Source: Poets & Quants
by Ethan Baron
Aug 15, 2015
Business school lecturer Steve Blank spreads the ‘lean startup’ gospel – Ethan Baron photo
The educators have come to Blank’s idyllic ranch to learn how to teach lean methodology to students. And although studying and practicing the lean method in business schools focuses on preparing students to start new ventures, for the teachers here, the workshop is more about learning how to give their students tools to succeed in a 21st Century world where nothing is certain but the hyper-speed of change. For these educators, the workshop provides an opportunity to learn how to arm their pupils with a set of abilities as applicable to life in general as they are to business: thinking innovatively, creating and testing hypotheses, collaborating, progressing through iteration, staying agile, pivoting away from intractable obstacles, and reaping the rewards of failure.
“The research right now in education is about the importance of grit, the importance of perseverance, the importance of being willing to work with people and take feedback, and not to take feedback personally, and learn from feedback – being willing to be innovative and throw crazy ideas out there, which I think that we train our kids out of doing in school, because there’s a right answer,” says Emily Dawe, a math teacher from Los Angeles who is creating an entrepreneurial studies elective class in her middle school.
TACKLING A WHOLE NEW WORLD
“That’s how we grade, in many subjects we grade based on right answer. (Today), we don’t know what the answer is. We don’t know what the next business is. We don’t even know what jobs these kids are going to have. We need to teach kids to tackle a totally new world.”
The lean startup method arose out of the “discovery-driven planning” for new ventures articulated in the mid-’90s by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath. Lean startup methodology replaces the traditional business plan with a constantly evolving document called a “business model canvas.”
Workshop participant Emily Dawe speaks with co-organizer Doris Korda – Ethan Baron photo
Blank, an eight-time entrepreneur who created the lean startup movement and turned it into a pedagogy he calls Lean LaunchPad, developed the teaching method in his class at the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business, and unveiled the LaunchPad course at Stanford Engineering School four years ago. He now teaches a LaunchPad course at Haas as well as at Columbia University, New York University, U.C. San Francisco, and with the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
Blank believes instilling the lean startup mindset in young people will improve the pipeline into business schools, creating a pool of students who have received an early push into innovation-focused business practices.
“The analogy is what happened when kids started programming in high school – it kind of raised the bar on what you were expected to know when you got to computer science programs in undergrad,” says Blank. “We’re going to teach them a set of skills that are going to raise the bar by the time they get to business school. You’re going to have people coming in who now know how to come up with ideas, not just run someone else’s business.
Business school lecturer Steve Blank at a workshop in his California living room – Ethan Baron photo
HOW TO KEEP KIDS OUT OF THE MACHINE
“In the U.S. our culture allows us to do this without the rigid command and control system of rote learning. This isn’t South Korea or Japan; we’re doubling down on the cultural aspects of what we do well here – we question everything in the U.S., and of course kids question everything before we beat that out of them and put them in the machine.”
In Blank’s expansive, sun-soaked living room, he reaches into his personal experience as a parent of a former schoolchild to explain to workshop participants what they’re expected to take away.
“My daughter went through an entrepreneurship class in seventh grade,” Blank tells the teachers. “They essentially taught . . . how to run a lemonade stand. This class is going to have you teach skills that are actually useful in the 21st Century. We’re using the skill set that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley use to create new businesses that have never existed before.”
Blank asks the participants how they plan to apply what they’re learning in the workshop. One woman intends to teach lean skills to women and minorities, to bring more diversity and varied perspectives into the tech sector. One man intends to teach students how to commercialize cancer research. Another plans to teach students how to create a scaleable startup. One woman wants to give her pupils “the tools to actually realize their ideas.”
The workshop – in its third iteration – arises from a partnership between Blank and Hawken School, a Cleveland private K-12. In 2013, a group of educators from Hawken took Blank’s “Lean LaunchPad for Educators” workshop, created an entrepreneurship course at the school, based on the lean methodology, then, with Blank, began giving workshops for K-12 teachers on lean startup pedagogy.
WHO LET THESE KIDS IN HERE?
During the workshop at Blank’s ranch, the educators see how Hawken has applied the methodology in its course. Via videos that show the student experience, participants watch teams of young people spend three weeks developing a solution to an actual company’s serious problem. “We find real businesses with real and urgent problems who are willing to let a lot of high schoolers work on it,” says Doris Korda, director of entrepreneurial studies at Hawken, and a former software entrepreneur. “They’re working on real problems with real deadlines. They learn how to do market research, qualitative analysis, quant analysis, communication. It’s problem solving, it’s experiential, it has to be data based.
Workshop participant Derek Krein discusses lean startup-based education with workshop organizer Doris Korda and another participant – Ethan Baron photo
“The combination of customer development, business model canvas, agile development, and having a course where you’re having to work on teams, present weekly on what you’re finding and what you’re going to do next, and get out in the real world, and really, really find out what others need and want, and have issues with, is crazy-powerful learning.”
YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR SEES THE LEAN LIGHT
Hawken student Phil Hedayatnia, 17, had founded two companies by the time he took the school’s entrepreneurship course and was introduced to lean methodology. He worked on a team applying the method to an Indian barbecue restaurant startup. “I realized that most of the things I had known about entrepreneurship were wrong, and I was doing things the wrong way,” Hedayatnia says.
He believes the methodology, in addition to teaching entrepreneurship, can play a crucial role in keeping younger generations connected directly to life, rather than always engaging via the virtual world: fundamental to the lean creed is the mantra, “get out of the building.” Practitioners must talk to dozens and dozens of people – especially potential customers – about the product under development. “Learning these skills . . . teaches you to get off the phone, get off your computer,” Hedayatnia says. “It breaks that digital divide that I think our generation faces more so than previously.”
The lean method’s focus on team-based problem-solving can help young people position themselves for success as entrepreneurs or employees in new enterprises, says workshop teacher Alex Kehaya, a serial entrepreneur and co-founder earlier this year of a Santa Barbara startup accelerator. “I look at startups every day. These skills are essential for the new economy we’re in. It’s a huge need. When you look at people who are trying to hire other individuals, they’re looking for that ability to solve a real problem,” Kehaya says.
TOWARD EFFICIENCY IN THE WORKFORCE
Lean-based programming for students also fosters personal growth, leading young people to identify their weaknesses and address them, years before that self-awareness would be gained through life and work, Kehaya says. “That’s super powerful,” Kehaya says. “When you have that ability, you’re able to be way more efficient in the workforce, and also to create more value.”
Derek Krein, a college counselor at a grade 9-12 boarding school outside Boston and a workshop participant, believes the lean methodology can give high school students the means to accomplish personal life goals while succeeding professionally. Learning the fundamentals of entrepreneurship will also set young people apart along the path to higher education, Krein believes. “Take Stanford, MIT: they have more perfect test scores, perfect GPA kids than they know what to do with,” Krein says. “How does a student then stand out? They’re in APs like everybody else. What’s the story they can tell? What’s the value that they’re going to bring to a college campus?
“Something like this, shows, ‘Look, I can think in a different way, I can engage people, I want to make a difference.’”
Regardless of whether kids have an interest in entrepreneurship, specifics of the lean method – particularly those around customer engagement – translate directly to daily existence, says workshop participant Kit Halversen, a Silicon Valley ed-tech entrepreneur and part-time teacher at a private high school.
“Those are really important for everybody, despite their interest in innovation or entrepreneurship,” Halversen says. “They’re important as you navigate through life. You’ll probably have a lot more opportunities if you aren’t paralyzed in social situations. If you’re able to empathize with people, you’re able to build stronger relationships.”
LEAN METHODOLOGY AS ECONOMIC DRIVER
As lean methodology sweeps through business and engineering schools, and educators begin to hit young people with it early, a number of U.S. government agencies are putting scientists through the Innovation Corps (iCorps) program Blank has adapted from Lean LaunchPad to help federally funded scientists create commercial products out of their research. In July, Ohio’s Department of Higher Education announced iCorps Ohio, after Governor John Kasich called research commercialization a prime factor in job creation and called on colleges and universities to make it a top priority. Sixty faculty teams are to be trained in lean methods over the next three years.
Blank’s influence is also spreading beyond borders. One of his disciples is taking lean startup to the developing world. Alethea Paradis runs Peace Works Travel, a non-profit working in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Cuba, and Rwanda, and slated to expand next year to Bosnia, Croatia, Chile, and Guatemala. “Our mission is experiential learning and social entrepreneurship in countries recovering from conflict,” says Paradis, a former lawyer. The organization started as a “voluntourism” program that brought middle school, high school, and college students to post-conflict countries for community-service projects.
“I realized after doing this a couple of years, how completely wrong it is,” Paradis says. “It’s colonial: here come the well-meaning white people who are going to paint your walls because you can’t possibly hold a paintbrush.”
She began looking for another way to operate. Then she met Kehaya, who introduced her to the lean methodology, and she took Blank’s Lean LaunchPad for Educators workshop. “That just revolutionized what we were doing and since then the projects the kids have done are so amazing,” Paradis says.
A LEAN SOLUTION TO THE FALLOUT FROM WAR
Now, the projects often focus on developing livelihoods in communities. A group taken to Laos, to learn video storytelling, interviewed members of a family whose patriarch had lost both legs to Vietnam War-era cluster bombs, which still kill or maim a person a day in the region. Family members told the young Americans about their struggle to live without a breadwinner.
The kids applied lean methodology to their brainstorming over solutions, and concluded that a tractor would not only help the family to farm, it could bring in rental income. The kids went home, raised $10,000, bought a tractor for the family, and arranged for members of the family to be trained in its operation. Now, says Paradis, the family is making money from a sustainable business, and the students have notched a business success. “A lot of these kids have gone on to get into major universities,” Paradis says. “This (successful project) figures highly in their future endeavors.”
Learning lean also equips young people for the high-stakes competition that characterizes today’s business environment – “this sort of menacing notion that someone will eclipse you if you’re not on your game,” Paradis believes. “You’ve got to be intellectually and emotionally resilient, because you’re going to get knocked down constantly.”
Robert Taylor, an economics teacher at a Connecticut private school, built an entrepreneurship course around lean methodology after attending Blank’s workshop last summer. “It was one of the most popular classes in the school,” Taylor says. “There’s lots of team-based projects, lots of presentations, lots of work outside the classroom. The sooner you can expose kids to entrepreneurship the better. They don’t know it yet, but many of them will want to be entrepreneurs once they start working.”
