfully, you have to understand what progress looks like for you as an individual. And we have framed the world of progression, meaning climbing up, climbing up career ladders, organizational charts, and the like. But it's fundamentally out of step with what progress for an individual, for at least 75% of us, looks like when we switch jobs. And so what we help you do by understanding why thousands of people have switched jobs before you, what are the root causes that, that push and pull them to make a switch, we help you identify what's the progress you're actually seeking right now. We help you understand what are the energy drivers that that really are critical for you to have in the next role? What are the capabilities you have and that you wanna develop? And how do you prototype and make trade-offs in the job market? This is not a book about the dream job that has everything perfect. I don't believe it exists. Every job has some element of suck in it where there's a part that's draining. The question is, how do you make intentional trade-offs to get the things that are most important to you at this point in your life? And those will change over time as well. So what we've built is a process that allows you to keep coming back to it, repeat it over time, um, and do it with others. And that's the last statement is fundamentally, this is not a book you do in isolation. It's one you do with other people.

I started reading it in preparation for this interview. I have not finished it yet because it's recently, recently released. So I haven't had time to finish it yet, but But I'm very excited too, because it's been very, very interesting so far. One more question. I wish I had time for a dozen, but one of the things that you do is watch the trends in the education sector. You're looking at the different research that's coming out. You're looking at the different projects that people are working on. You're looking at the newcomers on the scene in terms of education programs and software tools and learning science research, all of it. Yeah.

Yeah.

What are the things— you're clearly a student of innovation. You've studied this for a long time in a variety of different fields. What are the things that you look at or look for when you're looking at a new school that's emerging or a new program that's emerging that makes you feel optimistic or excited, or like this is a thing that you wanna flag to keep watching? This may be a very hard thing to distill down, but I'm curious if there are patterns in how you think about this or particular lenses in your paradigm. that particularly influence how you think about these things? I feel like it must be very interesting to be inside of your brain looking at different education programs, and I'm curious what some of the biggest things are that you're looking for.

That's kind of you to say. Some people might find it terrifying, but to be inside my brain, thank you.

That could be interesting too.

Fair enough. I look first and foremost, is it accomplishing a meaningful job to be done in their lives? Is it helping them make progress? And I'm aware we haven't fully defined what that theory is, but the basic idea is, is it helping a group of people make meaningful progress in their lives, in their context? And I guess I say that just because I think to the point we had, the conversation we had at the very beginning, we get learning from lots of different parts of our world. And I often think we should be hiring school To do the things that we can't do for our kids in our home. So maybe I'll leave. So that that that makes me much more open to a lot of different form factors for schooling than I think some people who have their like favorite way of doing it are. The second thing that I look at, let's say this: in the United States, it's incre. It may be impossible to disrupt schools in the United States because we have quote unquote free schools that everyone is required to go to in some sort of way. There's no non-consumption. If, if we can disrupt schools, the only hope that I see is that actually a lot of individuals are overserved by schools. They don't need the football team and the school lunch and the this and the that, right? And the 15 bands and the 10 APs or whatever else. They want the experience that's, that's going to help them make progress. And so I look at the micro schools emerging right now and the education savings accounts and some of those vehicles. And I, I just think, what's, what's going to be the upward trajectory of those? Because disruptive innovation isn't just that you hit the overserved or the non-consumers. It's you start with them, but then you have to improve somehow. So that you can suck the volume out of the old system. And so I'm, I'm constantly trying to think or ask, like, what does that look like in this world? And it may be the case that it's not the individual schools, but it's more a set of enablers in society that helps us understand how to navigate and find the next education experience that helps us make progress on our journey. In this less linear world, I think we're living and entering. So I don't know if that answers your question, but those are a couple of the heuristics that I'm constantly thinking about looking at. I'll say the last thing is I think we have historically in education reform circles, I think of myself more as education transform, but in reform circles, I think scale has been thought of like you create a new school, it's great, and you copy and paste it 100 million times, and therefore we've scaled education change. And that's like a software engineering mindset of scale, like billion lines of code, copy paste billion times, we've scaled. But I think education is probably much more like civil engineering, which is to say there are certain laws of physics that doesn't matter whether you're in San Francisco or Boston or, you know, Florida. Those are immutable, but the contexts in which you are actually are very different. And so the way you build the bridge in earthquake-prone San Francisco is very different from how you build it in snowy Boston. It's very different from how you build it in humidity-ridden Florida. And so I sort of have this sense that there are principles that scale in education, but how we implement them in different places actually should look very different given the life circumstances of the different families, communities, and so forth. And I think sometimes we like to get in fights with ourselves and argue that as a bug, but it might be a feature.

I am very inclined to think that it's a feature, and I love that that's where we're leaving this because I think that's such great food for thought. If people have enjoyed this interview and they want to delve deeper into your work, obviously we've referenced a couple of different books that you've authored and co-authored, including the most recent one, Job Moves. Where else would you send people to dive deeper?

Sure. So I'm— my Substack is Michael B. Horn on the Future of Education. That's probably a pretty good way as any to engage with me. But obviously I'm on X and LinkedIn at Michael B. Horn and Instagram and all the rest of those social media channels that can suck us down rabbit holes, but are great ways to be in touch.

This was so much fun. I'm so glad we finally had the chance to do this. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you for having me. I'm so, I feel like now I understand why you say I should have allotted 90 minutes instead of go get my kids,

but

thank you.

Maybe we'll do it again sometime. Sounds good.

I would love it.

I would too. All right, my friends, that is a wrap for today. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. I hope that you found this valuable. Please leave a 5-star rating on Apple or Spotify. Please like the video on YouTube, and please don't forget to subscribe on whatever platform you listen to make sure that you don't miss next week's episode. Thank you so much, friends. I will see you next week. Bye.