Best of: Training the next generation of entrepreneurs
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Hey, everyone. It's Russ Altman, your host of The Future of Everything. It's graduation season here at Stanford, and students are getting ready to collect their diplomas and take their education out into the real world. A couple of years ago, I sat down with Tina Selig, a professor in our management science and engineering department, who's done a lot of research on how we can teach skills, including imagination, creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

all things that can come in very handy when you're setting out to make a positive contribution to the world. Whether you're a new grad trying to figure out your next steps or someone simply looking for a solution to a big challenge, we hope you'll tune in again and be inspired. And by the way, to those new or soon-to-be grads who are listening, a big congrats to you from me and the whole team here at The Future of Everything, and best of luck as you head into your next adventure.

Before we get started, a reminder to follow The Future of Everything in whatever app you're listening to so you can always be alerted to new episodes and you never miss the future of anything. You know, we often have a stereotyped view of entrepreneurs. They're lone geniuses who develop a passion and then do anything to make it happen.

In these narratives, the entrepreneur is often a charismatic figure who leads the company to success despite, or perhaps because of, numerous personality quirks. It's as if they were born to be entrepreneurs. But is entrepreneurship really an innate quality, or is it something that can be learned? Are entrepreneurs always the most imaginative, creative, and innovative folks?

Do these stereotypes in fact hinder people who otherwise might be great entrepreneurs, but they don't think that they fit the mold? Well, Professor Tina Selig is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. She's an expert at entrepreneurship and technology innovation. She studies how the relevant skills can be taught so that success is not random, but is the result of good habits and practices in everyday life.

So Tina, you study and you teach about entrepreneurship. And many of us have an idea about entrepreneurs, that they're risk takers, creative, visionaries, focused on a goal, building a company, making it work.

Now, you've been around a lot of these folks. How much of this entrepreneurship stereotype is true? And do you think that this comes naturally or is this something that's teachable? I love these questions. So thank you for starting this way. And I'm delighted to be chatting with you today. Though people often think of risk-taking as being binary, either you're a risk-taker or you're not.

But I've really come to understand that risk taking is much more nuanced. So you can be a financial risk taker or a social risk taker or an emotional risk taker or a physical risk taker. And the thing is, entrepreneurs are all different. Some of them are risk takers because they're willing to take on a really big idea, but they might not be a very big financial risk taker. They're gonna do some small experiments to see if it's gonna work. So we often look at the results

and say, wow, that was a really big risk. But the path to get there is lined with lots of little experiments that allow you to test the validity of your idea to see if you're going in the right direction. So I would say entrepreneurs are there trying to squeeze the risk out of every single venture in order to get to success.

So that's a great answer because I was totally not expecting it. And so risk-taking is not a single yes, no. And they can occur in different areas. Would you say that in general they have to be risk-takers along some dimension or at least comfortable with risk? Or are there very, very conservative innovator entrepreneurs who really minimize risk in all aspects of their business?

So I'm going to give you a slightly different answer is that you really have to look at the team, not just the individual. Right. In order to bring a big idea to life, you need a bunch of different people. And probably if you looked closely, they will all have really different risk profiles.

Because someone is going to be able to say, hey, listen, that looks really risky to me. Let's go reevaluate this piece. But that piece looks like, you know, I feel really comfortable with that. So collectively, the team is going to be risk taking in some dimensions and not risk taking in others. Right.

That makes perfect sense. So let's think about these ideas of creativity and innovation. First of all, is creativity and innovation, are they synonyms or should we think about them differently? People so want to conflate all of these terms. And I've spent a lot of time parsing this and looking at really what is going on. And I believe that there's a very big difference between imagination, creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Let's go through them all. It sounds like four good words. Exactly. And people get confused and do a lot of hand-waving because they don't understand exactly how this creative process takes place. So imagination is envisioning things that don't exist. This is something we do all the time when we're kids. This is something that comes very naturally. Creativity is applying your imagination to address a problem.

We do this again all the time. You know, I'm really hungry. You open up the refrigerator. Oh, there's some peanut butter, some jelly, some bread. I think I could combine them and make a sandwich. Okay?

Okay. Innovation then is applying your creativity to come up with a really unique solution. So to go from being creative to being innovative, you go from coming up with a solution that probably a lot of other people might've found before to innovation is where you're doing something that has never been before. And so there are times in which a creative solution is perfectly fine, but there are many times in which you really need an innovation. You need to jump

over what's been done before to come up with something new. And then entrepreneurship is applying that innovation to then bring your idea to the world, to scale it. This is key to thinking about the so-called the stack that leads to entrepreneurship, which is what you teach and which is kind of one of the goals. Now, Silicon Valley is very famous for entrepreneurship. Of course, it's not the only place in the world. But in thinking about our chat today, I was thinking how...

maybe at least in my world, information technology

and technology in general have become one of the major foci of entrepreneurship, at least in Silicon Valley. And yet there's entrepreneurship all over the place that is not information technology. So I wanted to ask if any of the rules of entrepreneurship or any of the approaches are information technology specific, or if you think that these are kind of universals that are relevant, even if you're building a new physical widget and it's not about IT. You know, we've

are so focused on technology here. I really deeply believe that these concepts, these tools that we teach are universal, independent of whether you're building a widget, doing something IT, or even launching a new restaurant. So these are things or some service. These are all relevant tools. And as you asked before, can they be taught? Absolutely. You know, people ask all the time, can you teach creativity? Can you teach entrepreneurship? And

It's such a funny question because no one asks, can you teach math? Can you teach history? Even can you teach music or sports? These are all things that, sure, there are going to be some people who are natural musicians and natural athletes. But when it comes down to it, we all get better with education, understanding the skills and the tools and practice, practice, practice, practice.

I know this is an unfair question, but for people who might be surprised by that answer, can you give me a thumbnail sketch of how you would teach creativity, innovation, or entrepreneurship? You bet, because I do it all the time. Right.

Right. Well, the reason I'm worried is because you spend so much time on it that it's a little insulting to ask you to do it in a few sentences, but I'm going to do it anyway. I love it. I love it. I love it. So I'm delighted you're asking me how to teach creativity. It's something I do all the time. There are some very specific skills that you can learn. And

that change the way you look at problems. For example, one of the most powerful things I teach in my classes is how to question the question you're asking by using frame storming. Now, what is that? Oftentimes we assume we're asking the right question. So perfect example, let's say we run an umbrella company.

And we're deciding we're going to make new umbrellas and we're going to make umbrellas that are bigger or umbrellas that are more beautiful or umbrellas that don't drip water when you get them into the house. And we could keep doing this, but we might be asking the wrong question. And so I would ask my students to say, what problem are we really trying to solve with an umbrella? So, Russ, what are we trying to solve with an umbrella?

Not getting wet in the rain. Exactly. So how might we solve that? Wow, that was very stressful. I just want to tell you. Exactly. But that was a simple example, not getting wet in the rain. But think about it. That's a really different problem than making a new umbrella. And how many different ways can you come up with to not get wet in the rain?

It's not just about putting something over my head. Right. Maybe you create walkways that people walk under. Maybe there are tunnels. Maybe there's a new type of rain garment. Maybe you have hot air that blows up from the ground and keeps the rain from even coming down. There are lots of different solutions. And so often it's very, very, very important to question the questions you ask before you start trying to generate solutions. Right.

And so you need to fall in love with the problem and stay in this problem space long enough to understand if you're solving the right problem. And that was a very simple example, but there's some that are much more complicated. It takes a long time to parse what problem you're really trying to solve. So that's an example of a tool that I think is extremely powerful. And those people who come up with a really creative way of preventing you from getting wet in the rain are going to put the umbrella companies out of business, right? Because...

Who likes carrying an umbrella? Nobody. Who likes losing an umbrella? Who likes, you know, I mean, like umbrellas are a pain in the neck. Having them turn inside out. Exactly. We carry them despite the fact that we don't like to use them. And so there's so many things in our lives where we can make incremental improvements. But if you're really innovative, you're going to brainstorm before you start brainstorming in order to make sure you're solving the right problem.

Just so I understand, what is the derivation of this frame storm word? What's the frame part? So brainstorming, you know, we're thinking of ideas. So just help me make that final connection. What is frame storming? Yeah, that's really good. The question you ask is the frame into which the answers will fall.

And so if I ask a question, how do I make a new umbrella? That's one frame. If I say, how do I stay dry in the rain? I've now created a very different frame. So that's why you want to brainstorm before you brainstorm.

Okay. And so that really is helpful because now I can see that, first of all, you're teaching these students not really just how to be entrepreneurs. This is a skill that's going to be useful to them in life in any situation they find themselves in. Exactly. In fact, I want to quote my colleague Tom Byers, who years and years ago taught me something very, very brilliant, which is that teaching entrepreneurship skills is really a Trojan horse for incredibly important life skills. The

The skills that you learn get applied to everything you're doing. I'm going to move a little bit because I know that one of the things you want to do is you want to train a generation of innovators and entrepreneurs who are global citizens. I think that's the word you've used in some of your writing. Global citizens. What do you mean by that? Well, we want people who come out of our programs to be able to contribute in a positive way to the world.

This is not just about, this is not about making money. This is about making meaning. This is about doing something that's a positive contribution. And having that mindset and that framing around your place in the world is really, really important to us.

And when I've read about it a little bit, I've seen that part of it is like thinking about the upsides and the downsides. So you're doing your new – you're trying to stop people from getting wet to go back to the umbrella example. And you come up with a new way of doing it. And I think one of the things from reading, one of the things that you do is you ask them to think about both the positives of this new way of –

protecting people from rain, but there also might be downsides or they might be what they so-called dual use. There might be a way to use these things to do bad things, not just to do good things like keeping people dry. Is that part of the curriculum and how do people respond to that when you kind of layer this extra requirement on top of everything? Yeah, I'm teaching a course with Drew Endy from bioengineering and Lisa Solomon from the d.school called inventing the future.

And it is one of the most exciting classes I've ever taught. This class is based on the concept or the premise that our students are going to be inventing the future. They're going to be going out and inventing the tools and the trends that are going to have a big impact on the world. And then

it behooves us to prepare them to look at both the positive and negative, sort of the utopian and the dystopian consequences of that technology. And so in this class, what we do is that the first five weeks, the students are learning all sorts of tools for imagining the future,

and evaluating the future. And in the second half of the course of last five weeks, they are debating. They are debating the utopian and dystopian consequences of different frontier technologies. Okay, so let me be a little bit of a curmudgeon here. Someone could argue that, look,

If you constrain the invention before it even happens, it could die on the vine. So that the discussion about the secondary, the dystopian uses, the bad uses, that should happen after you actually have the technology because that will allow you to have a conversation that is meaningful about the actual capabilities of the technology, what it can and can't do. Whereas if you have a discussion too early...

you may just kill the idea without ever giving it a chance to be created and then to see what it does. And so I'm just wondering, where is the right place to introduce this consideration of the right and wrong of it? So, you know, of course, people think of the nuclear bomb and like, should we have invented the nuclear bomb or not? And of course, that's a long conversation we're not going to have. But I think the people who invented it would say, let us invent it. Well, actually, they wrote a lot of books about this. Somebody could say, okay,

We'll invent it and then the world needs to decide if and how to use it. So how do you grapple with these kind of somewhat profound issues? First of all, it's a really, really important point you make is that if you kill ideas too early, I mean, if you evaluate them too early, you're going to kill the idea. Right.

Evaluate. That's the word. So during a brainstorming session, it is extremely important to defer judgment and to not evaluate because you're going to kill the process. It is clear that you need to separate the brainstorming, sort of the exploration phase from the exploitation phase. And that evaluation has to be a separator.

However, once you've generated all these ideas, once you've done that, you really it is your responsibility to consider the downsides and to look at ways to mitigate it. I mean, let's think about it. Cars. Cars are great. But if someone had early on said, you know, let's project if everybody has a car, what it's going to do to air pollution.

And would there have been a way to mitigate that by saying, okay, when we build it, we need to build it in a way so that we don't have air pollution or sound pollution or whatever else, you know, negative consequences. And it allows you very early on to consider what things you could do to mitigate the potential problems.

So I think it's really important. In fact, one of the things we teach in our classes is design criteria, where at the early part of the design process, you look at what something must have, what it could have, what it should have, what it won't have, and to really think deeply about this before you start developing. It doesn't mean you don't develop it, but you bake in ways to prevent the things that are the potential negative consequences.

Yeah, so that really does sound convincing. But let me ask, do we have any data about how good inventors are at anticipating these kind of downsides? Because as I think about that, you've just given some examples where like the car guys could have thought of this, the sound guys could have thought of this, people, of course. I guess there's ways to kind of try to do a good job at that because...

I think a pessimist could say we'll never be able to think of all the bad ways a new technology could be used. So, really good point. But what we're trying to do in our class is to give the students the tools to start thinking about this early. You might not be able to consider everything, but you're going to consider a lot more than if you never thought about it. In fact,

one of the interesting things is that every week when we bring a different, we have a different technology like mining asteroids or flying taxis or bringing extinct animals back to life or virtual reality dating. We bring in experts in that domain to talk to the students and remarkably,

sometimes they're surprised by the potential negative consequences that the students bring up because they were so positive, so sanguine, so excited about this that they didn't spend the time thinking about the negative impact. That's great. And that goes right back to your first points about the importance of the team and not just a single founder type. Exactly. Exactly. And there are a whole bunch of other reasons why it's important to teach these skills.

because it places the students and the, as they go into the world, with a sense of agency that they can help shape the future in a positive way by having these tools that allow them to not just imagine the future, but evaluate it before it gets developed. This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. More with Tina Seelig next.

Welcome back to the Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, and I'm speaking with Professor Tina Seelig of Stanford University about entrepreneurship. Tina is also leading a new program that trains leaders. In this segment, she will tell us that creativity is key to leaders, and it can be taught in an explicit way so that they're prepared for all the challenges that leadership positions throw at you. She will also, in the end, tell us that creativity

You actually can control how lucky you are with changes in your everyday habits.

I was wondering, what is the relationship of these ideas like creativity to the concept of training future leaders? It is a core, core skill for any leader, because think about it. Leaders are solving problems all the time, right? If you're in a leadership role, the problems roll up to you. And you need to be able, as we talked about, to frame the problem correctly, to generate really creative ideas, and then being able to, of course, implement them. So it's

In fact, you could think of leaders as, no matter what role they're in, is really needed all these entrepreneurial skills to bring their ideas to life. So absolutely, it is a core skill. And in fact, our leadership framework that we have at Knight Hennessy Scholars is very much rooted in skills around being creative and collaborative and being able to bring ideas to life, which are the same skills that we teach in our entrepreneurship program.

So let me actually ask the same question that I started off the whole discussion with, which is how much of leadership can be taught versus, you know, you're born a leader. I remember some Latin, in fact, in that direction. But so are you is your program predicated on the idea that anybody can become a leader? Or do you even on the admissions process look for previous signs and

in their lives that they showed a tendency to be a leader. Yeah. So we definitely, through our application process, are looking for people who have demonstrated at least an interest, an interest and a goal of being a leader, especially a leader who is going to have a commitment to the greater good, wants to drive meaningful results.

and is really excited about being part of our very multicultural and multidisciplinary community. So we're looking for people who are visionary and curious and open-minded and empathetic and courageous. So they've already demonstrated some of these skills, but we are really trying to hone those skills

as well as teaching them very tactical tools around problem solving, around collaboration, around being decisive, about being action oriented, teaching these very specific skills that are going to allow them to really take their goals of being a leader and then give them the skills to make them do it much more effectively.

Yeah, so that sounds great. And let me ask, I would guess that there are issues in stereotypes. So like, as you know, there are stereotypes that have permeated the culture, like leaders tend to be men. So there's gender biases, there's underrepresented minority biases. Do you find yourself grappling with those issues that somebody might not look like what

traditional leaders have looked like previously. And in fact, they may have like imposter syndrome and not believe that they're cut out to be a leader. Is that a dynamic that you have to confront in training future leaders? Well, one of the things we do is we craft a very, very, very diverse cohort of students.

And so they come from all over the world. They come from all different disciplines. They look and sound totally different. And so as soon as they walk in the room, they get to see that leadership is an entire rainbow. And they get to work on projects together. One of the things that I'm most excited about is we, at the beginning of the year, they pitch ideas of projects I want to start. And there are things...

tackling all different topics from prison reform to homelessness to food insecurity and teams, these multidisciplinary teams come together around these problems and they start seeing how the skills and the backgrounds from these different folks contribute to addressing these very complex problems. So I...

feel is one of the things that we are doing very, very well is demonstrating and they get to see it in real life every single day that leadership comes in all different flavors. Right. And that will be, that will have great repercussions as then people see role models of leaders that look and sound and have a similar background as to their own and that just increases confidence and participation in all of society basically. So that sounds incredibly important. Well, yeah. They get a chance again to work on

things of all different sizes so they can build their confidence in their leadership skills as they go through the process. In the last few minutes, I didn't want to miss the opportunity to ask you about your TED Talk, which I think was called something like How to Be Lucky. And so, again, that is a

funny thing to even read because we think that lucky is not something that you can control but obviously that title gives somebody the idea that maybe I can be an engineer of my own luckiness so can you give me a thumbnail about what's that all about? It ties back even to our initial discussion about risk because the talk is about the tiny risks you can take to increase your luck now one thing just like we parsed

the innovation and entrepreneurship and creativity and sort of looked at how they're different. Luck is also the same way. People tend to conflate the terms fortune, chance, and luck. And they're actually quite different. I'm going to love this. So you're going to give me three relative definitions. Exactly. So fortune is things that happen to you. Like I'm fortunate to be born into my family or fortunate to be born in a particular place and time. Chance is something that's out of your control. It's like you're fortunate.

Chance, you need to take a chance. I need to buy that lottery ticket. I need to apply for that job. I need to do something. I need to roll the dice because there's no way that something's going to happen unless I take that chance. But luck has much more agency.

I deeply believe we make our own luck. Now, it doesn't mean that it's definitely going to happen, but we put a lot, there's a lot more effort that we can put in to creating our luck for ourselves. And so I am sort of a master of thinking about all the things we can do to make ourselves lucky. And it's a little tiny things. One of my favorite concepts is that if you are one to 1% better every day,

Like 1% better every single day. Which is a modest improvement. Tiny. Like what's a 1%? Like sending one thank you note. You know, running around the block once. Meeting one new person. Right? Saying hello to someone on the train. Right.

Each of these little things gets compounded over time. So the concept is if you do the same thing every single day, that's 1.0. And 1.0 times 1.0 times 1.0 times 1.0, what do you end up at the end of the year? 1.0. 1.0. If you do 1% better, 1.01. So if you'd multiply that times 365, you know what you get? I do not actually know what I would get. You get 38. So you go from 1 to 38. Yeah.

If you do 1% better with the compounding. And it's really, I have so many personal examples of this, right? You talk to someone and you meet someone and then you follow up.

up or you send a thank you note and something happens and all of a sudden these opportunities blossom that someone else on the outside says, oh my God, you are so lucky. It's like, yeah, but you have to look behind the scenes of all the things they did to make themselves lucky. So that is a, okay, I'm going to just dwell on this for a moment because I think what you just told us is pretty, me, is pretty profound. So, so

Fortune and chance, you know, maybe. Fortune cannot engineer that at all. Chance is kind of involved with the luck because it has to do with going ahead and doing something. But you believe that lucky is the outcome of actually a bunch of micro decisions that you make in your life every day.

And I find that extremely empowering because everybody is making decisions all day. And no matter where you're starting out today, your advice is implying that I can start making small improvements today and that after a certain number of days, I'm going to find myself in a different position. Exactly. And I...

very observant of this. I watch people who were in my world, you know, people who work with me, my family, and you can see that moment where they either took that, like did that one little thing or they didn't. And you can see the person who sent the thank you note, the person who said hello to someone, the person who, you know, put one little bit of more effort into what they were doing and how that ends up amplifying, amplifying, amplifying

that they have. I love it. I love it. A saying that my father used to always say, which I'm going to have to now reevaluate, is he said, remember, it's always better to be lucky than good. But actually, they might be synonyms. Well, my father

always used to say the harder I work, the luckier I get. Right. And I think, you know, that hard work has to be defined very broadly in this case. It's not just work as in like doing more homework. The more effort you put in, the luckier you are. Thanks to Tina Seelig. That was the future of entrepreneurship.

Thank you for listening to the episode. Don't forget, we have a lot of episodes in the back catalog and you can spend days and days and days listening to old episodes of The Future of Everything on a wide variety of topics. If you're enjoying the show or if it's helped you, please consider rating and reviewing it. We would love to get a 5.0 if we deserve it. These reviews and ratings make a huge difference in allowing the search engines to spread the news about the future of everything.

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