Jerry Gustafson
Who lit the fire in your life?
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 247: Jerry Gustafson
Here’s a question. Who lit the fire in your life?
I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I’m asked to help their leaders discover what they’re capable of and then to maximize their impact.
Welcome to the intersection of strategy and humanity.
This week’s guest is Dr. Jerry Gustafson. He’s Professor Emeritus of Economics at Beloit College and the Founder of the Center for Entrepreneurship in Liberal Education at Beloit, known as CELEB.
Jerry was also my faculty advisor when I was an undergrad, and the person who, without question, lit the fire in my life.
“What you really would like to do as you're getting people to try to think about themselves and what they want to do, is to start thinking about, what is it that really makes life great? Simple. What do I really enjoy? Lots and lots of young people have not been permitted to think about that.”
CELEB is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. The difference that it has made in the lives of the students that have passed through its doors and benefited from its physical and emotional infrastructure is enormous.
Beloit is a small Midwestern college with a very big heart, just like the town after which it’s named. I wound up there on the back of an edict from my father, after my repeated academic disinterest produced a string of exam results that no British university would accept. For a man who valued academic achievement, my intellectual failings were disappointing to my father.
I use the word ‘disappointing’ in the British sense. The American translation came with an ultimatum. Go to Beloit or get a job. Luckily for me, Beloit fit like a glove. Even luckier, it brought Jerry Gustafson into my life.
I’ve always said that by the time I graduated, Beloit had taught me two things. First, that in the grand scheme of life, I knew nothing. And second, how to find the answers to almost anything. I can think of no more valuable foundations.
But there was a third lesson that I received from Beloit that I hadn’t fully appreciated until years after I graduated. The details of the story you’ll hear in my conversation with Jerry. But the headline is that there is no greater gift than having someone who sees what you’re capable of before you do.
For me, Jerry was that person. He lit a fire in me that I’m happy to say burns fiercely today.
Helping people doesn’t always happen in real time. Sometimes the embers that you stoke don’t fully ignite until later. But don’t let that stop you.
Light fires wherever and whenever you can. If you see greatness in someone, tell them. The chances are, they haven’t yet seen in themselves what you have.
And above all, as Jerry suggests, help them to start thinking, about what it is that for them, makes life really great.
Be their fire starter.
It’s the best job there is.
Here’s Jerry Gustafson.
Charles (03:21):
Jerry, welcome to Fearless. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a privilege for me.
Jerry Gustafson (03:27):
It's so wonderful to have you here, Charles.
Charles (03:30):
Let me ask you the question I ask all my guests to start with. When did creativity first show up in your life?
Jerry Gustafson (03:37):
You know, that's kind of hard maybe. but I guess I would say, that when I was in my early years in high school, I fell in love with jazz. And it didn't take long before I found out that this unusual thing that jazz musicians did that nobody else seemed to do, was they improvised. And I used to think a lot about how people could learn how on earth to make sounds that fit with all the chords and that sort of thing. And especially how so many artists could sound so differently. It's all about creativity. And somehow or another, they had the impulse to do this thing that seemed to me very difficult for them to do. And it wasn't anything that a lot of people really cared that much about. But they had something that they wanted to say, and they wanted to say it in a language that nobody else was using. I guess in a way, I was kind of overcome by that sort of concept. I'm not so sure whether I really thought of it in terms of, you know, creativity, because at the time it seemed so specific to me. But yeah, doing things differently, very promptly came to be something that I really appreciated, at least in those areas where I could understand it.
Charles (05:22):
How did you express yourself growing up?
Jerry Gustafson (05:26):
I tried to play the saxophone, without a great deal of success. But on the other hand, I also enjoyed school. I enjoyed English classes, writing, did a lot of that. My best expressions probably during my growing up years were when we finally got to high school, and then you had cars, and having a car meant that you could go out with friends and sit someplace and just talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. I did a lot of self-expression (laughs) in that sort of mode. And also, so did my friends, some of whom have stuck around. We still occasionally have contact with each other. Now it's all through email. Today, I express myself through email (laughs).
Charles (06:23):
When did you know you wanted to teach?
Jerry Gustafson (06:26):
I pretty much decided that when I was in high school. I had an older brother, and he was a great guy, very successful, still is. And so, naturally, I thought that I was supposed to do everything that he had done four, five years earlier. And, he decided he wanted to be a teacher. And, as a matter of fact, he went to Beloit. And when he got his first teaching job out of Beloit, it was at the high school in Rockford, where I was. So he was in the math department while I was a senior then. And, he was having a great time teaching, doing all kinds of great things. Coached a bunch of us students into having a jazz club that we called the Knights of the Turntable. He should have branded that somehow or another. So, thinking I was gonna be a teacher was kind of a logical thing.
Charles (07:34):
And what was it about that, that drew you to it? What difference did you want to make as a teacher?
Jerry Gustafson (07:41):
I didn't really think in terms of wanting to make a difference. I thought that I could be a better teacher than some of my teachers. I wanted to make a difference that way. But, I hadn't thought all that much about making a difference. In so far as that was concerned, that would sort of get me more into the direction of politics. And the early fifties were like now, not a good time to be interested in politics. A lot of things going on due to a senator from Wisconsin, as a matter of fact. No, I didn't really think in terms of making a difference until I got into graduate school. And then I was thinking very academically, and I had some areas in economics that I thought were under explored and that needed to be dealt with. And I thought that great difference might be able to be brought about by the way people thought about things, if these steps forward in economics were suddenly made. Okay, so I wrote a doctoral dissertation about that, thinking that I wanted to make a difference maybe even in the discipline of economics. But that didn't work out. And so I came to a liberal arts college instead.
Charles (09:15):
Do you think about making a difference now as you look back? Are you conscious of that?
Jerry Gustafson (09:19):
Well, everybody has times when they think about what they could have possibly done instead of what they did do. And I suppose I kind of think about those kinds of issues sometimes, but not often. And I never really thought too much about making a difference, per se. Which is not to say that I don't think that I did make a difference, of a probably very minor sort. But nevertheless, you know, here I was, this was my world. And I used to even think, you know, my world might be kind of small. But it's very interesting. And as long as I can keep doing things that are of interest to me, I ought to feel very happy about that. And so that's kind of what I did. I mean, you remember the old underclass common course?
Charles (10:29)
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jerry Gustafson (10:30):
That was the bane of existence for a lot of college faculty, actually coming in to teach freshmen, non-disciplinary course, where they were actually learning mostly about writing and communicating and great books and that kind of stuff. I love that.
Charles (10:51):
As you look back at your teaching career, what have you learned about what makes somebody a good teacher? What does good teaching require?
Jerry Gustafson (10:59):
As much as anything else, it requires a fondness for students and a drive, even, to try to promote them. If you have a student and they know that you are motivated by the prospect of their learning, and profiting from what they learn, and that you're really willing to be helpful about it, then they tend to respond, I think, by trying harder. And that's what they need, more than anything else, is to have somebody encourage them to try harder, try harder. Identify what you really want to do as best as you're able now, and then think about the resources that you need in order to pull it off and to get there. And, you know, if you can get to a student and fire them up about what their prospects might be, they respond. And that wound up having a lot to do with my surprise of becoming an entrepreneurship teacher.
Charles (12:18):
We're sitting in CELEB, 20 years after you started it, 20 plus years since you conceived it. You started teaching entrepreneurialship in 1984, the year after I left. But I could already see the sort of beginnings of that from my perspective, as I look back. What was it about entrepreneurship that drew you to wanting to focus so heavily on that?
Jerry Gustafson (12:41):
(laughs) It was money. The Coleman Foundation gave Beloit College a million dollars to endow a chair for somebody in entrepreneurship. It turned out to be an accidental sort of thing, that I wound up having to take the chair myself. Roger Hall and I had gone down to visit the Foundation. They had met me. I had explained what I was doing, and the one course that I had tried to teach, which was called Entrepreneurship and Liberal Education, because I thought I knew more about that than starting a business. Anyway, we approached them together, and it was only about two weeks later that he came back in his office, and walked toward me with his hand out and said, “Congratulations, you've got your chair.”
The Coleman Foundation had four other chairs that were endowed, and we met as a group at least once a year, usually twice. And we met with the Chairman of the Foundation, whose name was John Hughes, great fellow, non-high school graduate, President actually, of the Fannie Mae Candies company. He was a fabulous entrepreneur. And so we would get together and talk. And so I listened and asked questions and learned. And I began to appreciate the nature of this field, which at the bottom line, is all focused on action. Not thinking, not academic daydreaming, which is certainly good in its own stead.
But it began to occur to me that people really need a few pointers in how to become successful at action, as well as the other things that you learn in school. Okay, and about the same time as that was going on, had another friend, classmate, actually, from Beloit, who had contacts with people who were interested in entrepreneurship education at Harvard, where he was actually teaching a course himself, but also at Babson College. So I'm connected to the entrepreneurship community in Boston, which was very significant, as well as in Chicago with The Coleman Foundation. I got a very rapid education, very quickly, and learned to appreciate this field, which worked so hard on the notion of organizational and social and individual achievement. Yeah, I'm beginning to get all excited as I think about it (laughs).
Charles (16:03):
I mean, entrepreneurialism is, in many ways, the ultimate personal creative expression, right? I mean, it requires you to be an original thinker. It requires you to discover things about yourself that you didn't know you could do. The challenges are numerous. And, from building my own business, Chris and I, we've said to ourselves frequently, if we had known all the things we were going to have to solve for we would never have tried, because it would've been impossible to imagine we could do that. But nevertheless, you find out things about yourself that are extraordinary.
Jerry Gustafson (16:30):
That's absolutely true. And, another introduction to entrepreneurship for me, actually, was I had read pretty deeply in student development. And student development is all about exactly what you're speaking of. You know, how you decide which mountains you want to try to climb and what you're going to do about it, when you made that decision. People talk about things like, what really brings about self-fulfillment? Yeah. And here's entrepreneurship. And that's why I began to realize the deep connection there is between entrepreneurship and the arts. They're in the same business. Creating something from nothing. And so, the group of Coleman chairs, we were starting to discuss new ventures that we might want to get into as a group.
And there were three of us who got excited about entrepreneurship in the arts. Very, very few people were thinking about that when we were starting, and it sort of caught on pretty rapidly. But anyway, that's when I started thinking, you know, music is obviously not only an art form, it's a business. There are things that you have to know about business if you really want to be successful in your career in music. Well, for that matter, so is art. And so when we were going to start working on developing an entrepreneurship center here, I started thinking that it would really make a lot of sense to have an entrepreneurship center that really had a focus on trying to bring in the art students and so on, lead them to believe that it was possible for them to have careers in the areas that they loved.
Charles (18:54):
So, if entrepreneurship is about unlocking creativity, and teaching is about unlocking the potential of people, I mean, I know personally you did that, you did that for me.
Jerry Gustafson (19:03):
That's a great compliment.
Charles (19:06):
And sincere and true. I think that what you've done over the last 50 years that I've known you, has been remarkable in the fact that you are essentially a leader of entrepreneurs. You are giving people the ability to unlock their own potential. And you are a leader in that field. And I'm interested in knowing, what have you learned about how best to do that? I mean, I understand you found it necessary to have a physical location that makes complete sense to me. That creates a physical focus. There is, there are financial implications. You have to figure out a way to fund it. You're at a small town in the middle of, when I first landed in America, it seemed like the middle of nowhere. So you have to deal with the politics, you have to deal with the financial dynamics, you have to deal with the physical dynamics. But at the heart of all of that, is the human connection that you create. What have you learned about that, that is important? What works to help people unlock their own potential?
Jerry Gustafson (20:05):
When college students arrive at college, I'd say the vast majority of students, not ever had it occur to them that they are able to make their minds up about what they really want to do. They've never been given permission to do that, amazingly. I mean, you know, parents and their other teachers and so on would find that this was, rather hard to believe. But if you can counter that students pretty routinely who are just entering, you know, college freshmen, they've always thought that what they're supposed to think about is at some higher level than what they really are aiming for.
There are ways to give people permission to really think about what they like to do, what they enjoy. What you really would like to do is, you're getting people to try to think about themselves and what they want to do, is to start thinking about, what is it that really makes life great? Simple. What do I really enjoy? Lots and lots of young people have not been permitted to think about that. They've been told that they should be thinking about being a lawyer, an accountant, or Lord knows now these days, got to think about what job they want after graduation. You know, that's not the way things work. The typical Beloit college alum comes back and they've been involved in three or four different careers or more, and almost everything that has happened to them has been happening in terms of their reaction to accidents. So anyway, give students permission to think about what they really want to do, and try to teach them something about how to do, as well as how to think.
And it really can be done. There is a process of doing. You think of goals, you try to specify what they are. You think about what you need, in terms of resources, in order to bring them about. You want to know what people are there who can help you bring them about, how do you attract them and so on. And you think about getting together some sort of a plan where you can get things organized. It's the entrepreneurial process. Okay, and so it just falls to reason, then, that the way in which you get students the permission to think about what they really want to do in their own lives, is to try to prepare them better to do, and to urge them to find some things that they want to do. That's really what this place is all about.
Charles (23:29):
Can I offer one other observation?
Jerry Gustafson (23:30):
Yeah, sure.
Charles (23:31):
So, all of that I experienced from you, all of that. The other thing that I, as I think back now, that you did for me that I don't know that anybody else had ever done until that point, was you trusted me. I remember coming to you in my junior year, this was really a moment in my life as I've looked back on it. I came to you in my junior year, you’re my faculty advisor. And part of one of my requirements for my Econ Management degree was Business Math and Statistics. And I came to you just before midterm, and I said, “Jerry, I'm flunking this course, and there's not any doubt that I'm going to flunk this course. I'm absolutely going to flunk it, and if I flunk it, I can't graduate. Help.”
And you said to me, “Okay, I'll let you out, but you have to take two computer science courses to make up for it.” And this was at a point where, like a lot of institutions around the world, we had terminals scattered around the campus and one mainframe that would kind of clunk its way around to each terminal. And you were praying that the power didn't go out before it next came back to you to save the work that you'd done. But we also had little tiny desktop computers where we learned how to program in basic and cobalt. And what I've always said to people was, that taught me how computers think, which is not at all, they're remarkably stupid machines that have incredibly intelligent outputs. And that helped me when I got into the real world, to really launch myself forward in ways that other people just really were completely amazed by, oh, he understands how to use this and that. So you trusted me. You gave me the confidence to say, “Okay, you're not following the rules over here. I'll create a different set of rules, which I think are going to be better suited to who you are.” Is that a fair observation, that trust is implicit?
Jerry Gustafson (25:16):
Oh, yes. Okay. I am, my heart is flipping, about this story. You learned how, you learned your first computer on a Commodore business machine.
Charles (25:32):
That’s exactly right.
Jerry Gustafson (25:33):
Yeah. That is, okay, you are, you know, in a small minority (laughs), and that was not a bad way to start. And as a matter of fact, I'm sure that that did you more good now, even in retrospect. So I know that my trust was definitely worthy. Well, from my standpoint, I think, how fortunate I was to be in a place where I could trust the administration of the college to let me make decisions like that. I mean, it's fully the college's mission to try to help students become all that they can become. And it doesn't do that when you take a student who's generally suffering from some kind of a course that you think that they really ought to have. I mean, you know, it's the only sensible thing to adjust. Now I will say Charles, that there were people, in positions somewhat like your own, that I may have trusted, and it didn't work out so well (laughs). But nevertheless, yeah. You have to make up a lot of things in life as you go along, right? Yeah.
Charles (27:08):
As you look at the state of entrepreneurialism today, what do you see the key criteria for people who are successful? How are they showing up? What is it they need to bring?
Jerry Gustafson (27:20):
Okay. Well, I've read a lot about this, and I think that the answer to the question is, fairly, nobody really knows.
People have different characteristics, different aspects. A lot of them come into play. Sometimes maybe it's one thing, sometimes it's another. I do admit, though, that over the years, I have played a lot of stock in The Achievement Motive, you know, David McClelland and all that. If people really do think of themselves in terms of their attitude to what they have proven to themselves that they can do, well, they're talking about achievement motive. And if, dammit, you're going to get this thing done, that I think is a major factor. On the other hand, it is true, too, that it's possible to press too far into things, to be too focused on doing that thing that you set out to do, you know, come hell or high water, when the best thing is to pivot or maybe drop what you're doing and pursue something else. I would put that forward as the least explored and most important question in entrepreneurship theory now. When do you really pivot, rather than to follow this deep urge that everyone else is so impressed by?
Charles (29:03):
What do you see as being critical to successful leadership?
Jerry Gustafson (29:08):
I think that leadership depends very, very heavily on the care and love and trust in which you hold those people that you're trying to lead. That doesn't mean that a general who loves his troops necessarily has to, you know, be all soppy about it. But fundamentally, you have to appreciate what people are doing for you, and you must show it. It's not hard to say thank you.
I was just having a back and forth with somebody about who actually had this line. I thought it was Eisenhower, but it turns out it was Truman who said, “There's no end to what you can accomplish, providing you give the other people the credit.” I think that is really a truism. Leaders who do that, I think that's great.
Charles (30:17):
As you look at your own leadership, of CELEB, of the entrepreneurial capability of the Beloit [inaudible'], as how do you define your own leadership?
Jerry Gustafson (30:29):
I think that you ought to ask other people that question, not me. I don't know. For some people, I think that I've exercised good leadership, for others, maybe not. But, if I have been successful, I guess, one of the things should be that people don't think of me in those kinds of terms at all. Here are some results. They're maybe good. If so, that's great, but otherwise, who cares? I know that's the way the college administration has felt about it (laughs).
Charles (31:11):
And as you look at the future, what are you afraid of?
Jerry Gustafson (31:15):
I really can't think of anything that I would admit to being afraid of. I'm 82 years old. I already have triumphed over almost any fear that somebody could imagine, which leads me to think that the future maybe does not bode well (laughs) if things balance out over time. But, no, otherwise.
Charles (31:48):
What are you proudest of?
Jerry Gustafson (31:52):
My wife and family. And I say that not only because she's sitting here (laughs), although that may be a factor. (laughs) No, yeah, I'm satisfied. Maybe I could say I'm proud with basically the way my life has gone. I've had a lot of help.
Charles (32:33):
I really want to thank you for joining me today, and inviting me up here to talk to you. I asked you earlier whether you were conscious of the impact you've had, and inevitably you are humble about that answer. I would like to say on behalf of the thousands of us that have benefited from you, in so many aspects of our life, you've had an enormous impact, Jerry. And I can't thank you enough for the role that you played in my life.
Jerry Gustafson (32:59):
Well, you are so welcome, of course. And that is what makes my life complete, to hear you say things like that, it's truly wonderful. I will say, that when you came here in ‘79, those were not good years for the college. 1978, financially was the worst we'd ever seen. And I was beginning to be shaken a bit from my academic perch, and wondering what we should be doing about things. And we wound up having talks about business and advertising, and how you got here and where your family was coming from. And then, that was followed by visits down to your then pretty new business in Chicago. And you came here to visit, and Chris came with you and we took students down to visit you. You just couldn't imagine how much influence you had in terms of this place getting going. So, it very much cuts both ways. But it's lovely to hear you say those nice things.
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