Designing a New Course

It's been twenty years since I taught in a classroom. Back then, I was an Assistant Instructor in the Math Department at the University of Cape Town. What I remember most about that experience was the challenge of personalizing the learning for each student. We were lucky. We had three instructors for about twenty five students, so we had enough time to connect one on one with each student. But it was still difficult to step out of my own mind to find the right language, process and and pacing to scaffold and inspire learning.

I am teaching again this spring, in the master's program at IE in Madrid. This time, I designed the course, in the Entrepreneurship program. Choosing a subject I wanted to teach, and felt qualified to do so, proved harder than I anticipated. Stealing wisdom from others, I decided to teach what I wanted to learn.

Founders are compensated (in equity, mostly) for making good long term decisions. Good decision making in startups is fraught for several reasons. First, information is limited. Second, time pressure. Third, unclear optimization function.

Startups are beautiful because they are not yet entrenched in routine. There is no organizational consensus on the right path for the company: that is what needs to be discovered by testing and iterating in the market.

To have any chance of survival, founders must gather resources. That means convincing investors, employees, customers - and sometimes regulators, suppliers, media, trade organizations, non-profits, others - to support the venture in some form.

What results is a complex set of interests, not yet solidified. Both the size of the pie and how it will be shared between customers, suppliers, employees, investors and others needs to be determined. Founders today must embrace this ambiguity. We have moved past the shareholder primacy world championed by Milton Friedman and others.

In this new reality, we don't have a great toolkit for how founders can make consistent and ethical decisions over time, with limited information and an evolving end goal. That is the focus of my class.

In Decision Making for Purpose Driven Leaders we explore how to build a team and organization when the purpose extends beyond just profits. We believe founders sit in the middle of a complex web of relationships, constantly making decisions that need to balance various interests over time. Making these decisions with consistency and integrity is difficult, and understudied. We hope to improve that.

The full course syllabus is here. My first class begins next month, and hopefully there will be many more, with the cases and course continuing to evolve to reflect our collective ongoing understanding of the challenge.