Jack Brittain, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Anne Peterson, 2 November 2011

Transcript (72, 53 pages) of an interview by Anne Peterson with University of Utah business professor and former dean Jack Brittain on 2 November, 2011 and 13 January 2012. Part of the University Oral History Project, Everett Cooley Collection tape numbers U-3095 and U-3122

Jack Brittain (b. 1953) was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado and was raised in California. He discusses his early family life and his family´s educational background. He talks about going to school in San Jose, the teachers that were critical to his development, and his passion for math and science. He describes his involvement with the Junior Achievement program. After high school he went to Berkeley where he graduated with a triple major in operations research, quantitative analysis and business management. Jack talks about the different jobs he had while attending Berkeley, and his involvement with the social and political trends at Berkeley. After graduating he went on to study for an MBA at Berkeley where he eventually earned his doctorate. Jack describes the business environment in California and the rise of Silicon Valley. Jack has worked at the University of Texas at Austin and in Arizona and Dallas before being hired as dean of the business school at the University of Utah. Jack talks about the opportunities and challenges he faced in his new position. He describes his involvement with the university venture fund in 2005 and with the Lassonde New Venture Development Center. In his second interview, Jack talks about the process of hiring new business teachers at the University of Utah. He describes the business school´s involvement with information systems studies. Jack discusses his involvement with the Christensen Center. He talks about his push for an engaged student movement. He discusses his fundraising efforts and his relationships with donors. Jack talks about his administration and the people he worked with at the University of Utah that were integral to his projects. Jack later worked half-time as dean and half-time as vice president for technology transfer. He talks about the process of commercializing research at the university.

JACK BRITTAIN Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview By Anne Peterson 2 November 2011 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION University Oral History Project U-3095 American West Center and Marriott Library Special Collections Department University of Utah THIS IS AN INTERVIEW WITH JACK BRITTAIN ON NOVEMBER 2, 2011. THE INTERVIEWER IS ANNE PETERSON. THIS IS THE EVERETT COOLEY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT. TAPE No. u-3095. AP: T’ll begin today by saying welcome Jack Brittain. This is for the Everett Cooley Oral History collection. I'm Anne Peterson. We’ll be talking to you today about your early life, your education, and your time as dean at the school of business. I think that will probably take all of the time that we’ve allotted today and then I’ll look forward to doing another segment with you to get caught up on your new ventures. So I'd like to you to feel comfortable being as thorough as you’d like to be, not cut your story short and be able to give insights that I might not be asking you about because you obviously know your history even better than I do. So you should be as thorough as you like. If I ask you something you’d rather not discuss, we can certainly omit that as well. I'm not purposely trying to do anything that would make you feel uncomfortable or reveal any trade secrets today. JB: Okay (laughs). AP: So let’s just start from the beginning with when and where were you born? JB: Iwasborn in 1953 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. That’s where both my parents were from. My mother was a very young mother. So she was sixteen and she had to drop out of her sophomore year of high school to have me. My mother and I lived with my grandparents for a couple of years. My father, upon discovering fatherhood, promptly joined the navy (laughs), which was, I think a good thing because my parents were both in a lot of ways still children. They had to do some growing up. So we lived with my grandparents until I was two and a half. Then I had a sister. Around that point my dad got Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 out of the navy and we kind of started family life. But, anyway, I had that oddity of extremely young parents. It’s kind of growing up beside them, a little bit of my life story. But also, my mother felt extremely deprived, actually, in having to stop her education. I think she only finished the first semester of her sophomore year of high school. So she always, from the time I can ever remember her talking about anything, always talked about “you’re going to go to college, you’re going to go to college, you’re going to go to college.” My dad was the first person in our family to get a high school education. My grandparents had all been classic American history, more farming oriented, dropped out in junior high and stuff like that. I think that’s something people oftentimes assume about your background, that if you’ve moved into academics, you must have come from an academic. But that’s actually absolutely not true in my case. AP: I'm curious whether your mother was able to go back and complete education? Or was that nothing she was interested in? JB: No, she never did that. I think late in her life, definitely she regretted it. My parents got divorced. She was almost unemployable because she had no work history whatsoever and no education. She managed to learn how to keep books, so she got a job doing that. So, yeah, she just really never had the opportunity, didn’t have the resources, the time. I was the first of five children, so she was in the baby business for a long time. Then by the time they got divorced, going back to school wasn’t an option for her either. AP: I’m sure she had many responsibilities. So at some point I gather you moved from Colorado to California? JB: Yes, we did. My dad was a tool and die maker. He learned that in the navy. So when I was very young, we moved to California looking for big money. I vaguely recall Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 he was making about $1.25 in Colorado Springs, so we moved to California to make three bucks an hour. Much to his surprise, he actually found a job for $5.00 an hour. So our standard of living hugely increased -- so much so that even as a little kid I noticed. He eventually got an opportunity to go to work in the semiconductor industry in the equipment side of it and learned how to do equipment set up and eventually was hired by National Semiconductor to supervise building and equipping their plants all over the world. So he traveled all over the world building plants. He built the plant here in Salt Lake City as well. He used to commute back and forth. But he would have long periods of absence when he’d be off in Malaysia or Brazil. He eventually took a job in Brazil and divorced my mother. That was one of the hard things in our growing up period, but anyway, he did that. He always felt very disadvantaged by not being educated, because he got into an engineering realm and he only had a high school education. But he was very much the smart blue collar person. He was always really good at math, so he was able to just figure out math on his own, which was required for a lot of stuff that he was doing. Anyway, he lived most of his life in Brazil. He married a Brazilian woman and we saw him very infrequently after he moved to Brazil. AP: Where did you attend high school and what were your high school studies like? JB: I went to Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose, California. So San Jose for me feels like my home. That’s where I grew up. That’s where I have my childhood friends. So I went to Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose, California. It was a brand new high school. That was when Silicon Valley was just starting to take off and they were building housing tracts all over the place. We lived in an older part of town, but our Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 attendance zone was Piedmont, so I went there. It was a brand new school. We had a new bunch of kids there, so it was a fun time. I had some really great dedicated teachers who were also new to that school and, I think, had a sense of ownership of the kids there. I had a very important teacher to me, a science teacher who I ended up having for three years. I had him for freshman science, I had him for biology and I had him for physiology as a senior. Mr. Wong. He was a brand new teacher right out of school. I don’t think we appreciated it at the time, but he was really not that much older than we were. We have remained friends. We’re still in touch and I’'m going to go out this Christmas holiday and meet my college roommates, who were all friends from high school. We all roomed together in college. So we’re going to meet Mr. Wong for dinner one night. He’s now retired, but he’s going to come up and see us. So just some really great teachers. I had both teachers and coaches, I think, who made a real huge difference in my life. They challenged me. I found the kind of bad kids at school attractive and I had a little bit of bad boy in me. So coaches and teachers were critical to me in my development. My football coach in junior high is a good example. I got in trouble in Spanish class one day and I was late to practice. I got in trouble in Spanish class because the girl in front of me was teasing me and I hit her on the head with a pencil, just tapped her, but my teacher made me stay after. When I told the coach that the stupid Spanish teacher made me stay after, we had a game the next day and he didn’t start me. He made me sit on the bench. I was the captain of the defense. It was quite embarrassing for me to not be starting for getting in trouble in Spanish class. It was a good thing. It made me stay...I didn’t get in trouble in Spanish class anymore (laughs), anything, all through Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 school. I really cared about those parts of my activities. So I did a lot of athletics. I played every single sport in junior high. I think it was good for me. I've liked my kids to have the sports just to keep them worn out, a little bit out of trouble with the discipline of it. So 1 did a lot of that. In high school I was very hard core science and math and was on a top academic track. I had quite good grades. When I was a junior, I was selected for a National Science Foundation program where they ship kids from all over the nation to colleges. My good fortune was to go to San Jose State. So I went for half a year to San Jose State in a special program in genetics, which was an emerging field at that time. So we had professors from Stanford. There were a couple of San Jose State people who were coordinators. Then they brought in some people from NASA, and lecturers from all over the country. So we were studying biochemistry and genetics. We would do lectures half the day and lab half of the day. So that was a really a tremendous experience. When I applied to Berkeley. I applied and was admitted in the genetics program. But simultaneously, I think for anyone of my era, what’s going on is the Vietnam War. They had the draft and we were quite worried about being drafted. I just got extremely interested at that point in time in social issues. So although I was accepted in genetics, I actually switched immediately to political science, because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I literally picked political science—this is how little I knew and how we didn’t have very good advising—I picked political science because it had the word science in it and I thought I was pretty good at science (laughs). I received a four-year full ride scholarship at Berkeley. I was a Regents Scholar. also had a state scholarship, which paid my tuition, and I had the regent scholarship that I Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 paid all my living expenses and book expenses. I was extraordinarily fortunate to get that scholarship. My family gave me a hundred dollars a month for going to school, which kind of paid for groceries and stuff. Things were cheaper then. They were supportive, but they just couldn’t financially carry the burden of it all. Anyway, I got a scholarship and changed my field. I didn’t have great advising at Berkeley either, so I just signed up for stuff that I had always taken, which was math and I took computer science and economics. I took political science. We were on a quarter system, but three didn’t see like enough to me, so I always took extra courses and I actually finished at Berkeley in three years and one quarter. So I was accelerated. Partly I had always had this sense of fearing I was going to run out of money, so I wanted to get done fast so I wouldn’t be out of money. Anyway, political science wasn’t actually a great match, but it turned out that I'd taken all the necessary prerequisites for business. I was mostly interested in operations research, more mathematical kind of sides of business. So I finished my undergraduate. I actually had a triple major in operations research, quantitative analysis and business management. I was a little bit of an overachiever, so I figured out a way to take multiple majors. But I finished fast and ended up in business a little bit happenstance, but I still intended to go to law school. I applied to the joint JD-MBA program and much to my shock, because I had a much higher LSAT test score, I didn’t actually get admitted to law school. But I got admitted to the MBA program. So I started the MBA program. So that’s a bit of a fast run through the education stuff, a sequence of how things happened, not according to plan. Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 AP: Jack, were you involved in high school with Junior Achievement? JB: I'was. Idon’t even know how I heard about it; I guess they had the flyers at the school. I went to the orientation session as a junior in high school. At that time, Junior Achievement was quite a bit different. We actually set up a joint stock company where we sold stock to our parents and relatives for a dollar a share. Then we accumulated capital and we made products and sold them door to door. Then we had a big trade fair at the end of the year at the shopping mall, Mayfair Shopping Mall, I think, or...Valley Fair Shopping Center, and we would all set up booths and then people would buy. We’d do a lot of our sales at that time of the year. So I was the president of our company. I can’t remember the name of the company. The first year I was the president, which was an elected office, all the kids elected me and we made these little picture cubes. We literally made them and we had some machinery that we did the work on and sold those and had a great year. We made a profit. I don’t know, we made a buck per share profit or something. Then I did it again my senior year and we were making these little bean bag animals that were just goofy, cute, primitive in a lot of ways, but they were actually pretty big sellers. We could sell them at our high school, kids would buy them, they were like two bucks or something. We actually filled them with rice because rice was cheaper than beans (laughs). But the same night that we had our Junior Achievement, the other company went bankrupt that same night. So our advisors thought it would be a good deal—there were like five or six kids left that still wanted to do it—so we merged with that company. Unfortunately I didn’t appreciate at the time that I was diluting my shareholders by taking on all these other shareholders. So we became known as Phoenix International—rising Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 from the ashes. I don’t know why we picked that. Anyway, we needed more labor because our beanbags were selling like crazy. At the big trade fair we sold out all our product. I think we won an award for company of the year or something. Then I had to do the annual report and write the letter to the shareholders. It wasn’t until I did the annual report that I learned the lesson of dilution of my shareholders. So we still paid a dividend, but I think we paid like a buck fifty instead of like three bucks or something. So I was quite chagrined as the CEO. I had to write the CEO letter and explain to the shareholders how we had taken on this other company. Anyway, it was really this great lesson. It clearly stuck with me. I was stung by it a little bit. But, yeah, I was involved in Junior Achievement. Then when we moved here I got an opportunity to join the Junior Achievement board. We feel like it’s a great program. They’ve changed it a lot. They don’t have the stock companies anymore. But we had some great advisors from accounting firms. It’s just, we’d get together one night a week, a bunch of high school kids and make our product and sell it. That was a significant leadership opportunity for me because I had about probably, in the second year, we had about eighteen kids who were part of the company and we had an accountant and just a great program. We had this kid, Robert Munoz, who was from a very disadvantaged background, was horrible at math, and he became our controller (laughs). But the accounting people just worked with him, worked with him, worked with him. I saw him later and he ended up going to college and becoming an accountant. Just a great transformative experience in a lot of ways for the kids that were in there. Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 East side San Jose is not considered the good part of San Jose. It’s more of the, I guess, more lower middle class—it’s not exactly horrible either. For a lot of kids, Junior Achievement experience actually gave them kind of an equivalent of a fairly responsible experience that they might not otherwise have had. So, yeah, it was definitely a part of my experience and played a little bit of the role of my interest in going into business in Berkeley. I can guarantee in 1971, business was not a very popular major at Berkeley (laughs). Anyway, that was a significant experience. AP: 1 wondered if you had considered attending any other colleges or universities. You mentioned that you had a core group of high school friends that were going onto Berkeley. What were your thoughts about your college opportunities? JB: My back up school was San Jose State because it was local. Berkeley was local for me. We had played chess tournaments up there and that’s probably something I should disclose about my high school experiences. I played on the baseball team and the tennis team. I got a bad elbow injury playing baseball, so I switched and started playing tennis. But I was also on the chess team. Our chess team, we all started playing together as freshmen and we were horrible. But in our sophomore year we won the league championship, and our junior year we won our district championship, and in our senior year we won western United States championship. We played in the national championships in New York City and came in, I think we came in fourth or fifth. We didn’t win, which was a huge disappointment; we thought we would. But the East Coast chess teams were pretty good. But we won for the whole Western United States. So it was the first airplane trip I ever took. We flew to LA to play in the Western United States Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 championships. Then the second airplane trip I ever took was to fly to New York City to play in the national championships. So we had quite an adventure with all of that. Those were the guys who were my college roommates and I’ ve stayed in touch with. Actually half the tennis team was on the chess team, so when the chess team had to go to the national championship, we had to forfeit one of our games (laughs). It was kind of a goofy high school thing. But we had a lot of fun with the chess team and for a lot of years we used to get together on an annual basis and just play once a year in team tournaments and stuff. That’s all fallen off. One of the guys who’s on the chess team—he went to Berkeley, one of my roommates—became a social worker and he was able to retire because he started early. He was able to retire probably at fifty-seven. So he has a full-time chess coaching company now. He has a whole group of kids who are eight to twelve that he coaches and then he takes them to tournaments and stuff. It just has remained a really huge passion for him. I still like to play a little bit, but I've lost my competitive drive on it, the intensity of what we used to do. But that was also something I was doing in high school. But by the time I got into college that was it. I kept playing tennis competitively. Then when I was in college all the guys who weren’t good enough to make the tennis team, the squash coach got us all together and I played on the squash team at Berkeley, which was a club team. So we would mostly play the San Francisco athletic clubs, which were mostly a lot of fifty year old guys (laughs). So we thought we were pretty damn good, actually, in squash. But I did that as one of my sidelines of things I was doing. 10 Jack Brittain AP: 2 November 2011 Jack, I'm attaining a picture of you as a high school student as being fully immersed in almost every activity possible, from athletics to the Junior Achievement, then three years with the science teacher. You think that’s an unusual sort of experience for high school students to have in order for their lives to be so fully involved with their education? JB: Well, seeing with my own kids now, the thing that’s different now is how scheduled the kids are, and how there’s a level of intensity about which we seem to do everything that maybe is dysfunctional. There was a great article in Time magazine, probably about four or five years ago; it was about the Baby Boomers. They had this line in there that said the Baby Boomers have discovered the ultimate competitive game: parenting (laughs). I reafly try to keep that in mind with my own kids. But my parents were totally uninvolved in everything I did and unaware. So when I was playing baseball, I rode my bike to baseball practice. I rode it to the games. I think my parents would, every once in a while, drop by a game. They had four other kids, is part of it. But the level of parental management was low. I rode my bike everywhere, rode it to school, even at the start of high school I think I was still riding my bike. It became suddenly quite uncool and I would rather walk at one point. But it was just, I guess, a different time. I never felt particularly stressed. Also, when baseball season was over, it was over. We didn’t play year round. We’d play and then we’re done and we’d go play tennis and then play basketball. But I think I’ve a little bit of ADD maybe, but not at a level of dysfunctionality. But I always like to do a lot of different stuff. I like, and I still like having a lot of variety of activities. It’s my core strength. There was a time in my life when I got in academics 141 2 November 2011 Jack Brittain where it’s so specialized that you feel like you’ve got to focus almost at a dysfunctional level. But then there was this breakthrough period where being a generalist mattered. Just the way the academics works, it drives you to specialization to a really extreme degree. That is not per se my personality. I was able to do that fine and still did quite a few things, but once I broke through and established my publishing career, the world actually liked generalists at that point. So that really is probably how I always was and really what I'm best at is fulfilling that generalist role, being able to have a breadth of activities. Certainly having management responsibilities where I can delegate is helpful to my personality type and how I like to work. But that was true even when I was relatively young. I was always the kid who, I got elected to be the class president. In high school I didn’t have any interest in student government, but I was constantly captains of teams and all that stuff. I didn’t ever think of myself as having a particular skill set in that area, but I guess I'm pretty good with people. What I do appreciate and hope is that I’m just trusted to be fair and evenhanded and listen to people. But, yeah, from the earliest, first ever class president election, I was the class president. I was always the class president. AP: Did you have a sense that as a scholarship student as an undergraduate, you were under more pressure to perform, to keep your grades up and your peers? JB: Oh, I was nuts crazy about it. Yeah, I was very worried about it because I wasn’t going to be going to school if I didn’t have a scholarship. So I arrived at Berkeley and high school had been easy. I think I got like one B-plus once in one quarter, otherwise I had straight A’s. Fortunately I got the B-plus early, otherwise I would have been crazy 12 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 about that as well. But my very first paper in Englishl A—I didn’t have to take bonehead; all the other guys I went to high school with all had to take bonehead English. But my very first English paper I got a C-plus. I had never seen a hook in my entire life (laughs). I was like, what is this? It really put a bit of a scare of me. I think my minimum GPA I had to keep was probably a 3.0. It wasn’t outrageous, but that was just quite of a shocker. I was used to kind of...it just came. So, anyway, I got real serious about my English class. I was taking calculus and that was easy for me. I was getting A’s in calculus and A’s in computer science and all that stuff. But that hook, I can almost blush with the experience of it at this very moment. But I always felt a lot of pressure. I did well; I was an honor student in undergrad. But I never lost that sense of being on the edge with respect to the scholarship. Because I had a scholarship I didn’t have to work during the school year, but I always worked in the summers. I would work all summer long and saved money so I could have some element of self supporting. But, yeah, I definitely felt that. That’s why I’ve always understood, I think, for the scholarship students, for an awful lot of them it is a wonderful opportunity. But I always felt it was a challenge and I’ve always had a sensitivity to that for the students who are recipients, that it does add an element of pressure if they’re kind of an achievement oriented student. AP: Where did you live as a freshman? JB: 1lived in the dorms, the old dorms, Durant Hall. I picked the one that was farthest away from campus. I figured I was really going to go way independent (laughs). I was going to go two blocks away from campus. My roommate was one of my high school friends. Then I had another high school friend who lived half a block down. He lived in 13 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 the old Methodist women’s dorms. His grandmother had been secretary there, so she got him in. They converted the dorms to private dorms. They eventually shut it down. It was one of the old theological seminaries. One of the things people don’t understand about Berkeley is what a huge seminary center it had been for a long, long time. There are a lot of those old seminaries, eventually couldn’t sustain themselves, but then became private dorms. So Dennis lived down the street. Dennis was a Japanese-American. His father was German, ethnically German, and his mother Japanee. I’ve had over the course of my life quite a few mixed race friends who are extremely close friends. I don’t know why that is. Tony Mock, who is Chinese, and his brother already had an apartment, so he moved in with his brother who was older. But they lived a block away. We got together three or four nights a week. We’d go down in the café down in the basement of the dorms, order French fries and play cards. We would play cards for hours. So that and basketball—we were gym rats. So we would go hang out and play basketball, and we played cards at night. It was a great time. But the summer work, one of the things, it was quite significant, because I just couldn’t get a summer job; it was kind of bad economic times in the early ‘70s. So I stumbled upon Manpower, which is temporary work agency. They have this industrial division. So I figured that was better than no job, so I was getting paid typically minimum wage. I think I got paid like a buck eighty-five an hour. But I figured out early on that if you call in, you’re low on the list. If you go in they’d place you right away because they’d want to get you out of the office (laughs). So I would show up before they even opened up the office every morning, get the newspaper and I would sit on the front porch 14 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 and read the newspaper. They’d come open the office. If I didn’t have work that day, whatever came in, they usually sent me out immediately. The assignments would be three days, five days, sometimes they’d be a little bit longer. But part of my interest that evolved into my research interest in business, you start to experience the variation that exists across work places. I worked in a lot of crummy environments, you know, unloaded trucks, loaded boxcars, unloaded boxcars, a lot of physical labor. At one point (laughs), we were sent to this guy’s house. In his backyard there were three of us and he had like the outline on his lawn and three shovels. He wanted us to dig a pool (laughs). He decided it would be cheaper than hiring somebody to dig it. AP: With a backhoe. JB: Yeah. And we literally had shovels. So we just started digging. About the point we got about four feet down—I mean this was days by hand—we hit the water table and it started filling up with water. We came in and at that point he realized that three guys with shovels were not going to dig him a pool, and that was kind of the end of that job. But we did all sorts of stuff. But in the course of that I experienced all sorts of management styles and worked in lots and lots of different work places. Sometimes I’d go back over and over again. I worked for this one company, Sand Spray International, which was a division of US Plywood. They glued rocks on boards, is what it was, and it was for siding on buildings. The only building I've ever seen built out of Sand Spray International product was Sand Spray International headquarters (laughs). But they were building with it somewhere because we were shipping out railcars of the stuff. So some days we’d have to unload the 15 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 rocks off the railcars, and they came in 150 pound bags and we’d stack them up. Then they had some way they’d slice them and put them in these bins. But a lot of what I would do, my most frequent job there was at the end of the line. When they were running twelve foot boards. The plywood would come in and it goes through a glue machine, which would spray glue on it. The guy that worked in the glue booth was as goofy as you could possibly be (laughs). Sprayed glue on it and then they had these hoppers which would drop rock on them. They’d drop coarse rock, medium rock, then fine rock to fill in the spaces. Then it would go through an oven that would cure the glue. Then at the end of the line they had this pneumatic lift which would pick it up and shake it and all the extra rock would roll off onto a conveyor belt and go into a bin to be used in other runs. It was only when they ran twelve foot boards—they ran eight, ten and twelve—but the twelve foot boards would be a little too heavy. I would stand at the end of the line and about every third or fourth board I would have to reach out and push it up so that it would rise. That was mind numbingly boring and all day long just standing, because it wouldn’t be every one; every once in a while. Then it would go off the end onto an automatic palletizer and then they’d band it. The forklift driver would band it and put it on the railcar. But I did that many a day and that makes you kind of want to finish college and get a different job (laughs), let me tell you. But that was a fairly non-cohesive work place. I worked in a metal distribution facility where they had large pieces of metal and cut it into smaller pieces of metal. Or they’d bring in sheet steel and some of the stuff was extraordinarily heavy. That was a real cohesive work place. They were in the middle of a union organizing drive while I was there. I was not part of the voting group, but we 16 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 would into the lunch room and they would be conspiring about the union drive and, I think, the United Steel Workers. They eventually ended up joining the United Steelworkers. It was a fairly negative work environment, which probably promoted the union. Then all the guys were convinced they would make a lot more money if they joined the union as well. So that was a kind of cohesive place where there were some really, really strong guys from picking up that steel all the time. If you crossed them they’d beat you up. It was very physically intimidating. And we were the college punks, so we did whatever they told us to do (laughs). That was probably like at two week gig, but it made a huge impression on me because of the physical nature of the dominance, but also they were talking about the union processes as well. So that was my first exposure to knowing anything about unions. I eventually studied it and the very first paper I ever published was on union mergers. I did a course seminar project on it. The professor thought it was pretty good and agreed to help me develop it. It ended up being the very first paper that I published. I had a real interest in the unionization process, unions as organizations and bureaucracies and how they worked and didn’t work. My grandfather had been an organizer for the teamsters union in Colorado and was a lifelong union member. So I heard stuff, but I got interested in it. Really, it was that Manpower experience. Anyway, I had a huge diversity of jobs. That’s eventually, when I got in graduate school, I got interested in this area called organization behavior, and it was really very much informed by that kind of work experience that I had had. 17 Jack Brittain AP: 2 November 2011 That’s a fascinating trend from those summer experiences to your future studies. I wanted to ask you if you think that in retrospect would it have benefitted the administrative career that you pursued to have attended law school? Or attained legal education, I should say? JB: Yeah, I had still intended to go to law school. So I got in the MBA program and I kind of know now after the fact that I had done absolutely nothing that they wanted you to do to get in law school, which is be involved in clinic stuff, and I just had gone through and got good grades. Also, I was young; I had graduated early. It never occurred to me that that would be any disadvantage. But also, when I got in grad school right away one of my professors recommended me to work at the Institute of Industrial Relations of Berkeley for a journal that did reporting on public sector labor relations. So I was a journalist. I was assigned to cover the implementation of the Rodda Act in California, which was brand new and for the first time giving public school teachers the ability to organize and bargain collectively. Because I was the reporter on that, I would go to Sacramento and cover the governing board meetings. Then the school districts were having votes. There was a big surge in activity. It was clear the teachers were going to go with collective bargaining, but it wasn’t clear if they were going to go with the National Education Association affiliates or the American Federation of Teacher affiliates. The Nation Education Association had historically been the professional association and the AFT was the union. The teachers thought of it that way, having collective bargaining through the professional association or joining the union. Joining the union was a pretty big move. 18 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 So that was going on. Then they were having for the very first time ever, strikes. So I was also covering the strikes. In the course of all of that I got very immersed in a lot of the legal stuff. I had taken some business law and we had read decisions, Supreme Court decisions, and I had done papers on something called the bona fide occupational qualification. So could airlines not hire men to be stewards as a bona fide occupational qualification or not? So I’d read Supreme Court level. I’d actually never read legal documents (laughs). As I started reading legal documents, I'm like, “oh, my God, this is what I'm going to be doing!” So Ilost interest in that. In retrospect, a friend said to me, the practice of law is a fixed rule system and you learn how to operate within that rule system. He looked at me and he said, “Your first impulse is to break every single rule. As soon as you know it you want to break it or you want to change it.” I think that’s absolutely true. So I would not have been a good accountant, I would not have been a good lawyer, because I tend to see how things are and I question it. I go, “Why do we do it that way?” I’'m quite willing to be persuaded it’s a good way to do it, but my first impulse is a tendency to say, “Why do we do it that way? I can think of a better way.” So being an academic turned out to be a great match for me. It was a very accidental path. T had never imagined it. But academics is all about questioning things, about seeing things differently. So it turned out to be a great match for me. I was really kind of plucked out by a professor, because I was in the MBA program, with still every intention of going to law school. Taking a corporate job or something similar had actually never much crossed my mind. 19 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 Anyway, when I was in the first year of the MBA program, I got into this job working as a journalist, which was a great experience in learning how to write and actually do production writing. So I wrote forty-nine articles in one year. Some of them were quite short, some were longer. Being edited is where I really learned to write, which has been a very important life skill. Then I started working on this union merger paper. So after I finished my first year of the MBA program, I was hired that summer to be a graduate assistant for this professor. We wrote this paper and published it. Then we started working on another paper. So I got very involved in research. Then he suggested that I consider the PhD program at Berkeley. That’s what I did. I didn’t actually ever look at another program. So I got extraordinarily lucky. I know at this point in my career, going to Berkeley was a great choice for me. It was a great university. It has a credential value. I had zero appreciation for it; no knowledge of it whatsoever. I was so out of the depth of my family experience. Getting a bachelor’s degree was unheard of. I have two sisters that went right behind me in Berkeley. They both graduated from Berkeley. One became an accountant; she got her MBA at Santa Clara. One is a nurse and then she went to UCLA for nursing school. But my youngest brother and sister, they didn’t go to college; they stopped after high school. It was partly my parents getting divorced kind of knocked them on a different life track. AP: So Berkeley has a reputation for a radical, liberalization of students. Did you have a sense of participating in or rebelling against the social political trends on campus in the early seventies? 20 Jack Brittain JB: 2 November 2011 I was probably in the extreme of liberalism at that time. I'm sure all my high school folks were absolutely stunned that I went into business. But my first year in college, we had riots; that was the last of the riots and when People’s Park was liberated. So I was living in the dorms. The students would start kind of running around and I'm sure throwing rocks and they tear gassed the dorms, which forced us all to leave the dorms. So we’d be out on the street running around. So we’d go down to my friend Dennis’ place at the Methodist women’s dorm. They had a rooftop turret, is what it was. We would go up there. We played basketball virtually everyday in People’s Park. We didn’t have the kind of deep seated resentment for the paving on People’s Park. It was where we played basketball; it was our favorite place to play basketball. Part of that riot is they tore up People’s Park and took the parking lot off—there was a small parking lot—and they tore up the basketball court (laughs). So we were up on the rooftop watching all of this transpire and probably having a slightly different attitude, because we really liked that basketball court. But we just starting going over to the gym. But that was an interesting time. We also had a big labor strike by the cafeteria workers. So we had no food service. Then there was a period of time where the students were boycotting classes—I don’t know if the students were boycotting or enjoying spring. Anyway, we would go to the professors’ houses to have class. So that was also an interesting experience. So we were kind of supporting the labor union, but we still had classes in the very uniquely Berkeley kind of way that people would do stuff. That was all swirling around. I was, I think, pretty extraordinarily liberal. I definitely had no appreciation for market mechanisms. It’s one of the great learning in my life because coming to 21 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 appreciate market mechanisms is a kind of decentralization, letting processes occur that does not come naturally to people. It can actually be also a better leadership technique in a lot of ways. But I was very much of the time that “we’ve got to regulate stuff, we’ve got to impose restrictions.” At that time, very controversially, rent control passed in Berkeley as well. Rent control hugely was supported by and benefitted students in the short term, but by the time I was a graduate student, you couldn’t get an apartment near campus because all the people in the rent control wouldn’t move. They would commute to San Francisco and keep their rent control apartment. At one point I got a girlfriend who had a rent control apartment and benefitted enormously from that (laughs), because I moved in with her. So we had very cheap rent. But I could see that, I didn’t believe it at the time, but I could later see it happen. I went to Berkeley for twelve years. So in the course of that, saw rent control implemented. I think my interest in and concern for social justice has remained, but my understanding of how you achieve it changed enormously. I think I’'m probably, I would characterize myself still as classically liberal, which is more the British economics kind of sense of liberal economics in terms of market mechanisms, but appropriate intervention and creating fair play in the rules of the game. I guess being a liberal economist these days is a little more on the conservative side. The thing that is very much self-image for me is when John Anderson ran as an independent for president. He said “My heart’s on the left and my wallet’s on the right” (laughs). There is something about starting to pay taxes that makes you probably a little more conservative. But I think I’'m probably still very socially liberal. 22 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 One of the things I've always tried to think hard about and make a difference for are marginalized individuals. One of the things I'm very proud of what we did in the business school during my time as dean is really liberalize the environment for our gaylesbian faculty and students. So we very early on embraced that. It was a frame breaker for our professional association because in our professional association they were trying to organize a gay-lesbian caucus. So University of Utah sponsored that and our annual convention party was the Utah Gay-Lesbian cocktail party. That was a huge frame breaker for people. People like go, “Utah? You're kidding me!” (laughs). It’s now become one of the biggest events at our professional association every year, the national Academy of Management meetings. AP: What’s that association? JB: It’s called the, I get confused between the campus name. At the national, it’s the GLBT, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Caucus of the Academy of Management. We also support the people of color at the National Academy also. They came a little bit after the GLBT. We had an African-American faculty member who was in leadership of that group, so we underwrote that group and got that started as well. It was almost trivial amounts of money to make those things happen. It was something I felt was the right thing to do, but it was also something to change conceptions of Utah out of the state on how people think about Utah. It, I think, was a good thing for us to do. We supported that also in the American Accounting Association. We supported their people of color—I don’t know what they called it—but it was basically the minority caucus in the American Accounting Association also. We helped found that and have supported that over the years. 23 Jack Brittain AP: 2 November 2011 So you held some fellowships in your doctoral years. Does that mean you were one of the top students in your program? JB: Yeah, I guess so (laughs). I don’t know. I guess I had the great fortune in my entire education to have scholarship support the whole time, and it came in the order of fellowships and assistantships and various kinds of things. So once I got the job as the journalist and then I was hired as a teaching assistant, or a graduate research assistant, I never had to have a job outside of the university again, which allowed me to be very focused. I was always, from the point that I started the graduate program, I was always the youngest. I guess I still think of myself as the youngest, but I'm not so young anymore. But I was always by far the youngest. There would be people in their midthirties. But I was, I think, very focused. I was very fortunate to be publishing papers as a graduate student, so by the time I got an academic appointment, I was well ahead of the curve on that. Yeah, I guess. I had a lot of opportunities coming out of school and different places that I could go. I guess also philosophically, I've always tried to pursue things in which...I like to keep doors open, I liked to have opportunities available. I guess it’s a little bit back to that, I think when you’re economically not secure from a very early age, you kind of start developing this, “what are my options?” kind of mindset. That has always been with me. So I am not ever willing to take any job or anything for granted. I like to know I have options. That would I guess be part of my graduate education. I was always trying to create options for myself. I never doubted that I would take a university position then. Just didn’t cross my mind. Berkeley was so unforgiving about that, too. You weren’t allowed to even express an interest in doing consulting or anything; they’d throw you out 24 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 of the program! So you were expected that that’s what you were going to do. So I had some publications and I had actually quite a few job interviews and took my first job at UT Austin coming out of school. I was a relatively slow graduate student. I liked it a lot. I would still be there today if they would have let me stay, probably. I think we made, as graduate assistants, I think we made 600 bucks a month. They did allow us to work full-time in the summer, so we would make full-time pay. So I had all my school expenses paid. My apartment was $300 and I had bike and somewhere along the way I sold my car because I couldn’t afford the insurance on it anymore. I was totally grooving on the Berkeley lifestyle (laughs), but I needed to get out of there. I was way too comfortable doing that. AP: So the total number of years between your MBA and your doctorate was what? JB: So[Iactually left Berkeley in...’85? I didn’t finish my PhD until *89. So I was four years ABD. Fortunately, I was publishing papers. So that worked, it actually was fine. But I did not rocket through my dissertation. It took me a while to finish it up. But I’d already published three papers out of my dissertation by the time I finally filed it. I don’t know, you kind of wish you’d done that a little bit differently, probably, but at the time, I didn’t. AP: You were making discoveries along the way. JB: Yeah. AP: So your emphasis was organizational behavior and industrial relations. Can you describe what the business environment in California was like then? JB: Well, California is pretty heavily unionized. The industrial relations was kind of this residue of the Berkeley Business School; had been a department of economics when 25 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 it first started. It had been basically the industrial labor economics group, then they kind of morphed into this organizational behavior group. We still had people in the department who were labor economists. We all had to take labor economics and industrial relations courses, but the field was clearly changing and, I don’t know, they may still have a little bit of industrial relations, but the organization behavior was kind of rising up. The business environment in California, what was very significant for me was the rise of Silicon Valley. I had grown up with that literally in my backyard. When I was a kid, California still had brasero labor; we had Mexican guest workers who would come in and pick the fruit. San Jose had 100,000 people. My school teachers all took summer jobs in the canneries, in the fruit canneries. That was kind of the primo job. When I was in junior high the primo job to have was cutting cots. So they would take the apricots and you would cut them in half by hand and take the seed out, lay them out in trays. My parents wouldn’t let me do that. I felt quite deprived by not being able to cut cots because I had some friends who were making some money cutting cots, but my parents thought it was dangerous to have a knife (laughs). They probably were right. Silicon Valley started taking off. It had existed there in some way, since 48— Hewlett Packard was there—but the semi-conductor companies themselves were really starting to take off in the mid-‘60’s. San Jose was transforming. The orchards were being ripped up and they were putting in industrial parks and vast amounts of housing. The area where I lived in became a huge housing area. So when I was in elementary school and in junior high, we walked to school through the orchard. We actually walked on an orchard road, cut through the middle of the orchard to get to school. By the time I was in high school those were just all disappearing. So there’s this big transformation and people who 26 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 were long time residents would say they saw it as quite tragic because all this very fertile farmland was being converted to industrial parks and how could that make any sense because this was the best farmland in the world. It made no sense. I'm kind of like, well, it makes no sense to me either. But then you start realizing the value in that company, the economic value in that set of activities and what’s happening to people’s standard of living as that industry becomes central in the area. California still had traditional big business. Berkeley was very close to the Haas family, which was Levi Strauss. They eventually built the Haas Business School, but the Haas family was, already when I was a student, quite involved there. So you had the Bank of America, Levi Strauss, those big kinds of traditional businesses. We still had a big Ford and General Motors manufacturing plant. A lot of the people I went to high school with, after they finished high school they went to work at the automobile plant and made tons more money and had new cars and, “What? You college guys are a bunch of idiots. Look, you don’t have a brand new Mustang or Camaro or whatever.” We’re like, “Yeah, we don’t.” That eventually went away. But semiconductors were coming in. We had a big IBM plant, a lot of IBM activity. When I was in the MBA program, IBM was the job everybody wanted. One of the guys I was in the MBA program with, he decided not to graduate and went for a third year so that he could get another interview with IBM because they didn’t pick him the prior year. I don’t think he got ever hired by IBM. He had a really bad personality (laughs), so I think he didn’t actually get IBM but it was the thing to do. IBM at that time had lifetime employment. They would train you and you’d make a lot of money. Those were considered very prestigious jobs. 2 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 I had an offer out of MBA school to go into the Ford management training program where I would rotate between different assignments and eventually become a plant manager for Ford. I decided I wasn’t really interested in that. But those were the kind of jobs that people had. Still big business, but the semiconductor stuff’s going on. I was in that environment of people in semiconductor, changing jobs constantly, which was kind of unheard of. That’s not what you did; you didn’t change jobs. But in that industry, people changed jobs. You started seeing start up companies. So I got very interested in that. That eventually became a major research stream for me: I the emergence of the industry and strategic groupings in the industry. But all facets of what that meant. That’s where I first was exposed to the notion of venture capital and these start ups and how they got going. We were studying the startups, what was happening. It was, I think in the present day environment you don’t appreciate what a huge just cultural change that was away from big corporate lifetime employment. You joined a company, you stayed there forever. So it was very important to join the right company right out of school because if you missed IBM, there was no getting into IBM and you’d have to go to National Cash Register or some other big...Corning. Ford. So that was just this kind of huge change in the conduct of business, how we thought about business. At that time people were writing articles that said why does anybody even worry about small business? All the jobs are in big business. Don’t even worry about, these are trivial, they’re just noise, they just going into business, going out of business. You’'re getting the first examination of these conglomerates aren’t actually generating shareholder value; they’re obscuring shareholder value. So you have big IT&T that’s in 28 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 hotels and telecommunications and railroads and leasing and all kinds of stuff and people started saying that’s not the best way to organize business because if you broke out the pieces you’d generate a lot more shareholder value. That’s all happening. So there is a, I think a very big rethink in business happening at that time. You’re starting to see people looking at business formation as being an important thing. Entrepreneurship and business growth. So I was fortunate to be very much on the forefront of that. The first paper we did actually was documentation of what eventually became an ecosystem. So we were not looking at big business practices; we were actually looking at the entire structure of the industry and the ecosystem and how different companies participated in different roles as technological innovators. There was a whole segment of the industry which is specialized in obsolete technologies, but there still was a demand for replacement parts. Nobody was ever looking at that kind of stuff. So we wrote this paper called...oh, what was it called? “The Community Ecology of the Semiconductor Industry.” That became a standard citation and it’s still by far my most cited paper. We were actually doing that right as I finished up the MBA program, starting the PhD program, we published that paper. So that actually made my career. It’s bizarre to think about it, but that actually was more of a MBA project, but it was because there were opportunities to just really rethink a lot of stuff that was dominant. It was considered very controversial. When I was coming out of school, I got a letter from NYU. I had applied there. They wrote me a letter that said that they would not hire an organizational ecologist—which was kind of the name of the subfield I was in now—nor would they ever hire an organizational ecologist. I'm like, wow! (laughs). But it was considered very 29 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 controversial. People saw it as almost a little bit anti-business because it was not about big business; it was about smaller enterprises and entrepreneurship. So that paper was published in ’78, I think...’77 or *78—I should know this—and was very widely cited. It’s still cited a bit, but it had its period of time of being a standard citation and everybody knew it. Or was that...no that was actually published in 1980. Yes. Sorry. That in a lot of ways kind of made my career for me. Then I had a paper that was an Academy of Management best published paper of the year with a colleague, Doug Wholey. That was another big paper for us. That was also in this area of ecosystem structure and what’s the theory of ecosystems and population. It was called organizational ecology. So those ended up being early career kind of things that mattered. And things I slaved over and thought were the most important thing I'd ever done, nobody read. AP: Those themes are very current today. So that’s a good segue to my next question, which is how successful do you think the school of business at Berkeley was in preparing business educators for the last two decades of the 20™ Century and then the turn of the 2159 JB: The thing about the PhD program is they absolutely paid zero attention to what I would argue is an extremely important part of our role, which is teaching. The approach to teaching preparation was after you passed your comprehensive exams you were qualified to teach and they gave you a bunch of undergraduates because what did undergraduates know (laughs)? So absolutely zero preparation. The assumption was you’ve taken classes so you must know how to do it. 30 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 But I think the people that I was in school with, they were just serious about stuff, not in lacking sense of humor, but they just wanted to do a good job, I guess. So they threw me into a class. One of the things that is, I think once people know me well enough they can see it, but I'm actually very introverted. So when I had to teach, class was a horrible trial for me. I was so introverted that in my undergraduate career, if a class had a class presentation, I would drop the class. I’d find a section that didn’t have to. In my MBA program, in marketing, they made us, all the marketing classes made you do a group presentation. Even that was a trial. So the first time I had to teach, I couldn’t sleep, I was throwing up. But I had my stuff and was working enormously hard at it and I could not have told you I was doing a good job. By the end of the class, the very last class day, I arranged for us to meet in the Institute of Industrial Relations where I had my office. I brought in pastries and coffee because I just felt so bad that they had had to take a class from me. It turned out that they liked it and it was pretty good. I’ve always been real serious about the teaching, but I can’t ever say that I liked it. The assumption in the field is often that if you’re good at it you must like it. Actually, when I was at the University of Texas at Dallas they asked me to participate in a teaching training program for faculty and I wrote an article—it’s been published a few places of no consequence—and they use it. The title of it is, “Why you should do a good job of teaching even if you don’t like it.” It’s about how to do a good job. It’s about, if you’re passionate about your material, how to translate that into effective teaching in the classroom. Even to this day—and I speak so much it’s insane—but even to this day I get 3l Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 butterflies before any time I give a talk. But I learned kind of early on how to channel it into enthusiasm, which I am; I’'m enthusiastic about the material. My teaching had to iterate a lot because Berkeley was a highly theoretical kind of teaching; the notion of applied was not part of our culture. I actually did assign a couple, three cases because I thought they were kind of interesting when I taught my undergrads first time. But eventually when I went to Texas, at UT Austin, they had a lot more case teaching. I came to have an appreciation for that as motivating learning and evolved into what I would kind of characterize as a, I use a lot of case materials, a lot of examples to actually motivate students to take the information in rather than try to push it through their forehead. Also I'm a behavioral scientist, so you start to appreciate these processes, human processes and how people are able to access information and incorporate it into their belief structure. That’s part of what you’re trying to do is impact people’s belief structure. So once you’ve studied cognitive biases you realize that they are a natural inclination not to take new information in, especially if it conflicts with pre-conception. So you’ve got to work through all that kind of stuff. But I eventually, I guess, became a pretty good teacher. I won multiple teaching awards and am proud of that aspect of it. It’s a hugely impactful thing, part of our careers that doesn’t get talked about very much. But I think the people I went through school with ended up being great teachers, a large number of them became deans, actually, which is interesting. One of my classmates, Bill Glick, is the dean at Rice. Then another classmate is a dean at a Turkish university. She’s Turkish-American, a woman dean of a business school. Then another colleague is the dean, she was the dean at Minnesota, just 52 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 became a dean at Michigan. Another colleague was dean at Chicago Illinois. She just became the dean at Michigan State University. We not only graduated educators, we graduated a bunch of deans, which is a slightly scary thought. AP: In 1990 you did fifty hours of training in strategic management at Chualongkorn University in Bangkok. What did that entail? And did you encounter any University of Utah economics people while there? JB: Ididnot. I only once I got here discovered that we have some folks who do that. This was, I was part of the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business, which is part of Chualongkorn. It’s a joint venture between Chualongkorn, Wharton and Northwestern Universities. The way it’s set up is it has all American faculty teaching Thais, mostly Thais; there are some American students in there as well. The faculty, the program’s all set up in six-week modules and the faculty rotate every six weeks. So I had a friend at Northwestern. They needed somebody to come and teach strategic management. That was during the Gulf War, and the person who was supposed to teach performance appraisal bailed out at the last minute. So I ended up teaching the performance appraisal course, too. It’s an executive format program, so there’s a group of students that are full time students that you meet with on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Then there was an executive group on Friday and Saturday. So it’s actually intensive teaching. But an interesting experience. I had a little studio apartment provided by Sasin, so my wife Karen went with me and we stayed in the studio apartment. The first time we were there, we didn’t have kids. Just coincidentally one of my PhD students who was Thai, had been in Thailand for Christmas holiday break and his father had died very unexpectedly of an aneurysm. So they had a hundred days of mourning as Buddhists. So 33 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 Chat and his wife were there for the mourning period, but they didn’t have anything to do. So the whole time we were there they were around and really showed us around Bangkok and different aspects, and helped educate us on Thai culture, too. Anyway, I was teaching. Very interesting on the teaching side. The Oriental approach pretty much uniformly is the empty vessel. Students are assumed to know nothing and the faculty members fill them up with knowledge. So you’re expected to lecture. I don’t think it’s the best way to learn. Also, I was teaching strategic management, which is the capstone course. You’re basically supposed to be integrating all that you’ve learned throughout the program. They’re not used to talking in class. Matter of fact, if somebody talks in class they’ll be disciplined by the other students in the class. So you have to find ways to kind of create dialogue and engagement without violating their norms. I developed a system of index cards where I would have them in the prior class, at the end of class, they would write down thoughts that they had during class and things they’d like to learn more about, then they had to put their name on it. But then I would pick cards which I thought were interesting comments. Instead of asking them to give questions, I would introduce their idea as a distinction, so they really liked the call out on that. But then we would be able to have class discussion around those set of things and I’d work the material. So I tried to find ways to work within their cultural structure that pulled it out. It went great. It worked really well. Then we ended up going back...our son was born in 91 so we couldn’t go, but then we went back in 92 and "93. Then it just got to the point I couldn’t get away for six weeks at a time. It was difficult enough as it was. I would arrange my schedule so I had a 34 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 half semester of courses. I'd be gone the first part of the semester and I’d start my PhD seminar and the PhD students would be emailing me and working on project work. Then I’d come back and we’d have an intensive period there. So the university let me do that. It was a good thing, I think for the university for me to have the international experience also. I met a lot of great people in Thailand. We enjoyed that. Our son had his first and second birthday in Bangkok, which was also quite an experience. The school threw big parties for him and stuff. So we were very well treated, had a great experience doing it. I think, for me on the teaching side, it’s significant. People look at things in fundamentally different ways and how they think about it. So for instance, as I was teaching the performance appraisal and one of the students said, “Well, the reason we don’t do this is this terminology in our language means trial, we’re putting you on trial and we’re going to fire you.” Even thinking about the notion of being appraised and rewward systems and stuff have real different meanings in a cross-cultural context. So that was a fascinating experience. When we were there in 1990, they had a coup. It was on a Saturday. We later discovered they always have coups on Saturdays because they’re bad for business, so they don’t want to disrupt the economy by having them during the week, so they have them on weekends (laughs). But I was in class and it was about two in the afternoon This voice—I didn’t even know we had a public address system—this voice comes over the public address system in Thai and I had this executive group. I think I had eighty students in there. So we stopped class. I had no idea what they’re saying and the class president, who is a Thai prince—the class presidents of Thailand are always Thai princes; they have a lot of them—he stands up and says, ‘“Professor Brittain, you must dismiss class. There’s 25 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 been a coup.” I'm just like, “A coup?” (laughs) I'm like, “Are we in danger? Are your families in danger?” He looks at me like I'm crazy and he goes, “No. Traffic’s going to be terrible!” (laughs). Everything in Bangkok’s about traffic. I'm like. “Okay, okay, I guess we’ll dismiss class.” So half the class jumped in their cars to make traffic terrible; the other half went to the campus bar to sit around and talk about the coup. So I went with the group to the campus bar. The TV station was playing John Philip Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” The Thai flag waving in the breeze. This guy who was in the class was a general in the army (laughs), grabs the remote control and he starts flipping through the television stations. They’re all playing John Philip Sousa. But there was one that had news and he zipped right by it. I go, “Wait, wait, there was one with news.” He said, “No, I'm just trying to find out how fast the TV stations will flip.” He went one cycle through and they were all playing. He goes, “It’s going to be a bloodless coup because all of the TV stations are playing John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” (laughs). So it was a bloodless coup. They had a blood coup a few years later, but they at that point in time had had something like nineteen coups in twelve years. It was a period of a lot of turbulence. The army was the stabilizing backer in the county. The generals who had organized the coup, they would crawl—your head can’t be higher than the kings; you can’t look at him—you crawl up to the king, of course, broadcast on TV and beg his forgiveness, and which he blessed them and he said he forgives them for having a coup. We’ll have another election in six months. Then on Monday it was back to business. We kept saying, “Where’s the t- 36 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 shirts?” (laughs), which they didn’t actually think was very funny. So that was part of our experience in Thailand, too. We went through a coup and we were mystified by it all. AP: Let’s talk about your first teaching position, then. Was it the University of Texas? JB: At Austin. AP: Austin. And that was in the management department. What are some of the lessons that you learned about becoming a great teacher there? JB: Well, it was my first experience, I think, at a place that was very serious about business. So the Berkeley business school was in a lot of ways, at that time, I think it’s changed some, but it was very much a social science department that studied business. So the Berkeley business school management department was very proud of having no faculty who had business degrees. So people were economists, psychologists or sociologists. We didn’t have anybody who had a business degree. They at that time were not hiring anybody who had a business degree. That changed eventually and they started hiring people with business degrees. So I went to UT Austin and they were quite serious about being a business school, being a social science department of people who studied business. That didn’t necessarily have a huge impact on me because I was teaching a pretty practically oriented class on how you use social science knowledge to be effective in leadership and management kind of stuff. There is a pretty natural affinity for applied social science work in the management/organizational behavior subject area and I was doing my research. But it was, I think, significant in that it was the first time I’d been in an environment where this kind of notion of practical skills was considered highly legitimate. So people were constantly talking about and focused on much more practice 31 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 side. I actually liked that. I liked that side of it. I liked the “what’s the implication of this?” and at that point kind of developed a lot of my framework that informed my teaching. I think it actually broadened me as a scholar and made me a better scholar to go beyond the theory and say “what’s the implication for practice?” So I was transforming my teaching to a lot more case integrated stuff. I went to a seminar in which I heard somebody actually for the very first time talking about the learning process. One of the things that she said, it’s become kind of a rule of thumb for me, is that adults have an attention span of about seven minutes. They can absorb seven minutes of abstract material, but they need to then a break and they need to have a different learning mode. I started structuring my class around five-minute lessons. Then mini-cases. I use a lot of mini-cases that are like two sentence cases that I can describe to people and then we discuss and apply, discuss and apply. That was probably the most important thing I was going to learn as a teacher is to structure material in a way that actually addressed the learning that was going on in the class, and then starting to understand that the learning process was as much about students taking hold and embracing as me forcing it through their forehead. So it had a real big impact. Then I went on to win two teaching awards out there. I taught only graduate students in Austin. I was on the, because I already had publications, I was immediately put on the graduate faculty. A lot of the faculty weren’t part of the graduate faculty and they needed more graduate faculty. That was all great. I actually loved Austin and hated UT. I was not happy there. I had come from this environment at Berkeley, we were all in an institute, all the faculty, all the graduate students were there every day. We came in the morning, have coffee, we talk about stuff. 38 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 It was a highly social environment and the sense of collaboration. I went to UT Austin and it was an empty hall place. People did not come into the office. And I had...it was huge. Also I had sixty people in the management department and there were people I never met there. I'had a very prominent famous guy named Karl Weick who was hired the same year I was. He was a senior tenured chaired professor. He had the office right across the hall from me. I met him four months later at a conference in New Orleans. I had never seen him. He, the next semester, was on duty and so he would be there one day a week. He was so famous people traveled from all over the world to meet him. So the one day a week he was there, people would just line up in the hall to talk to him for like fifteen minutes at a time. So we never saw him. I started developing a joke how I was going to develop the Karl Weick franchise and I was going to sell him to a lot of different places. They could put his name on a door somewhere. He eventually left UT and went to Ohio State. He didn’t like it at UT either, actually. We stayed friends for all those years. But there would be a lot of days when the secretaries were the only persons there. I had always been a kind of work at work person. So I felt really isolated there. I had one guy who had gone to Berkeley, Bill Glick, who I saw all the time and kind of talked to and stuff. But he had his own life. He was married and stuff. So I was single and didn’t have much in the way of colleagues. So I met some people. I got to know a whole bunch of therapists (laughs), psychotherapists, and kind of ran in that social group for a while. Anyway I just wasn’t happy there, so I got a chance to go to Arizona where I had three very good friends who were on the faculty there. So I jumped at it and went to Arizona. I really liked the environment in Arizona. The environment of Arizona was 39 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 there were a lot of assistant professors. It’s really hot there during the day so people would come to work really early, like seven in the morning. We’d all get there and we’d go over to the student union and sit on the patio and drink coffee and argue for about two hours. Then we’d march back to our offices and do our research. When I was at Arizona, they brought me in to do the mass sections, so I was teaching three to four hundred students at a time, but I only had to teach one class. So I did two fifty minute lectures a week. Then I had four TA’s who worked for me and they ran sections. So I'd do the two fifty minute lectures a week. Then we’d spend two hours with the TA’s going through the cases. They conducted case sections. So in a lot of ways, although I was carrying a lot of load, I had actually, to me, very reduced responsibilities (laughs), because the students went to the TA’s; they almost exclusively interacted with them. So I had a lot of time to work on my research. I loved that environment. The teaching, I started feeling very distant from the students. You’re doing the same material you’ve done before, same subject area, and you start feeling distant from the students. A lot of, for me, the personal satisfaction of the teaching started dissipating away. I was dealing with undergraduates. There’s all kinds of goofy ways in which they approach the world. I love undergraduates, I love them for their freshness and stuff, but at 400 at a pop, you know no one. So that in its own way was an isolating experience; collegially very satisfying, but very distant from the students. I did that and it was great and I was good at it and the department chair loved me because I was good at it because nobody else wanted to do it. Generated a lot of income for the department. Made some really great friends there. But Arizona at that time was 40 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 having a lot of budget problems. So our department of seventeen over a three year period had fourteen people leave (laughs). So my friends were all leaving. I got a chance to go to the University of Texas at Dallas. I actually had three offers: an offer at Chicago was one. I had an interesting interview at Chicago. I did my research presentation. There were a lot of things I liked about it, but I met with the associate dean and he said, “Well, we have 120 faculty in the business school. We have 116 of them are economists and you’re not” (laughs). So they offered me a job, but they had no PhD program in my area and had no intention of having a PhD program in my area. They just really saw me as kind of this workhorse teacher. I could just tell that’s what they wanted me to do. They wanted me to do executive ed; they were trying to get their exec ed going. But it’s a very prestigious school. Then I had a chaired offer at Marquette University in Milwaukee, which was very attractive and I almost took it, but it just looked like I was surrendering. To me it looked like I was surrendering to a real different environment, real different set of expectations. I had this offer from UT Dallas, which was, in retrospect, just a crazy decision. My PhD advisor, when I told him I was taking that job, started yelling at me on the phone. He said, “You’re going to the third tier. You’re going to the third tier.” He wanted me to take the Chicago job. You know, I had no idea. But UT Dallas had started as a business school in like 1980. So when I went there, it was only nine years old. UT Dallas had originally been the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies. It was actually owned by Texas Instruments and was an advanced research studies institute for faculty from all over the world. It was founded as a PhD institution only. Then by the time I went they had master’s degrees, but they had no 41 2 November 2011 Jack Brittain undergrad. Then during my time there they added undergraduate. So they built from the top down. The business school only had twenty faculty. But when they hired me they made me director of the PhD program, which is what I wanted to do. Didn’t probably have a clue what I was getting into. But also because the school was so new and so young and was hiring faculty pretty consistently, had a very young group of faculty. It was just this interesting environment to do things because nobody had ever done them before. So I was involved in creating their executive MBA program there. They didn’t have it; we created it from scratch and eventually added and helped create two more executive programs, one in project management and one in organizational change management, supported by Texas Instruments. It still remained a very important relationship. I think I had seventeen PhD students while I was there. Was very, just a great and very enriched part of my career to be involved in that. I eventually became the department chair there. Then I was going to be the associate dean there when I was hired by Utah to be the dean. So the things that I had an opportunity to do at UT Dallas, relatively early in my career were unique for my age. I became an associate professor and was just being promoted to professor, was hired here at a professor level. But I was able to do a lot of things there that I just normally wouldn’t be able to do in a lot of other places. I guess the thing about that, Chicago and Marquette, because I'd be a chaired professor in charge of the entrepreneurship program, I was in a box and I guess maybe I saw that. At UT Dallas it was like, you can do anything you want here; you’re part of creating the school. The business school has subsequently really come up in the rankings; they’re now a top-50 42 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 ranked business school. My advisor had no appreciation for how new they were and that they were kind of building. Nor did I. But I had a lot of great experiences there. In a lot of ways it was a somewhat negative place because it was highly internally competitive and people weren’t very nice to each other, but I did fine in that environment. I was able to just do things to prepare me to be hired as dean that were differentiators . At the point I was hired as dean I was forty-six, I was relatively young to be a dean at point, but it was because of the opportunities I had at UT Dallas. So I never regretted that decision. I was there for ten years. It was like every year was just another set of opportunities that opened up for me. They were, at the time I went, they were unaccredited. I got to go through the pain of, but also help them get their AACSB accreditation. So I had experience in that. So just a whole bunch of stuff that really set me up for the job at Utah. I would have not been at Utah if I would have taken another choice at, I think, in any other place and juncture in my career. I would have gotten, at UT Austin I had so many senior colleagues, I would have never been able to do anything until I was in my fifties. In Arizona, they were tanking. There was just no way to stay there. I got a fifty percent salary increase leaving there. So I almost had to leave; it was kind of no choice. My wife’s originally from Dallas. It just was a coincidence that turned out quite well for us in starting our family to have family support there. I think we had a great time there. Neither of us wants to go back there; it’s not calling our names anymore. But at that time in our lives it was a great choice for us. 43 Jack Brittain AP: 2 November 2011 I was going to ask you about the many service commitments that you had in leading the accreditation when you were there, but it’s now quite clear that you knew that you were on this track to academic leadership. JB: Yeah, it had never occurred to me to be a dean, actually, but through the accreditation I had been a department chair. I was looking at associate dean and then one of my colleagues here at Utah, Harris Sondak, is a student of one of my great friends, Margaret Neale, who I published a paper with. She actually was, the second two times I went to Bangkok, she was teaching bargaining and negotiation there. We met as graduate students. She was a UT Austin PhD; I was a Berkeley PhD, and we met at the doctoral consortium at the Academy of Management in Detroit in 1980...’82? I can’t remember the year. I met her and another great friend of mine, Tim Stearns, who was at Indiana and went to Wisconsin. He’s now a chaired professor at Cal State Fresno. But I met both of them as well as some other people or doctoral students. But they have been the two really significant professional relationships since I was a doctoral student. It was kind of funny because Maggie was going to Arizona when I was going to Austin. Then when I went to Arizona, she was going to Northwestern. She had been hired at Northwestern and we lived in her house; we rented her house from her while she was trying to sell it. But another good friend of mine from graduate school, Doug Wholey, who I published a paper with and would publish a couple more papers with, was at Arizona. Arizona had hired another good friend of mine, Gary Wagner, from graduate school. Then this guy, Greg Northcraft, who was a collaborator with Maggie, I’ve known him for a long time. So that kind of set of relationships. 44 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 Then eventually, Maggie’s student from Northwestern got hired at Utah, called me up and said, “You should take a look at this.” The only thing I knew about Utah was I’d been in the airport. I'd actually never been to Salt Lake City; Id flown through Salt Lake City. I said, “Okay, I’ll give it a look.” T was not applying for jobs at the time. I hadn’t applied for anything else. When I looked at it, I said, “This has potential.” A lot of deans jobs are really crappy jobs. You don’t have the resources, you don’t have the opportunity, you’re just kind of stuck in this losing situation. But I looked at Utah and the Eccles Endowment had become fully funded. It actually was given a few years earlier, but it wasn’t fully funded. So they were starting to actually have a set of possibilities. I could see possibilities here that were going to be very challenging, but I wasn’t stuck. So I applied for the job. I called up my buddy, I guess I emailed my friend Tim Stearns and said, “T’ve applied for this job at Utah and I’ve listed you as a reference.” I got an email back from him that said, “I’ve applied for the job at Utah and I’ve listed you as a reference” (laughs). He actually ended up being one of the three finalists, Tim was as well. I was more than glad to recommend him for the job. He would have been great at it. It came down, really, to the two of us and I ended up getting it. AP: JB: Thope he found a nice job elsewhere? Yeah, he runs the Lyles Center at Fresno State, which is very much like the Lassonde Center. They came out and benchmarked us and then they’ve been able to really create some stuff there. I think Fresno’s been a great option for him. He’s really considered one of the top people in the whole Cal State system. Fresno is an interesting environment. He’s just done a fabulous job there. He’s about ten years older than I am. 45 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 He’s also kind of at a different life place. But we’ve remained just best of friends. How long have I known the guy? I’ve known him for almost thirty years now. Yeah, it was very funny. He ended up being a finalist for the job as well. So there just were a set of possibilities here. I thought I could make it work, and swore I would never build a building. At the end of my tenure I was building a building (laughs). But it was very much poised and had an opportunity to hire just a lot of people. We can talk more about the stuff that happened. That was really, it wasn’t like I was looking to be a dean. I thought I could do it, but, yeah, the opportunity was a great opportunity at a point in time when I was willing to consider it. I think if it would have come two years later I probably would have turned it down. I would have been an associate dean. The dean that I would have been serving with is still the dean. I don’t know that I would have moved on. I probably would have stayed there. AP: JB: You got to skip that associate dean thing? Idid. And subsequently I've learned that associate dean can be an absorbing state. It’s very hard for people to move out of that into a dean position. I wasn’t thinking I wanted to be a dean, anyway. I did want to be the associate dean because I wanted to have a little more influence on kind of school level things. Anyway, I got the opportunity to be a dean and did that for ten years. It was one of the real peak periods of, I think, my entire life, is the opportunity to do that. AP: Ihate to tell you, but we’ve been talking now for two hours and I think I just brought you up to getting here. JB: Have we been at two hours? 46 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 AP: Ineed to take a break myself. So let’s do that and we’ll decide what to do next. JB: Okay. I had no idea what time it was! [interruption] AP: Okay, Jack, so you were just telling me about your candidacy and what you knew about Utah. As a candidate, what did you think could be done to set the University of Utah apart from other MBA programs both locally and nationally? JB: One of the things as I looked at the school, I made the transition to coming here is I knew we would have to be a different kind of business school. So in the midst of...it was right when I was interviewing. So the interview process was I had a phone interview. I had what they call the airport interview, where I just flew in for three hours and flew back the same day. I’'m not sure how many candidates; they usually would have about ten candidates at that point. Then I came in for a full two, two and a half days of interviews. When I came in they had prepared a bunch of material for me and included, we had the, I'm pretty sure it was Utah Business that had the list of the 100 largest Utah businesses. So just that weekend before I came in, the Dallas newspaper had published a list of the 100 largest Texas businesses. I was in an environment of working with global businesses, some of the biggest in the world. So I was doing projects with EDS, Electronic Data Systems at the time was huge; they’re still huge. Had just finished a pretty significant roll out consulting project with Nortel, which was rolling out at that time it’s new PCS technology. So I worked with the R&D group that was going to roll into and be the core of a brand new business for Nortel. 47 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 Then I had also been, from ’86 to end of ’88, *89, been the principle consultant on the global reorganization of Texas Instruments. So they did nine divestitures. At that time I was involved with them, that’s when they sold off all of their defense businesses to Raytheon and then Raytheon bought Hughes; Raytheon acquired Hughes Missile. Just a huge restructuring. Went from 77,000 employees to 25,000 employees. In addition to the divestitures, we also did thirteen acquisitions, mostly of software companies that were specialized in cell phones. They were moving very heavily into cell phone technology at the time. They were making chips, but their chips served cell phones. Just enormous. So the Texas 100, the smallest number 100 was more than a billion dollar a year sales entity. The Utah 100, we had a couple of big ones—there was Huntsman, Questar— by the time you got to the bottom ten had no sales. They were just businesses in the formation process and didn’t have sales yet. It could have been something like Myriad and NPS. They would eventually become significant enterprises, but the contrast was stunning. At that point you say, well, this is just not going to be your traditional big business business school. It’s not what the students want. They want that, some subset want that opportunity; you don’t want to foreclose that opportunity, but it’s not going to be a big corporate business school. What is it going to be about? What we have is a very strong entrepreneurial culture. We also have strong technology development at the University and the opportunity to leverage off of that and develop an entrepreneurship program. I wanted to do entrepreneurship that was high growth business. I certainly wanted to train people and help them do family owned small business—that’s a great sector and it’s been a great sector for Utah—but I really felt like the sector we could 48 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 carve out was innovative high growth entrepreneurship. It matched with my background in the semiconductor industry, how I kind of thought about where opportunities were going to come from. And I did have a sense that in Utah we had an issue, not with lack of employment but underemployment. I could see a lot of our graduates were prepared for much better positions than they were getting. That was my take. That is what I presented as a vision for the school. I had, at that time I had no idea about what eventually became my second job here, the technology ventures job, but I was looking at the Utah economy and how we could make a positive contribution through business creation and being the business school that supported that. It also was a way for us to differentiate ourselves. The business school had at that time kind of a, I would call it a half-hearted international effort, but it really had never quite achieved that and I was still very interested in the international and the international entrepreneurship, but I really wanted to put entrepreneurship much more at the center of the school. I saw that as an opportunity. The other aspect of the opportunity, because of my organizational background, is I looked at the internal demography of the school. How senior were people? One thing I could see was we were going to have a lot of retirements. Those retiring, they were great people, they’d made great contributions to the school, but that retirement, that whole wave of retirements of people who had started in the mid-60’s was also a chance to regenerate faculty in a slightly different profile and to really be able to make that strategic shift into innovation-based entrepreneurship. You also have to be able to bring in the faculty that can do that. 49 2 November 2011 Jack Brittain We were immediately having faculty retirements, a lot of them, and those became opportunities to build out the faculty. So by the time I stepped down as dean, we had about eighty-five faculty and I think I'd hired sixty of the eighty-five during my ten years. So we just brought on a lot of people, a lot of really great people, a lot of young junior people who were highly ambitious. Keeping in front of that curve in terms of having the endowed chairs and stuff for them was important. But we did that almost immediately, started looking at not only what it was going to take to build the faculty, what it is going to take to retain the faculty. Peculiarly enough we did have five and ten year plans on how that was going to look. One of the big challenges when we started having retirements is we lost the senior people who would typically take leadership positions. So we had to be very careful about keeping people on track academically. We developed this motto: we want to insulate but not isolate. So we want to insulate the junior people from carrying huge loads, but also we could provide them, and one of the things that I liked about being at UT Dallas was I did want to be involved. I did want to be a member of faculty making decisions about curricular issues. So we worked very hard at this kind of insulating from too much load, but everybody was involved. At all levels, everybody had a role to play in building out the school. I think that that turned out to be a great thing. Our junior people did want a level of involvement. They wanted to know the school cared about their long-term career, but they didn’t want to be isolated; they wanted to feel engaged. I wanted a place where people went to lunch together. So at that time the dean’s office was on the ground floor. I had my windows open at lunch time. I’d be watching the faculty going out and I could 50 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 see these groups of junior faculty all going to lunch together. That was one of my unobtrusive measures of is this working or not? that we have that kind of engaged culture. So that’s what I saw. You have to see what’s real. I thought those were real things we really could do and we did. Those were from the very beginning things that I thought were the direction. We had a lot of things that were tactical along the way. From the very beginning I could tell the part-time MBA was not working. It was just not right. We had too many students who were téking four or six years to graduate. That’s not a good program for the students. So one of the very first things with the support of some mid-career faculty, more junior faculty, we nuked the part-time MBA program and developed the professional MBA program, which is an evening program, but a full-time program. So we were making program adjustments, but we were also building out a new faculty, with a relatively large number of junior people eventually. And helped enormously by Debbie Scammon, who was the associate dean with me. She was a real critical person on the management side. Then I added a second associate dean, Martha Eining, who had been chairman of the school of accounting and she was also very critical in getting us built. We had to build out our whole IT infrastructure. There were whole sides of this that were boringly administrative but very necessary. Restructured the whole financial management structure for the school to get all that working together. But really the core opportunity was the opportunity to think differently strategically and be able to hire the right personnel-human resource mix to match up with the direction we’re going. So it had implications, for instance, in marketing, we are not a 5l Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 traditional marketing school. We don’t have advertising and brand management. What we have is new product innovation, R & D oriented. And we had people that had the ability to teach all of that, but we really were going in a direction of much more of an innovation company and what’s the marketing skill set of an innovation company. We were able to hire people who matched that. Same thing in the management side. Really people who were very good at change management, effective dynamic decision making kind of things. In finance, we are one of the few places in the country that really stuck by a corporate finance. So many places went the investment route. We have people teach investments and it’s a valuable program and we have students that go in that route. But in terms of faculty expertise, the corporate was, and how are you going to put together a growth organization, was extremely important to us. That had implications for really everything that we did. But it’s also, people who had those interests were attracted to us. They may not have been as welcome in a real traditional big corporate client kind of environment, so we were more open to those fields of study, but we were also more supportive of those kinds of fields of study. It was not immediately obvious it was a good choice. There were people that felt like we’d wandered a little way from big corporate, but it’s just the reality of the immediate environment we have. We have alumni in big corporate, but we just don’t have that local corporate headquarters, talent based, job base, and it was our best shot at really creating opportunities for our faculty and our students. I think now twelve years later we’re really in the forefront of that nationally and we’ve been able to differentiate ourselves. The innovation focus of the school has gotten stronger and people have 52 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 embraced it. But early on it was a choice we had to make and it was a choice that involved an awful lot of change in how we did things as a school. AP: That’s so interesting to hear that development because as I think about what the funders of the new building are, first of all we don’t have Fortune 500 companies. You can’t teach people how to have an old money family business and yet you have the innovators, people who move from field to field with the kind of vision that the Sorenson family has. JB: Right. AP: Really, the school, well, the school and your tech venture program are being recognized now. But there’s that period of, the latency, I suppose, that you had to develop those people and make those changes and now the effects are taking hold. JB: Yeah. Even the Eccles family, which are longtime supporters of the university and have very powerful family business culture, Spence wanted this to be a top-ranked business school. We just couldn’t try and be just like Harvard, which some of our supporters wanted, “Just be like Harvard.” At that point you’re going to be the 145 school just like Harvard. Or “be just like Wharton.” First of all, we aren’t big enough to be just like Wharton. We didn’t have the resources of those places. The only way we were going to be top-ranked is by being different than other people because our resource base was way constrained compared to what other people have. It is still, as business schools go, and I know this from being on accreditation panels, this business school is funded at about one-third of the level, forty percent, of what top business schools are funded, but we still manage to make it work. 53 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 Where we really need to build up, and Dean Randall is pursuing this, is we’'re way understaffed on the staff side; we’re very, very thin relative to top schools . We just really had to make the choice to go with faculty. That is ultimately, I feel like the core magic of education is really good faculty, really good students in a classroom. If the best you have for that classroom is sand on the floor and a chalk board, you can still have magic. We can build better classrooms, which we’ve done, and that matters. But you can’t ever lose sight of that core, here’s where the magic happens, let’s enable that, and then as we have the resources we start building on the other facets. You build better career advising and placement, which we slowly have done. The whole advising differentiation, we went with a general advising model because we really had no choice, but we’ve been able to evolve more specialized advisors and that’s very helpful both on the student recruiting placement and advising side. But those, because of our resource constraints, they had to be our second choices. The other thing that was very important we decided early on is you’ve got to give raises to the people who are here and invested in you. A lot of places—this was the problem at Arizona, is they were so constantly hiring, they were giving all the new raises to the new people. We really had to have a very conscious balance of keeping both market connected—we were never quite up to market, but we said market connected— with our faculty and also rewarding them along the way for their career progress, because ultimately it’s a lot cheaper to retain than to hire people. When I was at Arizona I saw a school that was making the mistake of hiring instead of retaining. When you lose fourteen out of seventeen faculty in a department, at the end of the day, you’ve spent a whole lot more money than you would have spent on retaining that core group of people. 54 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 Once they started going, everybody went, including every one of my friends. Doug Wholey went to Carnegie, Greg Northcraft went to Illinois, a guy name Chris Early I met there went to Minnesota. He’s now become a dean. He’s doing the dean thing. We had a guy, Shelby Stewman, who went to Carnegie. One of our colleagues went to UCLA. It was just like boom, boom, boom. People were going to good places. AP: Pardon me if this is crass asking what happens to the wizard behind the screen, but in essence do the faculty come to you at the end of the year and you say to them, “What’s it going to take to keep you here next year, professor of finance?” JB: We got market surveys and we really stayed close to what was going on with people. David Eccles School’s a relatively small school, so everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world we live in, so if they’re looking at some other position, it’s seldom a secret to us. The interesting thing is we never matched an offer; we couldn’t. A lot of times the faculty were getting way more than we could possibly pay. But what we were able to do is we almost always were able to provide some level of adjustment. They might have an offer that was for $75,000 more and we could pay $15,000 more. That’s how far off we would be sometimes. But what we were able to do is people knew we would treat them fair. One of the discussions I had with a faculty member who was literally the seventy-five and we were offering fifteen, he said, “Well, this other place, everybody’s telling me get it coming in the door because they’ll take advantage of you after you’re here. I know Utah will treat me fair long term.” So what we always tried to also do, I call it Shadow of the Future, it’s a game theory notion, but to really get people understanding and thinking about where will I be five and ten years from now and how 55 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 will they be treated. So the fairness and the fact that we had given the raises to the people who got us here, rather than the new hires, paid off on the retention side. Then we also had situations where the assignments the people had were so interesting to them that that was a retention factor. So one of the people that this came up with, he had an offer from Wharton, huge salary increase, we couldn’t even think about it. He said, “I'm wondering if I could stay involved with the university venture fund.” He was the faculty advisor to the university venture fund. I'm like, “No, you can’t (laughs). It’s a University of Utah program and we’ve got to run it with University of Utah faculty, not Wharton faculty.” He’s like, “Oh, I thought you were going to say that” (laughs). So that, coincidentally, that was actually Taylor Randall. He ended up staying at the University of Utah and then became the associate dean and was selected to be the dean of the school. But he had a point in time where he had to decide and that opportunity to do it. The things that we’ve done in the way of student enrichment are also enriching for the faculty because once you’ve been in your career and you’ve taught Intro to Finance— Taylor teaches managerial accounting—once you’ve taught that thirty five times, you keep the course current, you’re constantly updating, but it’s not the most interesting thing you’re doing in your life at that point. Something like the university venture fund is the most interesting thing you’re doing in your life. That has helped us retain people, too. We always joked about, we called it the ten percent Wasatch Front discount. But not only the building of faculty, but the retention of faculty was very critical. Then as the school was retaining good people, the finance department suddenly is getting national rankings in the top fifteen programs in the nation. Then people are 56 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 starting to say...and we were able to bring in Hank Bessimbinder from Emory. He, arguably, moved from a much more prestigious school, but into a better department and he just liked the way we treated people better. He’s been a wonderful addition to the school. So we were starting to be able to hire these presidential professors at the very most senior level with endowments, we could afford it. We still had to keep with that principle don’t give the raises to the new people. But there came a point where we started hiring real senior people instead of junior people because we were in a position to do it and we were also in a position to really start to generate a level of leadership and participation in our PhD programs that really took everything a notch up. But we built the school with junior faculty and got to the point that we could bring in very few—we don’t have a lot—but we have four presidential professors, essentially one in every department, that we were able to bring in and kind of round it up and make a big impact that way as well. But the junior people that came in the school very early deserve enormous credit for what they contributed, people like Christine Botoson in accounting, Karl Lins in finance, Gerardo Okhuysen in management, Steve Carson in marketing, were all assistant professors hires, who are now starting to move into the upper ranks and are definitely the next generation of leadership. Then Martha Eining, Cal Boardman, Debbie Scamon, they were senior people who really just stepped up to make a difference as well. Jim Schalheim and Uri Lowenstein in finance, they’re kind of the minority of the old timers, but they were people who just really made a difference and made a very positive contribution in executing this move to a much more research-oriented faculty. St Jack Brittain AP: 2 November 2011 Let’s spend some time talking about these strategic initiatives, such as the establishment of the university venture fund, because it does two things: it provides this creative source of teaching and research and engagement with the faculty, but it also engages the business community and the alumni who are contributors to these funds, so they have a reason to be engaged with the David Eccles School of Business. JB: AP: Right. So the venture fund in 2005 was an $18.3 million deal. Tell me how it got established. JB: So, one of the things that I did right when I came in as dean is regenerated my national advisory board and got, they had a core of people that were very good and we kept them but we added a lot more people. We added several people who had a VC background, smaller business, start up entrepreneurship oriented individuals. We very consciously added quite a few more women. A lot of the women we added were entrepreneurs, like Barbara Zimonja, we were attracting, because there just aren’t a lot of women in corporate positions here. So it was a good thing to add the more entrepreneurially minded people. So we started looking at, and I always worked very hard to engage the external community, if for no other reason so they understand what we’re doing and they’re buying in and supporting that, but also to give us their ideas. So the way we ran the national advisory board is we would have a planning session to create three agenda items for the year and then we’d have subcommittees that would work on the agenda items. So early on those agenda items were how do we create an entrepreneurship program? How do we revitalize our MBA program? How do we rethink and reenergize the undergraduate program? Very strategic advice. That’s really 58 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 what they wanted to do and actually found if you gave them work to do on a subcommittee they were much more engaged than if you just presented it to them. Not everyone engaged with us, but a surprisingly large number did. So the entrepreneurship, the venture fund came out of the entrepreneurship committee of the board. So it was Geoff Wooley, Kent Madsen were the leaders on that. They were both in the VC sector. They had this idea. I frankly in the beginning thought it was crazy. I said, “That’s the last thing we do, not the first thing we do.” They said, “No, you’ve got to do this first.” I'm like, “No, the venture fund’s what we do after we’ve framed the whole entrepreneurship program, then you guys start funding them.” “No, no, no, we’re going to do this at the very beginning.” My philosophy, too, is I quickly learned I had to delegate. I just couldn’t do everything. If people are passionate about it, they’ll make it work. I was getting involved in the mid to late ‘90’s in an area called appreciative inquiry, which is strength-based planning. One of the things that you go with the passion. I's actually my wife’s church did this appreciative inquiry. One of the groups wanted to do pet ministry, they wanted to involve their pets. I'm just thinking, that is just the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard (laughs). But they were committed to making it work and they did. You can’t...you’ve got to let the energy go with where people want to take it. So I really was thinking when we started thinking about this venture fund, pet ministry (laughs). I was very skeptical. But, anyway, they started working on it. The thing is, it’s kind of a classic example of what they thought they were going to do turned out to be wrong. They thought they were going to get philanthropic gifts and they were going to build this big fund with philanthropic gifts and it just wasn’t working. But they’re like, we’re going to 59 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 make this work. We did immediately start to engage and realize the students could do due diligence. That really starts to become the core of the program. The students can actually do the due diligence whether they have investment dollars or not. But it actually adds this level of intensity and engagement if we have this investment process to follow. It was really Pamela Atkinson, who had been invited to be on the BMW board, who said, “What do you know about this CRA stuff?” I said, “I don’t know anything about it. Tell me about it.” She said, ““You should look at this because this could work for the venture fund.” AP: This is the Community Reinvestment Act? JB: Yeah. Community Reinvestment Act. The people doing the venture fund actually knew nothing about it. But as we started exploring that, that ultimately was how they raised the majority of the capital to make the investment side of the program work. So they were doing due diligence for a couple of years before they ever got enough capital in. But by doing the due diligence, they built the relationships in nationally in the venture capital community to really make this fund work. The fund got a very sizeable donation from the Sorenson family. Really James Lee, Jim—people call him Jim Junior—was really instrumental in believing this, getting it started. They had part investment, they did partly a gift to underwrite the getting this going. But once the investment part of it starting going, it really started going. So the fund is now looking at a very significant round, a second fund. They’ve almost fully deployed the first fund, rather slowly, and I think prudently. But they’re looking at a much larger second fund. Because the management fee is what supports the fund operations, they’ll have a much bigger operational budget to do fund two. 60 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 Early on, this was not an idea that just went straight ahead,; it actually struggled a lot with designing what was essentially the business model for a non-profit, of how would this work. We had a lot of go-arounds, of how does this work, because we eventually settled on a non-profit that would manage a for-profit entity, which was totally out of the box. It took the IRS time to get comfortable with this notion, that we would have a non-profit managing a for-profit. But that’s how it evolved. The educational program and the management company as a non-profit, then the fund itself is a for-profit entity and makes returns to the investors. But it was really transitioning from a gift model. You look around the country, there are a whole bunch of these funds that are like $1 million funds, or $2 million funds, they’ve gone with the gift model. They just can’t get over that hump. People are willing to gift at some level, but first they’re looking at, I'm giving a gift and you’re going to make money off my gift? That’s not, per se, a natural connection people make. They much prefer, I think, to give money to support students. Really, what the Sorenson family did is gave money as part of the operational budget to support students. Then people liked the investment notion. Now they may turn that investment over and over again and just reinvest it, but that appeals to them more than giving away the funds. So that’s worked. Most of the funds nationwide are still trying to run that gift model. We are very fortunate that we have these industrial banks in Utah. It’s a unique asset we have. We’ve figured out a way to make that unique asset work in a unique way to support a unique program (laughs). But it was not a plan and march forward. It was very hard times—we 61 | 2 November 2011 Jack Brittain can’t make this work, we're running out of money, we’re not going to be able to keep doing it—<risis after crisis. I’m on the board of the venture fund and have been from day one. They let me be on because I was dean, even though I was skeptical. Then when Taylor Randall became dean, he took the dean’s seat, but they’ve always had an outside community seat, so that’s actually the seat I occupy on the venture fund board now. It’s just been a great ride. But it’s something that, in a lot of stuff we’ve done, are evolved successes; they weren’t this is what we're going to do from day one. We actually had to be responsive and run learning cycles to get to the way to make it work. AP: That fits very nicely with your professed strategy to go after these small wins, or controllable opportunities that produce visible results. JB: Right. That’s something I got from Karl Weick, who was a colleague, I said, at UT Austin. He’s the one that I didn’t meet for four months until I met him in New Orleans. But just a great thinker. He wrote this article in the American Psychologist many years ago. It’s called “Small Wins.” It’s about the logic of basically a kind of incremental learning based logic to get to a destination where you’re really not sure how the final configuration will work. You usually are guided by some sense of what you’re trying to accomplish; you do have this goal. But how to accomplish this goal’s quite fuzzy. His notion of small wins also includes the losses are small also. So if what you have are, you’re going to have failures, but you do not bet the result on it. You just simply say, “oh, that didn’t work, let’s try something else.” In a lot of ways the venture fund was like this. It was oh, that didn’t work. It took us a long time to figure out what else we could try. It wasn’t obvious there wasn’t any 62 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 other path forward. But we discovered another path forward and we went forward and it worked. If you do this, the thing is that the accumulative small wins far outstrip the losses you have. In some ways the losses fall by the wayside. I'had a job interview a few years ago and one of the questions was “describe your largest failure, describe a big failure you’ve had.” They weren’t willing to settle for “I mis-scheduled an appointment.” “Describe something really that went wrong and how you responded to it.” I was like, “I can’t think of one.” They kept saying it’s got to be this big thing. So I tried to describe to them this whole notion of, no, what we’re trying to do is have small wins, small failures. That’s the whole point. That’s how I operate. That’s how I like to do things. There’s another important work by a guy named Henry Mintzberg called “Emergent Strategy,” where again you have a notion of a goal, but it’s incremental—and this is the organizational behavior professor in me—you’re running learning cycles. The whole point of this is try things. If it doesn’t work, well, try something else. Actually, that was a real sticking point in the whole process because I couldn’t come up with a major failure. I was like, “I could tell you a million times where we failed in a little way, but it didn’t undo the program.” We had the right vision. It’s not because I got all this stuff figured out; it’s precisely because I don’t have everything figured out. I'm willing to start things, learn and let it evolve into an approximate match to what we think we’re trying to accomplish. Even the goal can be quite fuzzy and it comes into focus as you move closer to it. It is absolutely how I think about doing every large thing is with a bunch of small things that are additive and have these learning cycles. The important part, you’ve got to learn from the failures; you can’t just have them, you’ve got 63 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 to learn from them and say, “Well, what’s a different option. How do we make it work differently?” AP: Tell me about establishing the Lassonde New Venture Development Center, which was founded in 2001. Were you the first to connect the school of business to alumnus Pierre Lassonde? Both Pierre and his wife, Claudette, were connected to the school of engineering. Was it their idea? Was it your idea? Did it require persuasion on your part to have the gift come to the school of business and establish this innovative center of learning? JB: So, the school had been in touch with Pierre. Pierre got his MBA at the business school. He had an engineering background, you’re right. Claudette came here for nuclear engineering. So even coming to Utah was an unlikely thing for them. They had both been accepted at highly prestigious places, so I think it was something like she was accepted at Stanford, but he wasn’t. He was accepted at Wharton and she wasn’t. The only school that accepted both of them was Utah, so they came to Utah. I may not have that exactly right, but it’s something like that. So they came here as a young married couple. The school had been in touch with them for probably two to three years before I arrived. But Claudette had ovarian cancer and had had some successful treatment, they kind of thought she was in remission and it came back. I believe she died probably in *99 or early 2000. So I had not met him. I was aware we had the contact. So we had him, he came in, he has still very good friends here that they met. They lived in graduate student housing when they were here and their daughter was born in the University Hospital here. He has very affectionate feelings. 64 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 So we had him come into speak, was really the first time I met him. He was very interested in something that would span engineering and science and business. He kind of saw that that interface was important. He has never liked the way the university had those things so separate. He thought they should be much more integrated. As is somewhat typical in universities, the university had some buildings to build and they wanted him to fund some buildings and he had absolutely no interest in buildings whatsoever. I just sat down with him and brainstormed. I had had this idea and had actually written up a plan for an entrepreneurship program in which the students worked on faculty technology when I had the offer from Marquette University to run their entrepreneurship center. That was in 1989. I still had it in my back pocket; I'd been thinking about it. I thought about it a lot and kind of what we were doing here as well. He was talking about what he wanted to do and I said, “I have this crazy idea. How about we have the students, and we’d basically use your money, Pierre, to scholarship them, and we have them in a program in which they work on technologies from the university and write the commercialization assessment and do the business plans and see if we can’t get them involved at the earliest start up stage.” I really was thinking in my head about joining the start up when it has twelve people and build it, build the company underneath you, and you’ll have a great job. So I threw that out. We started talking about it. He really liked it. He said, “Okay, okay, what’s it going to take?” I developed a proforma practice first time around with Pierre, but I started doing it always, I'd actually develop a start up plan with pro forma 65 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 financial statements with all of these programs that we did with people. That’s how Pierre’s used to looking at stuff. I was introduced to the idea around this time, and Pierre is the epitome of this, of venture philanthropy. He was extremely interested in not just giving the money, he wanted to know what you’re going to do with it and how you’re going to sustain the program and what does the financial plan look like for it. I developed that with him. I sent that to him. We were on family vacation in Philadelphia, we were visiting my sister. We took the kids to DC and I got a phone call, “Pierre wants to meet with you.” So I flew from Philadelphia to Toronto and had dinner with him. He was still, I think, kind of reeling from the loss of his wife. He was a new widower. So I had dinner with him and we talked about this. He said to me “everything takes five years.” He agreed with me that we couldn’t plan what it was going to be, we just needed to do it and see how we were going to make it work. So he pledged—that was a $3 million gift to set that up. On the basis of that dinner we kind of did a handshake “this is what we’re going to do.” Then he gave me a ride in his Ferrari through downtown Toronto. He said, “If I go ninety miles an hour I’ll make all the lights” (laughs). Sure enough, he did (laughs). We went to his house and looked at his art collection and just had this great evening of getting to know him. He offered to let me drive his Ferrari back to the hotel. At this point I was much too afraid of his Ferrari (laughs) and I was not going to go ninety miles an hour and make all the lights. Nor did he. Anyway, flew back to Philadelphia. We cut the gift agreement the next week. Then he came in shortly thereafter. We headed up to Snowbird for a day and a half where 66 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 we just brainstormed this thing. We changed it significantly. We brought in some faculty, we brought in some of the people who were advising us on the program. Pierre was there and said, “How are we going to make this work?” We just decided to start it. Troy D’ Ambrosio I had just met. He came in kind of part-time to help with it. We did two projects, like a six-month project, neither of which worked out very well, but then we kind of started to understand where we were going. Then we went over to tech transfer, they would have nothing to do with us. They hated the whole idea. So we actually had to go find our own projects within the university. I think the second year we did three or four. So we just started growing this thing. Pierre said it would take five years; I think we kind of executed in about four. But it just took some time to get it going, but he was very patient, stayed engaged the whole time. Then came the entrepreneurship center. He was here for a visit. I was talking to him about maybe doing something on the bridge funding, kind of helping with a little more of the next step business plan with stuff. I sketched out the whole entrepreneurship center. I said “we want to create this....This is how it all relates.” This is how the Lassonde Center fits in and a critical part, but I want to build out this whole thing. I was talking to him about this little piece, like another $2 million dollars. He kept asking me about the whole thing. I looked at him and I said, “You want to do this whole thing, don’t you?” He paused for a moment and he was like, “I’m just asking about it; I’'m interested in it.” Then he said, “Yes, I want to do the whole thing. How much to do the whole thing?” I said, “$15 million.” I had a business plan in mind. He said, “Well, I’ve already given you three” (laughs). He likes to negotiate, he wants to deal, always wants to deal. 67 2 November 2011 Jack Brittain Anyway, we started talking about it. Then he was back about four months later to get an honorary doctorate from the university. That day, he brought his son in and we talked about it and what it was going to take and he had the pro forma. He knew what it was going to take to fund it, what the ramp up would look like and sketch it all out on a whiteboard, which T wish we would have saved; I don’t think we did. Handshake and we did the deal. That’s where we started broadening the program. He included in that two chairs, the Pierre Lassonde Chairs, of which he funded only one in advance and then he still, the second chair is the last thing he’ll fund. But about a year later, I’'m told, he called the president and told the president he wanted me to be the first chair holder. So it was just fabulous, a wonderful thing to happen, to be the inaugural chair holder of the Pierre Lassonde Chair. So the president announced that at one of our national advisory board meetings, kind of toward the end of my tenure as dean. So I am the Pierre Lassonde Chair. I’ve gotten quite close to him. When he remarried, like a week later, Karen and I flew over to Denver and had dinner with he and his wife. I was able to get one of the big picture memory books of the Olympics, and I was able to get Spence Eccles, Bob Garff, Mitt Romney and a whole bunch of people who were involved in bringing the Olympics to Salt Lake City to actually put personal messages in the book as a keepsake. So Pierre, he really loves that. The man can have anything he wants in the world, but he loves those very unique things and he loves history and he loves to be part of it. So part of the thing when we were talking to him about the Lassonde Center endowment, I parked at the guest house, walked over, stood in front of the commander’s house, which 68 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 was a wreck, it was just a wreck, and said, “This can be the Pierre Lassonde Entrepreneurship Center. We need to take a million dollars and put into this to restore this building.” AP: Because facilities were not his thing. JB: He does not do any. First thing he said, “I don’t do brick and mortar.” I said, “This isn’t bricks and mortar; this is history. This is going to be a flagship building on the entire campus and look at the history here.” We got him to come walk it; there were dead animals inside. It was, oh, unbelievably bad inside. But he got it. He wanted to do that. So we were able to do that and that’s where my office is now with Troy D’ Ambrosio. That’s where the student programs are. I chose to be with the student programs. I had other options and I really wanted to be with the student programs, so I chose to do that. So we’ve got this wonderful asset. As we remodeled it, we actually prepared a book of the whole history of the building, the building techniques and all that. Pierre got a copy of that as a gift. I think he really, really values that as well. So he still doesn’t like bricks and mortar and won’t pay for it, but history he’ll invest him. So we were able to bring all that. So it evolved from an involvement, but highly engaged, he’s always been highly engaged. He comes in, loves the students. I’ve seen him brought to tears by the student stories. That, for him, is the big payoff, the impacting the lives of people. So he takes great pride in it. Right after he’d done it, they did a...he’s considered one of ke most prominent mining executives in the world. One of the mining magazines did a feature story on him 69 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 and the whole first column of the story he was describing to them the Lassonde Entrepreneurship Center and stuff that he’s doing. It’s just great. I was just up in Canada. They did a profile of him in the Toronto newspaper about his philanthropy. The University of Utah was very prominent in talking about things that had the most meaning to him. So it has been just a terrific partnership and he’s going to do more. He’s looking at doing additional things. There’s other things he’d like. Right now we’re looking at the social entrepreneurship side. He’d like to build out that side of the program as well. He’s very visionary. He definitely has this investment logic, but it’s venture philanthropy. He wants to see it, and it truly is a gift, but it’s about creating something of permanence and enduring value for students. That’s always his focus. So he’s been a wonderful friend and a really great guy. AP: If you have to choose one thing about your period as dean, of which you are most proud, would the Lassonde Center be that? JB: I’'m very proud of the Lassonde Center, but it’s one aspect of, for me, what was the signature, what I wanted to create, was engaged learning. I had been experimenting with this in my own classes. So one of the things I did is I did a performance appraisal class, which could be possibly one of the world’s most boring subjects, but it actually, we made it very lively because I had the students go work for non-profits and figure out that their volunteer management typically had no performance appraisal in it. It’s a very important part of understanding the feedback-motivational linkage. I had some students do just a wonderful project for the Suicide Prevention Center in Dallas. One of the problems with the Suicide Prevention Center is they get, their volunteers get depressed, they’re talking to depressed people all the time. Part of it was 70 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 how do you keep them engaged and really how do you put in what is essentially a personnel system in a non-profit setting. They were really able to do some great stuff on job rotation and the feedback system and keeping people understanding their triumphs. I just saw that and I saw what that had done for those students that had been involved in it. It became a corporate bragging point for the corporation that had the President bragging about what this student had done as this class project (laughs). I had a lot of occasions, a lot of my executive ed stuff, I made the students do projects in their company. One of the projects I made everybody do, I made them, I asked where is the production value or moment in your company? They had to do a full day shadowing experience [unclear] in their company and what people learned from that and brought back. So I wanted to find a way in which people were getting beyond cases, beyond abstract learning and really experiencing firsthand what they were learning about and applying it. The [unclear]ship program was part of that, but our service learning, we have a bunch of programs that collaborate with non-profits. So we had the course I co-taught with Cal Boardman and Gerardo Okhuysen, where we sent students out to a non-profit consulting group. Then we developed the board fellows group out of that. Then we developed the low-income taxpayer clinic, where the accounting students were actually working with actual clients. Again, kind of getting beyond the technical, because accounting is also is a service business; it’s about working with clients. It’s a technical knowledge base, but the core skill is working with clients. Then we had the stock fund, we have the venture fund. 71 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 So the notion was to build a business school where innovation is kind of strategically the differentiator. But thematically what we’re doing across the whole school is involving students in hands on application experiences while they’re in school. Then building out their resume for their job search that has stuff they’ve done on it. We had a motto; we called it winning the interview. You win the interview when the interviewer asks you, “What is this Lassonde Center?” “What is this low-income taxpayer clinic?” because as a student at that point in time you get to describe one of our proud points. You get to describe yourself in terms of the set of accomplishments that separates you out from the pile of resumes, because everybody has good grade point averages, everybody has a prestigious school. Not everybody has actually worked directly with low-income clients and then worked out processes with the IRS. It’s a difficult thing to be engaged with. So for me, that’s the legacy. That’s what I wanted to do that was different and establish that. Lassonde Center is certainly a highlight of that. That personally has been very engaging for me. That’s where my professional career now resides. But for me, it’s the creation of that whole philosophy of how we do learning and how we differentiate our students, that’s what I wanted to do and feel very proud that we’ve accomplished it. Still more to do on it, but we revitalized the student clubs, so the student club engagement, were all pieces of that total engaged learning philosophy kind of at the core of the differentiating, the learning philosophy as well as what the school was best at. AP: Okay, Jack. We have reached the witching hour of one o’clock now. So we’ll take this up further on another day. JB: Okay. 72 Jack Brittain 2 November 2011 END OF INTERVIEW i3 JACK BRITTAIN Salt Lake City, Utah An Interview By Anne Peterson 13 January 2012 EVERETT L. COOLEY COLLECTION University Oral History Project U-3122 American West Center and J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections Department University of Utah THIS IS AN INTERVIEW WITH JACK BRITTAIN ON JANUARY 13, 2012. THE INTERVIEWER IS ANNE PETERSON. THIS IS THE UNIVERSITY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT. TAPE No. u-3122. AP: Jack Brittain, thanks for being with me again. Today we’re going to be recording the second in our series of oral histories for the Everett Cooley Oral History collection. Today is the 13" of J anuary, 2012. We are here at the Marriott Library. I'll just begin by recapping a little bit that last time we met, you were just beginning to talk about your role as dean, how you came to the David Eccles School of Business and also that you felt some good fortune in being able to make some key hiring of new faculty. So you just mentioned that, but we didn’t really talk about your key initiatives. I wanted to start with asking you to please tell me how you craft a pitch to interest someone in coming to teach business at the University of Utah. JB: One of the, I think, advantages we had in 1999 was actually having a relatively junior faculty. So it was a little bit of a disadvantage, it was very hard to staff leadership positions and roles like department chairs because we had very few senior people. But having junior faculty was a huge advantage in the level of excitement and engagement we were able to have in the school and that was very attractive to other junior faculty. We tried to, where we could get people with a little bit of a track record and maybe they had three or four years experience at another institution and looked good. Sometimes we were hiring people directly out of their PhD program. But one of the things that I had always felt as a junior faculty member and I kind of thought of this when we were recruiting people is people actually want to be engaged, at least the kind of people we wanted to have wanted to be engaged. Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 There’s this kind of common approach of isolating junior people and saying, well, you just should be working on your research. We developed this kind of mantra, we’re going to insulate you but not isolate you. In fact, what we want you to do as a junior faculty member is be insulated from heavy service demand, but we want you to be an engaged member of the faculty. So instead of bringing in junior people and having them just be locked in their office, we’d usually give them some specific committee assignment, have them engage in some program in which they taught. That actually became part of how we recruited people as well is...and I think it also meshed with a very strong faculty governance. So we had a high level faculty participation. I really worked very hard to insist everybody had to be engaged in some way. It was part of their responsibilities, it’s part of what we evaluated them on, their engagement. The department chairs were to work with everybody to have a level of engagement. [ found that when we were going to recruit faculty, the enthusiasm for their colleagues in that engagement really is getting us the people we wanted. People who wanted to be isolated, people who wanted to just make a short stop here, build up their resume and move onto some other place were not the people we wanted. We wanted people who wanted that level of engagement. So we certainly had high performance expectations on the research side. We wanted to enhance our research side, but really not at the expense of our educational program, not at the expense of having the kind of faculty we wanted. There’s subsequently been a book published, Bob Sutton, I think it’s Hire no Assholes, or something like that. It has a very provocative title. He’s at Stanford and he’s a provocative guy. But I would say that an awful lot at how we looked at how building Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 the school was really trying to from the ground up hire the kind of people that we wanted as long-term colleagues and also build an environment for them that was a long-term environment. We had a lot of success hiring women partly because we also were family friendly and the people we were trying to hire, the colleagues would say this is a family friendly environment. One of the things that I felt always was super important in just setting the tone for the school was in my own kids I put their events on my calendar and everybody knew I calendared my kid’s events because I felt I had to lead out and everybody had to know they should do that. At one point the development person, Heidi Woodbury, I knew her daughter was doing a lot of gymnastics and I had access to her calendar and I looked at it and I said, “Heidi, none of your daughter’s meets are on your calendar. How come?” So we pushed real hard to really be the type of place where people wanted to work and it’s a place where every single person, staff, faculty, felt that they owned a piece of it, that they were making a contribution above and beyond whatever their resume was. Another piece of this building the faculty is I always felt that I gave prestige to the place, the place didn’t give me prestige. One of the things that I always tried to communicate to faculty, we talked actually a lot about it, is we’re building this place. We lost probably during my term as dean, I’d say lost a couple of people to prestige because they go, well, that’s a more prestigious place and I want to go there. That’s fine. I actually think that if that’s the way people kind of approach the world, they probably should go to that place. But what we really worked on and what I think people bought into is that working hard paid off institutionally for us in the quality of program, but it also paid off individually because as we enhanced, we moved up in the rankings quite a Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 bit. We had been kind of consistently the eighties or nineties and by the time I stepped down as dean we were consistently showing up in the top fifty. That’s continued to progress. The school’s had some showings in the top twenty-five now in certain areas. But people saw that payoff and they actually saw that they had a job they loved at a place they loved and we could make it, we had control of that. I think that was a really critical part of the recruiting is we’re a little different in how we approach things. We have very strong faculty governance; it’s the place we choose it to be and we’re real careful in the type of colleagues we choose, too. We have an expectation of how they’re going to participate with us because we value this place. Utah has just a lot of benefits anyway. I think it’s a very family-friendly environment. We had really good fortune in recruiting families. We have a couple of husband and wives that we recruited to the school and it’s partly the nature of the place and the environment. So much of what people’s work life is is also what their home life is going to be. We paid attention to that. So I think that was all extremely helpful. After ten years, the faculty actually had matured a lot. In some ways the school has a very senior faculty now because all those people that we recruited and committed to the place and had great, very successful careers are here and they’re now in leadership positions and that’s a good place. But I think the next phase of the school is a little more balanced development of getting back to doing some more junior recruiting. That’s what the faculty’s already talking about now. But we’re a good place. I think we’re regarded as a very good place and we’re becoming an increasingly prestigious place as well. Jack Brittain AP: 13 January 2012 There was some departmental reorganization, the establishment of an OIS department, I think, during your deanship as well, keeping up with what trends were in business education and job market demands. Do you want to talk about that at all? JB: Well, sure. The information systems, information technology degree area is a very high demand area for graduates. We had a lot of student interest. We had developed a program within the accounting department, but it was very much influenced by being in the accounting department. A lot of the course work had an accounting focus. But students may have quite different interests. The information systems, information technology within a business school is different than computer science. Computer scientists are focusing on actually doing the programming, writing the language, the innovation in computer systems. Information systems and information technology people in the business school are innovators in the implementation of technology and deployment of technology. So they have to have a pretty strong expertise, actually, in change management, because so much of what they do is involved in making changes within the organization. So they have actually a fairly strong affinity for a lot of the management topics and the organizational behavior kind of side of it as well. So it just made sense and all around the nation there are very strong...we were hiring people out of information systems programs to fill our positions. Really, the hump we had to get over was critical mass. We didn’t have enough faculty in that area. We built that faculty within the school of accounting to get to that critical mass. Then we had to make a decision of where is the compatibility. We had a little bit of an odd mix in our management department because we had our production and operations people in Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 management. That’s actually fairly typical. But the direction of operations and production in our particular faculty was very strongly information systems, information technology focused. So we ultimately took that group out of management and merged it with information systems group and created the information systems and operations group. That’s worked well. They’re highly compatible. They do very similar types of research. They publish in the same journals. They both actually are able to kind of build on the strength of one another, they’re complimentary, and they’re both still very management oriented. But in the Management department really wasn’t the best home for them. So that went really well. Those are very significant degree programs for us as well. So it grew our graduate enrollment. Then we have a master’s in information systems that we push through as a new degree. I always want to be careful about degree proliferation, but it does actually make sense to have a few fifth year master’s degrees where people really go deeply into a subject matter. So in the business school world, a MBA by regulation is a breadth degree. You’re not allowed by our accreditation standards to take more than four classes in one subject. So even to say you have a major in a MBA program is a little bit, not quite right. But if you’re in a master of science degree you’re usually taking nine to ten courses in one subject area. You're going very deep. So we added the master of science and information sciences to be that kind of deep knowledge degree. We also added a master of finance to be also that fifth year, kind of beyond the undergraduate, really deep dive into that subject matter of true expertise. Then we had always had the master’s in accounting, which is also that kind of very focused program. Those were very complimentary to the MBA. I think what you’ll see over long term is people will go into Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 those career job oriented master’s degrees and may well come back and get the MBA for really the more broad kind of management preparation. So we built out that portfolio of degree programs which really helped us build up our graduate enrollments and really, I think in a lot of ways, served our student body because for a lot of our undergraduates who were coming out, they weren’t quite there. Adding that one year of master study in those very specific career focused areas was highly beneficial to the students as well. AP: You know, I’ve always wondered what it was like for you to be one of the deans in the period that we had a capital campaign in which more buildings were approved or constructed probably in any time at the University with the exception of the growth during the post-war period when we acquired Fort Douglas and became a more broad graduate institution. Did you have a sense that really important great changes were going on for this institution and the role that you were playing? JB: So when I came onboard the Christensen Center was under construction. We actually had to finish up fundraising on that. A little bit of more money had to be done on that and see that through to completion. That was actually one of the first real significant projects that kicked off what would evolve to be a fairly significant building boom on campus. At this point in time, as of today, I believe we’ve just finished up about a billion dollars worth of projects and we have about a billion dollars underway. Those are enormous numbers of dollars and enormous changes to the campus. I think what was interesting about the Christensen Center was it really set a new standard for, in particular, classroom environment. The University of Utah had classroom facilities that were just like what everybody else had in the mid-1960’s, but they weren’t what everybody was having in the 1990’s. The Christensen Center really brought a new Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 standard of student-centered classrooms, a real emphasis on the classroom design so students could see one another. If you look at a lot of traditional classrooms, the presumption is the students don’t need to look at each other because everything that’s important is happening up front with the instructor in the lecture and the blackboard. So students can be lined up in rows and if they have a good line of sight to the blackboard, then our mission is done. But business school teaching had changed fundamentally, and I would say reaching has changed fundamentally. What really has changed fundamentally about teaching is we’ve really gotten away from thinking about what we’re doing as teaching and focusing a lot more on learning. What is it that’s going to facilitate the student learning? As business schools in particular used the case method, experiential kind of learning, really I'd say discussion focused learning, we started to understand that students were going to learn the best if we could motivate them to reach out and grab the knowledge. Our old style was to try and shove it through their forehead. We figured if it was said in the front of the room, it had been learned and that’s just not true. There’s some research now coming out that shows that typical student absorption in the traditional “talk to them” kind of environment is no more than twenty percent of what information is actually put out. So we really wanted to, and in my teaching career, had made great utilization of kind of discussion based learning with a variety of stimulus material. Our stimulus material’s become much richer. Traditional stimulus materials, case, get people to talk about a case, it can now be movie excerpts, it can be mini cases, it can be exercises, are all ways to motivate a learning environment. Then I think another key of this is this kind of notion of a teachable moment. Part of what you’re doing is motivating the students so at that point they want to know the answer and you’re not Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 trying to shove it through their forehead. They’re actually reaching out and trying to grab it. That is all highly interactive. It also recognizes that part of the learning environment is students learning from one another. So the Christensen Center was a fundamental departure from that traditional design. It actually mimicked and copied what a lot of institutions have done in terms of setting up so that students could talk to one another. That’s just such a really fundamental change. The other thing is, what’s very important about that project was the integration of technology, because in real traditional methods in business, for instance, in accounting, you spend an awful lot of time in the class just doing arithmetic, just adding up numbers. By being able to integrate in spreadsheets and computers, you no longer had to spend all of that time doing arithmetic. You could actually focus a lot more on the analysis. You can shove out a template and the arithmetic kind of takes care of itself and you can really focus on what does this mean? Why is this important? What are the analysis steps we take away from this? You also didn’t have to make the problem so simple they were easy to add up (laughs). I don’t know about you, but when I went to school every group of numbers always added up to some multiple of ten because it was much easier to work with those numbers. So we were able to also just bring in real corporate spreadsheets, often, just load them up because we didn’t have to worry about stuff being arithmetically easy to teach. So it hugely, that integration, that discussion based method, but also the capacity to integrate technology into the quantitative curriculum really made a huge difference in how much time could be allocated to the analytics and understanding and really having Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 people understand tools, versus spending all this time on arithmetic. So that was a huge change. The Christensen Center immediately became very attractive to campus. So the academic senate started meeting there and people wanted to schedule classes. It’s only got, realistically, it’s only got four classrooms in it. So the business school could take almost all of that, but people got a chance to be in there, they became very interested. They could see that it was a better tool for the learning environment. So what you saw happening then was most of the classroom facilities, like the engineering classroom facilities, the medical classroom facilities, Humanities, went to these curved rooms where the students could see each other. Now like some areas, like engineering, only went about halfway because I don’t know that they were totally convinced (laughs), but they still really changed their approach to how they did things. The technology is much more integrative because that’s what people are going to do when in the real world, when they take the learning away. But partly that reality in the classroom actually helps the learning process. But also the interactivity hugely improved. So that also became a big impetus because once we had four of these classrooms that were such great learning environments we realized, well, we have another twenty-six that aren’t so great. When I came to the University of Utah I swore I would never do a building project (laughs). I could just see that it’s almost a thankless task. It just takes so long to do it. But it became a necessity. Our facilities were really working against us. [ had a student that, he eventually came to the University of Utah, but he talked about during his recruiting experience how excited he was, but when he saw the facilities, the term he said is “I wanted to barf so bad” (laughs). But we persevered through quality of programs. 10 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 But our faculty office space was very substandard, the way that our faculty also were scattered over a lot of different places was not very conducive to kind of the collegial environment that we had, but it wasn’t supporting it. But really so much about why we ultimately had to build more buildings is the learning environment. So that’s one of the things that I think is very gratifying is to see that happening around campus. The law school is next, they want to do something. But you’re seeing these student centric buildings go up. The buildings are respectful of and in the building project it’s a very big issue -- about also accommodating the faculty wishes. But the Spencer Fox Eccles Business building is, we’re going to have a total of, I think that has a total of twenty-six classrooms in it. It’s going to be what we need as a school and what we need as a university. So, yeah, there’s a lot going on. The health sciences has done a lot of laboratory space as well, but lower campus is really putting a real emphasis on learning spaces. And not just the classrooms, but the breakout rooms and all of the things that really support this total learning environment. It now understands that everything doesn’t happen in the classroom and actually most of learning probably doesn’t happen in the classroom. That’s a facilitation point for the learning process, but it’s not necessarily where all the learning happens. AP: This movement that you’ve described has been characterized as a change from the sage on the stage to the guide by the side. What do you think that orientation did to also fuel your interest in what you call the engaged student movement, or the engaged learner. JB: Well, that for me is kind of core for what I wanted to accomplish within the school. That can also, when you start saying we’re creating a learning environment where learning is going to happen, that starts to say, yeah, and that includes student clubs and 11 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 kind of all the things that students do with other students, but it also creates some opportunities for faculty to engage in a really different way. When we recruited this young, dynamic faculty, a very high percentage of them actually got very engaged with a lot of this alternative learning style opportunities. It’s turned out to be a huge retention factor with us for faculty as well as enriching the learning experience for students. The notion always was at the school level, at the dean’s office, we cannot think up all these programs. All we can do is demonstrate the potential and put in small amounts of seed funding to get them going. But the faculty will invent things as they get excited about it and they see other faculty doing interesting things. So one of the programs that existed when I came, it already was in place, was the student stock fund. Liz Tashjian had done that and done a fabulous job of creating that. It was kind of by design and had to be a relatively small program because of the intensity of faculty support. One of the issues with guide by the side is how to we scale that up? We know that that student stock fund worked really well, but it’s twenty to twenty-five students and we’re graduating on average 1,200 students a year. So how do we impact all of those students? Part of it is faculty creativity. So one of the programs that was created was Marlene Plumlee came up and learned about the low income grants from the IRS. IRS has typically not, maybe never had, actually funded those to student programs. But she actually proposed where our advanced accounting students would be working with low income tax payers on IRS kind of issues and the IRS funded that. They gave us money to do it, which helped pay for some of Marlene’s time, but also paid for support staff to be part of that, our partner in this guide process. Almost everywhere where we’ve been able to scale these up a lot, 12 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 we’ve typically had very good and motivated staff people who were also engaged as partners in the learning enterprise. One of the people who has done a fabulous job is Troy D’ Ambrosio. Troy, he’s a business person. I met him through the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year competition. I was a judge and his company owned by he and his brother, Convergys Communications, was one of the recognized companies and ended up being one of the award winning companies. Ernest and Young Entrepreneur of the Year is a very prestigious award in our community and really nationwide and worldwide, they run that program worldwide. I met Troy through that program. I knew they were selling their company. Troy, I also knew that he would occasionally play golf, but he didn’t play golf every single day and needed something else to do. He originally came in half time to work with us. Last year in the programs that he runs himself, it was very interesting, he had a staff person, when she left, he said, “Well, I can take that salary and turn that into three more student scholarships, so I'm not going to replace the staff.” He runs everything with students. Students not only participate in the programs, they learn by running the programs and they learn by doing marketing in a statewide program in which they’ve got to get materials out and produce materials. But Troy last year had 1,809 students run through the programs which he is responsible for and all run with students. Some of our programs have a little bit of other staff that kind of chip in, maybe teach some classes and stuff. But that’s a scalability that’s absolutely phenomenal. So one of the things that we learned in this process is that we could create opportunities for students not just to participate in the program, to actually run the program. Oftentimes the students that participated and really engaged on that, they got a whole other different type of 13 13 January 2012 Jack Brittain experience in actually running the program and being in leadership and calling up business people to be mentors or judges in competition. So as this started to evolve, from the very beginning we kind of worried about if it’s a defining trait of the school, how do we scale it? A very important way of scaling it are these very important partners and really staff level leaders in the program delivery that complements the faculty classroom component. Oftentimes guided by or certainly in dialogue and partnership with faculty. But it’s kind of a great position for these folks. Troy eventually became full-time. He got all this going really working part-time. I used to kid him that if he had any more fun I was going to start to charge him to work here because his engagement was so high. AP: Idon’t think you mentioned his position title and where he works. JB: So Troy D’ Ambrosio came into originally run the Lassonde New Venture Development Center. He’s now the executive director of the Lassonde Entrepreneurship Center. So all of the entrepreneurship programs all report in through to him, including things like our Bench to Bedside, our various kind of innovation programs as well. So Troy has, I guess I originally met him in 2000 and worked part-time, but he’s been a very important kind of collaborator leader of this whole learning development in collaboration with our programmatic side. They’re highly complementary with our entrepreneurship degree program, entrepreneurship minor, all of those pieces are there, but also these kind of staff leadership in these programs is important. Then the student clubs remained extremely important. There’s a lot we can do through the student club side, which is also a student leadership opportunity. So we did a survey in 2009 of all of our students in the school. We wanted to know what our impact 14 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 was. We got report back through the student survey that sixty-five percent of all of the students in the school were involved in one of these activities. It’s certainly not 100 percent, and I don’t know that you’re ever going to get 100%. Sixty-five percent was actually shockingly large. AP: Especially given the demographics of our student body. JB: Right. So many of them are part-time. They’re working and some of the most engaged students have families, they’re working jobs, and they’re still doing all of this stuff as well (laughs). So it really is what you want to see. To me it’s engagement in the learning process is what we’re trying to motivate. It certainly helps people’s resumes. It certainly puts them in the job market in a different position to be able to talk about some leadership role that they’ve had, something that they’ve done. The students, I think, get that as well. But the gratifying part is the students really have engaged in it. It’s not something that’s just a resume builder; it’s something they truly are doing. It’s worked extraordinarily well, I think partly because it’s fun. The students like that; the faculty like that. We had a situation where one of our faculty was being recruited by Wharton, had a very substantial salary higher offer at Wharton, we couldn’t possibly match it, but he asked if were he to go to Wharton if he could keep running the student program. No, actually (laughs). That’s something you have to be on our faculty to do. He ended up turning down the Wharton offer and stayed because that part of his career, that part of his job on doing that was a very enriching thing in his job. It’s not unusual for faculty if they’re teaching a core course, you might teach that same course, certainly updating it and bring it up to date, but you might teach that same course for thirty years. It’s not 15 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 exactly the most intriguing thing you’re doing. You’re updating it, you’re keeping it fresh, you’re bringing in new examples, but it’s not exactly like doing these more project oriented engagement with highly engaged students and that’s a real positive on the faculty side as well. AP: Nice. So how do you see your job as a fundraiser? How did you gear up for that portion of your work? And can you describe the approach you took with donors? JB: It’s funny, when I had the possibility of coming to Utah, I went and met with the provost, a guy named Hobson Wildenthal, at the University of Texas at Dallas, and I was talking to him a bit about it. He was a good mentor, very encouraging. I told him, well, I just don’t know if I can do this fundraising thing. He said something very interesting. First he said, “You’re not going to have any problem with that. The fundraising is going to work because you’re going to be passionate about what you’re attempting to do”—he knew me pretty well, I guess—*“and you have ideas and you’re going to be innovative and we’re sorry to lose you” was part of it, too. But what he said to me is he said, “Your biggest challenge as dean is going to be accepting what you cannot do. Because,” he said, “there’s going to be way too much to do and you’re going to have to pick and there’s going to be stuff you cannot do.” He was absolutely right. It’s a highly immersing position and being able to build up a personal strategic portfolio of what you want to work on is challenging. But we’re very fortunate, I think, to have this younger faculty willing to step up and take on a lot of the curricular side of developing it. I always felt I had to carve out about fifty percent of my time for fundraising. So we spent a lot of time on that. That was a top priority for me because building out the school’s endowment and getting these programs to work involved financial resources. An 16 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 awful lot of the dean’s job is a financing job. You’ve got to be constantly thinking about where does that set of resources go to enable programs. Fundraising is one aspect of it. The executive education was an important thing that we built up and that eventually thrived and did quite well, also. But the fundraising was important. I always felt like in fundraising, I was finding opportunities. I kept in touch with people at Berkeley where I went to school and they had had, the faculty, at least, had some opinions on some very high profile deans that were considered world-class celebrity deans who they would say, well, they could never make the ask. They just couldn’t bring themselves to make the ask. I think part of fundraising is to understand what my role was in it. I think people who have a hard time making the ask feel like— and I think the celebrity dean felt like because there was this notion of hiring a rolodex and you know a lot of important people so go ask them for money—I think there’s this feeling that I'm asking, I'm making a personal request, I’'m asking you to give me money. I never felt like that. I felt like what I was doing in fundraising was facilitating a process of helping people who wanted to give back, they wanted to do something in higher education, whether they were an alum or not, they wanted to do something in higher education. Very frequently were alums. What I was helping them do was one of the things that would be one of their proudest accomplishments of their life. They were going to tell their friends about it and they were proud of it. So I never felt like I was asking people to give me money; I always felt like I was helping them find something that was one of the maybe highlights of their life. They would be involved with this. I think Pierre Lassonde is a great example of somebody where we started with him on the new venture development center. He participated in the design of the program, 1 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 but it gave so much back to him. He was so proud of what he saw happening with the students, the impact on those students. Then I approached him for another supplemental gift for a related program. I laid out the whole thing we wanted to do with the entrepreneurship center, what all those elements were, and as we were talking about it, he was asking about all the other elements and it just hit me in that moment of talking to him about this, he wanted to do this whole thing. That’s what I said. I said, “Pierre, you want to do this whole thing, don’t you?”” He said, “Yes, I do.” We had to find a way to make that happen. But that was very much my experience, whether it’s a donor setting up a $25,000 scholarship, it’s something they wanted to do. They wanted to have that legacy, to be able to give back and that students were going to benefit, a lot of students over a long period of time. So the fundraising, I think, went well. We were able to really make a big impact and brought in the chairs and the scholarships. For me, scholarships were incredibly important. We put a lot of effort into the scholarship side. But I think that the success in it was really because we always had this mindset of what does the person want to do. I talked about this with our development people; we would have ideas “in our pocket.” I carried a set of proposals “in my pocket” about things that I thought were good directions for the school. But what I often found is as people articulated what it is they wanted to do, the goal side could match with a programmatic goal we had. We would connect on the goal of helping students, or helping bring in high quality faculty to enhance the student experience, or supporting faculty we already had with endowed positions that would help us retain them long term and keep them at the school. At every step, that’s how I felt about it and that’s what I think we accomplished is by having that kind of 18 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 orientation. I never felt like I was trying to sell something to people; I was always helping them find what they wanted to do. So we had a lot of success with that. We had a lot of people who wanted to help. I think you can offend people by trying to sell them something they don’t want to do. So our approach was always to try and understand what it is they wanted to accomplish, what their goals were, what was that point that they would be proud to tell their friends about. That always was in my mind: will they be proud to tell their friends about it? We had some funny things. We visited an elderly couple. They got so excited about scholarships that they took us down to the bank and pulled these stock certificates out of their savings deposit box (laughs). The bankers, I could tell, were looking at us like who are these people and what are they doing for this very elderly couple, who are whipping stock certificates out and having notarized signatures done on them. I’'m giving out my card, I'm,"No, we’re from the business school” (laughs). But, yeah, we drove right down to the bank and they signed over the stock certificates to us. They were so excited about making it happen. It was funny, but so sweet, also. It really was. We got to participate in that excitement and that level of gratification, a very gratifying part of the fundraising process as well. AP: JB: Very nice. Jack, would you be able to quantify what you raised as dean? It kind of depends if you want to count the legislative component, which I count, because that hurt (laughs). But it’s a whole different way of helping find what they really want to do (laughs). We were able to make that happen with tremendous support from the business community. But it was somewhere in the range of $150 million, something like that, which was total fundraising done. I feel like we’re still participating and supporting 19 13 January 2012 Jack Brittain efforts of things we’ve gotten going and there’s supplemental funding coming in on things. So I'm still involved in some stuff that’s another potential $20 to $40 million to the school. Then in the overall campaign that we’re currently completing, a big component of that is corporate. We’re on the corporate side. We’re bringing in $40 to $50 million dollars on the corporate side. I'm not sure how you count that. That’s a funny kind of component, because it’s corporate sponsored research, but that’s actually folded into the campaign numbers. So on the current campaign our organization, really not me, but our organization has brought in, we’ll bring in an order of magnitude of $400 million on that side of it. Again, that’s an awful lot of facilitation. In the world of, I guess, fundraising, success has a thousand fathers, right. So I don’t want to overstate that, but organizationally we had a real big role in the current billion dollar campaign as well. Probably we’ll account for about a third of it. AP: 1know when a decision is made to build a new building, like the new business classroom building, there are many steps and stages. Was there a particular moment in which you were endorsed by the school’s national advisory board or by the University and you came home and said, “Well, I guess I am going to build a building”? JB: Yeah (laughs). So this had multiple stages. It started with we were going to remodel. In any big project like this, there’s kind of what you hope for and then there’s a reality check at some point. So we had some remodeling ideas and we spent a lot of time and a fair amount of money on the architectural consulting services. So much of decision process also is driven by regulatory requirements on and building code requirements of what you’ve got to do. So as we pushed harder on that remodeling and to see what we could do with current facilities. Some facilities on campus have been remodeled 20 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 fabulously. I mean they came out as great projects with a little bit of remodeling. So the student union went through extensive remodeling. It was such a great structure, it was kind of worth it. One of my favorite buildings on campus. You can do some stuff with remodeling. It’s certainly, you hope, cheaper to remodel than to rebuild. Our buildings were built in the mid-‘60’s so you start to say, “well, do you really want to tear that down?” It’s by far not the oldest construction on campus. But as we got into it and got people putting pencil to paper, it turned out that the value of the existing structures, one of them’s value was set at $250,000 and it was because the seismic upgrade, the access upgrades, the constraints of, one of our big problems with the building was the floor plates were too close together and we couldn’t fit classrooms inside of them. You have to make so many compromises. The choice between building new versus remodeling, you could have all brand new buildings for $500,000 more than just tearing them down and starting over gain. As we reached that point, the remodeling project suddenly because a building project. We did have to work with our national advisory board on that. We had to work with donors on that, too. The donors had one vision of remodeling and a highly economical project and suddenly the highly economical project was an opportunity to do a lot more and add a lot more classrooms. But also in the course of adding more classrooms, adding more square footage is also an opportunity to fund because the acknowledgement part of the building is part of the financial part of the building. So you can actually add in a lot more donors, broaden the participation base. But we came to this point and I had to go meet Spence Eccles and tell him that, well, the remodeling project is now a building project. He had been through a whole lot 21 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 on campus and was, I think, appropriately concerned and well informed about what that meant. But also as we went through and literally looked at the remodel costs versus the build costs, he got it and said, okay, we’re with you. The national advisory board was with us. Then the next big decision was how do we finance this whole thing? It was important for our donor base that the state participate, which meant the campus had to get onboard. So I had to work real hard with the campus. We were arguably some of the newer buildings on campus, but, you know, we also had the potential to add a lot of classroom capacity to campus. In discussions with campus leadership, that was really the key thing was the number of classrooms, the net positives for the campus that were going to matter. So it was really a good solid year of lobbying, of talking, of, in this case, selling people on the project, of aligning interests. So it’s a big multi-party, multi-interest negotiation is what it was. Spending a lot of time getting everybody onboard and aligned behind the plan was no small thing. Then we also had to develop a legislative strategy. We had a group of sixty business people who endorsed our project which was influential with the legislature. But the building project also has to go through the regents. They have to give it a priority. The campus has to make it a priority. The regents have to make it a priority. The legislature has to make it a priority. So I had to spend a tremendous amount of time externally, not just on the fundraising, but the building, a stakeholder group to support the project. AP: AsIrecall, you leaped over a few other projects, so that I think there were maybe a few people that were a little miffed that the dean of business school was so successful in such a short amount of time. 22 Jack Brittain JB: 13 January 2012 Oh, there are people who have great needs. I think we always thought about what’s the campus impact. But the reality of why our project jumped people is because of the classroom addition. The campus is very tight on classrooms. The engineering project, the Warnock kind of basement level where they remodeled the classrooms, added a lot of quality space. The Marriott Library added some classrooms, which all helped us because we had to tear down a classroom building to build our building. So we had a couple of years where we were taking away from the classroom stock. But the Marriott Library completion date was absolutely critical to our project. It ended up being the same contractor, so they finished Marriott and moved over to our site and started working on our site, the Okland Construction group. It was one of their actual advantages in the bid for it is that they were on campus and it was a lot of cost savings for them to just move a few hundred yards over and start our building. But also they were kind of helping us integrate the plan to use the Marriott classrooms and disperse what had been in the Madsen classroom building. So there was a lot of campus politics, but I think everybody played fair and people understood that this was really about the net classroom addition to the university and the university needed it and that was why we were able to jump up. We also had funding. So we had funding at a very critical juncture when there was a lot of stimulus money that could go to construction. So we were there with completed business plans ready to break ground. AP: You mentioned Troy D’ Ambrosio. I'm wondering if you have other key administrators and co-leaders of your faculty leaders that were essential to your administration as well. 23 13 January 2012 Jack Brittain JB: Well, in the business school, definitely. What was so gratifying about that is the large number of people who stepped up, and it was probably because we were a junior faculty and so we had a lot of people who were relatively young in their careers stepping up. But we had some great senior people who were at a point in their career to step into a leadership role. So Uri Loewenstein who stepped into the finance leadership role, and I think he might be in his tenth year as department chair, he was somebody that, I don’t know that it was obvious that he would be such a great department chair, but he was somebody who just cared so passionately and was willing to facilitate the success of his colleagues and still teach his classes and do all those things and just really step up. Martha Eining was a more senior person—I guess we’re all more senior now—but she was a mid-career full and just had tremendous energy and capacity and very much engaged with this vision of the learning environment and the type of faculty we were going to build out. Then Bill Hesterly in Management and Steve Tallman. Bill eventually became associate dean. Steve Tallman is one of the people that we lost, but he had many years in a leadership role. Debbie Scammon, who was associate dean, she was interim dean when I was hired, did a great job and was a very gracious colleague in stepping down from that interim role and then into a leadership role and brought great energy into everything she did. The few senior people that we had in the school had to do some real heavy lifting and did it fabulously. We had the group that carried the burden for five or six years until we started getting people promoted up and a new generation of leadership. There’s now a new generation of leadership over there that is highly engaged, is totally bought in. So it’s just really tough to single out anybody, because I could say dozens and dozens of people. A really important hire for the school was Brad Vierig in 24 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 the executive education role. He grabbed that job and made it his own and built that organization. At the time he took it it was money losing, it was very demoralized. We were only able to get about twenty-five students a year. Now it’s maxed out. It has multiple different programs. They also have the corporate side that they’ve really built up. That has been kind of his vision and we just turned him loose to do it and he’s really done a phenomenal job. So on the staff side of people who have program responsibilities, I think both Brad and Troy are both superstars. They interestingly both worked for American Stores. So they both had that background. One of the things that I've discovered in my now thirteen years in the community is losing American Stores was unfortunate because of the corporate headquarters presence in our state, but they left behind a lot of really, really highly qualified people. You look all over the University and a lot of leadership roles, staff side, are filled by people who used to work for American Stores. So that’s one of the great legacies of that company is the really tremendous people that they brought here, developed, hired here and developed, but they developed people and those people stayed and have made a real difference for the University and I think throughout the community. AP: That’s a fascinating subject. I think an article should be written (laughs). How did you view the role of the national advisory board and did it change while you were dean from your predecessors management of that body? JB: The board side is always one of the more interesting dilemmas. One of the things that the leadership’s got to think about is what do I want from the board? An awful lot of people want the board to...they don’t know what they want from the board. I did know some things I wanted from the board. I wanted our board, first, to be our ambassadors to 235 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 the community, so I wanted them to be informed and be able to talk about the school. But I felt like where we were in 1999, we had so many needs that I wanted to be able to utilize the board as really to be strategy provokers. I don’t think you can really ask them to develop strategy, but they can give you that real honest look and a set of ideas about what would be some productive directions for the school to go. So the school in 1999 was very understaffed on the staff side. Probably still is. It runs extraordinarily lean. But we have advisors who are stretched way too thin. I had one person running career services for hundreds of graduates. We just really needed to look at a whole bunch of stuff. Then we had an issue with our national reputation. What’s our brand? The David Eccles School name was actually relatively new in the scheme of these things. That had happened in the early ‘90’s. But the University of Utah was just this unknown entity. We were anonymous, in some ways anonymous in our own state. So people didn’t know what we were about. What’s our differentiators? So my idea for the board—and the board rose to the occasion—was that we would have the board define for themselves three issues per year. I would lay out issues and say here’s some stuff that we need, but we would have three highly active board committees per year working on strategic topics for the school. So one of the very first things we did was the entrepreneurship program. We had a board committee that developed it, gave us a lot of ideas. We ultimately had to implement them. But things like the University venture fund came out of and was organized by that committee of that national Advisory Board. We had a group looking at our accounting programs. How can we kind of make those thrive? Then eventually we had very important board committees that worked on 26 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 issues like marketing and brand development. We had board committees that worked on career services and placement issues. Then advisory groups that helped us on the finance side, on leveraging up the master of science in finance, advise us on how that would look and what we’d want on the curricular side. One of the tensions on some of these program initiatives is the faculty concern that the board people will tell them what to do, which we never had that issue, actually. As we engaged the faculty, I think the faculty came to appreciate that these people who were doing the hiring and running the companies actually had a lot of perspective to add to what we were doing on the curricular side. So we didn’t do it in a hierarchal, authoritarian way; we really built strong teams and interactivity. That level of interactivity between the faculty and the board groups was, I think, just generally a healthy way to do it. It was a way to engage the business community, but also engage our faculty with the business community. So we had tremendous success on that. We came to realize that the active group of our board would be twenty-eight to thirty people and we would have another thirty people who were mostly just interested in knowing what’s going on. We decided we’re great with that, that we would work with the board participants at whatever level they wanted to participate. But we did need people who were informed about the school, to talk about us, engaged with various bodies like the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary clubs. The David Eccles School board, which ran around sixty people, was connected in every aspect of our community. We also have an emeritus board of people who decided that they wanted to step down from the board, and that had another thirty people. We typically would invite them and they would come to events and whatever they wanted to come to. But we had a dedicated group of people, 7] Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 highly engaged in our community more broadly to talk about us and say this is what’s going on. I think we were able to build buzz about the school. We were able to have people who knew what was exciting about the school, were excited about it, could tell other people. We made pretty rapid progress from being anonymous in our community to people really knowing about things like the entrepreneurship program, knowing about our various outreach efforts that we had. So that was a key part of the board is that as a communication vehicle, but also an advisory. We took the advisory real seriously and that engaged them. We can revisit this as a theme. One of the things that I understood quickly within just weeks of becoming dean was I couldn’t do it all. If it were up to me to do everything, nothing would get done. I would be the limiting factor. So I was always looking for ways that we could engage people, both our employees, in the doing of making it a great business school, but also our advisory board, get them engaged in the doing, of making it a great business school. So I feel like the success we had is owned literally by hundreds of people because so many people made some sort of contribution. Whether it’s the dean’s dinner and taking our fundraiser from raising $5,000 to raising $200,000, that was a board initiative and made something that was struggling into something that was truly great that made a difference for the school. So the board was absolutely critical. At all stages, I was always looking for ways to get people to do stuff for us, but do productive things. We would facilitate it, guide it, structure it and then also because you do a good job facilitating it the board could see their impact and they wanted to do more. They liked it that a group of people wanted to engage and give their time. Realistically they were probably giving no more than twenty or thirty hours a year, but it was highly 28 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 productive twenty or thirty hours a year and they could see the results of it and they liked doing that. They felt like it was a board that mattered to them and people wanted to be part, they wanted to be active, they wanted to come to meetings. AP: JB: Perfect. I think we should take a break. Terrific. END OF INTERVIEW SESSION AP: Okay. We should talk about a wonderful éommunity enterprise that you developed, which was the roundtables. JB: Those were interesting to do. They started with the convocation. When we were doing this Spencer Fox Eccles Honors Convocation, we would have these business leaders come in and we’d have small group sessions with them—the school still does this—in the morning. Some students would be invited and some faculty invited. We would have discussions with groups of twenty-five to thirty people. Those were often magical because they were so interactive. The speeches would always be great as well, but you just get so much more out of that kind of give and take. Then with Cal Boardman’s leadership, and Cal just did a fabulous job with all kinds of things within the school, but one of which was the ethics roundtable. We started doing that and it was for our national advisory board principally and key people from the community to just get together and talk with people for whom business ethics was a core differentiator for their company or they personally were known as highly ethical business people. So the notion was come spend an hour and a half with Bill Child and have Bill Child tell stories and ask 29 13 January 2012 Jack Brittain him questions and it was really interesting. It was really interesting to hear him talk about his motives and what they tried and how they responded to things that were business crises, but they responded from their set of core values and ethics of the firm. We had discussions with leadership of O.C. Tanner. Just a variety of people. Bob Garff and how he kind of ran his business. That, just how engaging that was and how much people liked it, we decided to actually do it a little more broadly and create some thematic roundtables. Sometimes these things would just be a little bit spontaneous. So I had this kind of crazy friend that I knew from the Porsche car club site and he lives in London and he’s an accountant and he came to the United States. He said “I’d really like to know more about the business of accounting.” My response was well, let’s pull together some firms. So we invited some firms. They came. We had this discussion around what is the business of accounting, not what is doing accounting, but what is the business of accounting, the regulatory environment and what’s going on with advisory services versus audit services. The firms were all competitors. It was quite obvious they really had no chance ever to really just talk about being an accounting firm versus the practice of accounting, and they really enjoyed it. There was a little bit maybe guarded, but it created basically an accounting practice roundtable that then formed. So a lot of these roundtables, became something we can do with a group of people that they’d like to do, it’s highly engaging with the business school. The one I personally got involved with and ran for several years is the Family Owned Enterprise Roundtable. We used the word enterprise because we have in our community not just family owned 30 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 business but also family run foundations. Those are enterprises in their own right and actually have a lot of interesting facets of family engagement in a common endeavor. So we kind of set up the roundtable broadly. We had a kickoff session where we just brainstormed topics. Out of that brainstorm set of topics we had three years worth of sessions. But our sessions always involved a family owned enterprise coming in and talking about their take on the topic. So we had the Garff family. The whole family came in and talked about governance and how as a family they participated in the governance of their enterprise. We had Young sign family come in and talk about that. They have a very novel kind of business ownership structure in that they have with a trust and then family members being employees of the trust and how they run their company. So people kind of talking about the challenges of being a family-owned enterprise, the kind of real strengths of family owned enterprise, and we have some very strong ones in our community. So we had people who talked about selling their business and the dilemma of that. We had folks talk about the intergenerational conflicts, when the next generation takes over and doesn’t see eye to eye and how do you deal with that. We had Crystal Maggelet and Chuck come in and talked about the real challenges she had of having created Crystal Inns and then her father tragically died in a plane crash and ending up running Flying J. Those kind of issues. It was fascinating. Families talking about intergenerational transfer and how do you bring your kids into the firm. The England Trucking people talking about building your kids to be true leaders and earning your way into that. We had people come in, like Clark Ivory and talk about buying. That transition was a purchase decision by the next generation and how that worked and so just this kind of incredibly honesty, real world set of challenges that people had in common. We had Sl Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 everything from the Pappas family, which is Roofer’s Supply, they’re a good solid business but probably on the smaller end of the scale, to England Trucking, which is a huge business. People don’t really understand how huge that business is. Garff Enterprises is actually a very significant sized business. So we had the Miller family, Larry Miller Enterprises, and talking about that kind of challenges, intergenerational they had, and the training. Sometimes some real honest tough stuff about kids who felt like they weren’t really given a chance sometimes, too, or too much was expected of them. So it was one of the things that I hugely enjoyed doing, but it also was a way for people to engage in the higher educational learning enterprise and what we really can do for the community, which is become a forum for continual learning, continual development, continual personal growth. So all of the roundtables had that. They seemed to have a natural lifespan of about three years and then maybe needed a break. But I think that they were something that we did that I certainly enjoyed, but they also brought in really, really great community engagement. It turned out that this building project has an awful lot of those families ended up supporting the building project as well because they got up and close and personal with the business school, with the faculty, we typically didn’t have students involved in that, but we did have faculty selectively sitting in. It was just a great way to engage, add value to our business community, but for them to also experience what the business school was about and the kind of commitment we had to the community. AP: TI'm so glad that you shared those reflections. I think we should segue now to your next move with the University and that was when you agreed to serve as half-time as dean and half-time as vice president for technology transfer. Of course, there were 32 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 several things that preceded this decision, but why don’t you talk about how your decision came about to take on an increased role in the role of technology transfer. JB: So the precipitating event in that decision is, I can’t explain why, but for some reason I became incredibly hot in the job market and a lot of schools were trying to recruit me. It was to me a lot. It was a dozen at least. To this day I can’t tell you exactly how that happened that I was getting all these calls and everybody saying we really want you to consider being our dean. And some were very attractive. I decided at that point I would look. Our son was in the seventh grade. My wife and I talked about it. We really wanted him to have a four-year high school experience, so if we were going to make a move we thought we should kind of look at options. It was always for me very much-- and I always said to my faculty, I think it’s a really good thing for the faculty--every five to ten years, somewhere in there, to just take a look around. I always phrased it as “make an affirmative decision to stay here.” I think that just inertia doesn’t serve anybody well. It doesn’t serve the institution or the person. I’d like them to re-up, recommit, rethink. What do they want this position to be? I was in a similar position. I was hitting seven years as dean of the business school, T guess, maybe it was more like six. Anyway, I had people at the university acting as references. I don’t ever want to do this on the sly, but let them understand that T hadn’t made a decision to leave but I was looking to make a decision to stay and what was next. Dave Pershing always has been great to work with if something like this comes up. So it happened actually very fast. I mean, already by November I was starting to get what were turning into offers. We were in December, I had an institution on the East Coast that wanted my wife and I to come right after Christmas and spend a week in the DC area. 83 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 The president was actually going to have me stay in his home. It was kind of an interesting approach to recruiting. But it had some attractions; I had some interest. Then just out of the blue, I mean, this is not anything I had ever thought of, Mike Young said we’d like to think about this. “We’d like to think about having you do this thing, and it’s very compatible with the Lassonde Center initiatives” we had and I had been talking to him about what I felt like were some of the weaknesses of the campus’ approach to commercialization. They set this out in front of me. My first reaction was, “What do you mean? What is this position?” It didn’t exist. As far as I knew, pretty much it didn’t exist any place in the country. Other universities had started doing similar things, but it really didn’t exist in other places. So even understanding what it was and then what does it mean to do it half time took some getting my brain around. But as there came to be some decision point pressure and were we going to spend the week after Christmas on the East Coast, book the flights, I sat down with Dave Pershing and answered a lot of questions and kind of hammered out a lot of “this is what it’s going to look like” and said “okay, let’s do it.” So I had an organization that didn’t exist that I was charged with and why we were even going to have it wasn’t real clear (laughs). So I started with first principles in the sense that I wrote a mission statement and I spent a couple of weeks really thinking about it and trying to get a real simple statement of what this tech venture thing was going to be. We had to have a name for it—that was slightly traumatic—and what was it going to be called. The notion that we kind of ended up pursuing is we wanted to have an emphasis on that we were going to help technologies get out of the University. The day after we decided it was going to be called Technology Venture Development my assistant 34 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 looked at me quizzically and said, “Are we going to call it Tech VD?” I go, “We absolutely are not going to call it Tech VD. From this day on it’s called Tech Ventures and we’ll just make this the short nickname of it so that we don’t get another nickname.” AP: JB: TI’ve never heard that story. Yeah, that Tech VD will stick in your brain forever, right. So Tech Ventures became our shorthand for it. We’ve made all our websites, our web address say Tech Ventures so we didn’t get shortened otherwise. But we had to build this out. So I started with the mission statement, said what it’s going to take to make this achievable. I did a six-month detailed week by week action plan. By point in time I’'m engaging lots of parts of the University. So I had kind of partitioned out what we had to do in different parts of our organization and had buy-in from the senior leadership and support for that and we got going. So Governor Huntsman very graciously came and did the announcement. We picked Evans and Sutherland because it had been one of the very first spin outs of the University. It just turned out that it was highly aligned with things that were happening in the state at the time because USTAR was starting to brew. In fact, this totally unplanned thing happened, which the legislature did not decide to go full speed ahead on USTAR; instead they gave a little bit a money and they set aside a planning grant. All the government agencies, the Utah Technology Council wanted the planning grant, the governor’s Office of Economic Development wanted the planning grant, a lot of people were looking...at setting the planning grant, which was $350,000 to do the USTAR plan. We never asked for it. We didn’t even know we had it until about a week after the legislature was over and all the kind of last minute bills suddenly were posted and there 35 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 in the USTAR bill was an allocation of the planning money to the University of Utah. Because nobody ever asked for it we really didn’t know what to do with it. We kind of looked at it and said, “Well, what are we going to do with it?”” Nobody had any ideas. I said, “Well, we’ll do it.” So Tech Ventures got that money and we began the process of a community engagement. We eventually had 120 people involved. But we got a leadership team to do that. AP: What a great way to start. JB: I'mnot sure. It was an interesting way to start, because suddenly we had something that wasn’t even clearly...I don’t know. We were biting off an awful lot for not really having any staff or anything. AP: That gives you the authority to ask a lot of open ended questions and gather a lot of data and start to plan the framework that launched you. JB: That’s what we did. That’s how Tech Ventures got started. So we were immediately engaged in a project that was not part of the plan (laughs). But, anyway, we did it. It got us very engaged with the community. We had kind of an opportunity for interacting with and getting involved with all the leading business leaders in the state. Certainly had the Utah leadership. All the people who wanted to be involved were involved. It was a very open process. Had good leadership. We had a twelve-person executive team and laid out a big project plan. It fell right in with my expertise in change management and kind of putting together change plans. So we had delegated a whole bunch of dedicated committees that did all sorts of stuff. A lot of people involved in a variety of ways. We executed the entire plan. Right in the middle of it we were given a deadline, I think, of November and about July the legislature informed us we had to 36 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 submit our full plan in September. So we had to redo it a whole lot faster. It all got done. There was an awful lot of work went into it and a lot of great ideas. I think that what eventually emerged as USTAR and how it actually got implemented in the next legislative cycle hugely benefited from all of that work that was done. Then we had a very important-- to me a critical process of a transferral of leadership from the planning group to the business community. The business people who participated in this felt ownership, or they did own it. It was their plan. So we were able to take a step back and let the business community leadership carry on and take that forward and continue to be very active through the governing authority board. Several people on the governing authority board were part of the planning group and ended up getting appointments to that board. That was Tech Ventures. Then we had all the other stuff we had to do (laughs), including hiring a director, because our director of technology commercialization position was open and that search had ground to a halt and so I had to revitalize that. I appointed a new search committee. We had a search firm already retained and we went after it. So within four months we had identified Brian Cummings from the University of Texas to come join us. That was very fortuitous because we were making him an offer. His wife was a Spanish teacher. They had lived here before and she had taught Spanish at Judge High School. We made him an offer and she called Judge and their Spanish teacher had quit the day before (laughs), so they hired her to come back and teach Spanish. Just a lot of lucky breaks there, but turned out we got a great person in that role and really helped that move forward. It probably helped the whole enterprise that having two jobs I was way too busy to get involved in day to day and Brian did a great job. It gave him a 37 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 lot of latitude to create the organization he thought we should have. We were able to build on what we already had in place, but had to make an awful lot of changes. But it went well. That was lucky. That hire was one of the great lucky breaks that I've had. He was exactly the right person. Out of a couple of hundred candidates there was the only one like him, because he’d been a entrepreneur, he had a very strong health sciences-- he’s a geneticist--very strong health science background. Been an entrepreneur in the information technology space, where he was an entrepreneur with his brother and had done a couple of companies. But then he had gotten interested in commercialization. Went to UT Austin and ran their life science program, which is very pharmacy heavy at UT Austin. So he had very, very good exposure in the pharmacy area, which is one of our strengths, in drug delivery, medical device stuff. So we just found that the one guy and the executive search firm said, well, he’s a young guy. He’s kind of relatively inexperienced. They characterized him as a risky hire. He turned out to be the perfect guy for us. AP: So why did you rename the Office of Technology Transfer the Technology Commercialization Office? JB: There are two reasons for it. First the notion of transfer is what I call throw it over the wall and hope the coyotes will raise it. So you birth the child, throw it out in the field—Romulus and Remus kind of thing, right—and hope that the wolves or the coyotes raise it. [ really felt like it’s just the wrong mindset for us to have. These things that we do, these technologies that come into our office, are just incredibly raw where they are, they’re not even close to being anything that can be commercialized. They are ideas. Those ideas have to go through...a lot of work’s got to occur on those ideas. They’ve got 38 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 to be transformed into both a product and ultimately to a business and those are two big steps. The way that I felt we could be successful was to be more engaged with the technologies as they went through that development process. That was the notion of becoming technology commercialization. The second piece on it was I felt like the renaming the office gave the employees the kind of latitude to rethink what they were doing also. One of the very interesting things about the transition of that office is that we only lost three people out of about twenty. We actually were able to revitalize, regenerate and reenergize that office with all the same people. They were, I think, a very demoralized group and they didn’t have real good reasons to work very hard because almost everything they did seemed to be wrong. But by renaming the office we pushed the reset button for them. They rose up, I think, spectacularly. Folks who were relatively junior, over a period of five or six years, really, really engaged, really stepped up into leadership roles. We ended up having a few retirements in the past couple of years of people who’d done great work for us but we had ready to go a new cadre of leaders in that organization who are more mid-career professionals and they’ve just done fabulous work. So that, I was actually surprised at how fast that happened, which told me the employees were just ready to punch reset and they wanted a restart because we had a meeting, I talked to them when I had been appointed, actually it hadn’t been publicly announced and I met with them. I said, really, I want to go in this other direction. I want to be tech commercialization, this is why, this is kind of the notion versus tech transfer. I went back a week later and all the signs had been changed already (laughs). They just grabbed it. I think a lot of the people there just felt like they were in limbo. The director position was open, nobody had been named, 39 13 January 2012 Jack Brittain nothing was happening and they wanted something to happen. So even before we got the new director hired we started seeing people thinking differently about what they were doing. We were extremely well served by the interim director, Brent Brown, who then right after we hired the new director of tech commercialization, Brent became the director of Office of Sponsored Projects, which was really a great thing for both organizations because the organizations have to work pretty closely on a lot of things. So Brent went on over and worked in the research organization, but he had had a leadership role in the tech commercialization office, understood it, and then we understood him, so that was very productive for both organizations. He’s done a great job over there running the Office of Sponsored Projects. So that all evolved in that way. But the name change was substantive, but also turned out to be culturally important also. AP: When the University made this commitment, it didn’t take very long to have some pretty significant results. It hasn’t been that many years you’ve been doing this, but yet two years in a row Utah’s been rated number one for the commercialization of technology from university faculty. JB: That, I guess to me was interesting. So Brian Cummings came in. He started in August of 2005, which would have been fiscal year 2006. When we interviewed Brian, he made a statement which I think very concisely captured the direction we were going. What he said is tech transfer officers are a lot like the rare book collection at a library. They’re extremely worried that you’re going to damage it or you’re going to lose it. So all of their processes are to prevent you from damaging it or losing it, ultimately prevent 40 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 you from touching it. He said when we go to tech commercialization, we’re checking out the books. The notion was we shouldn’t be so worried about the protection and a lot of universities get overwhelmed with this notion of protecting their intellectual property. And you can love it to death and it never goes anywhere. So we said we’re checking out the books and we’re not going to worry about making mistakes in the protection, we’re not going to worry that it’s going to get lost. We’re going to get it out there and get it deployed. So we had this philosophy, also, about getting it out there that we would need to develop the technology. One way to develop technology is to put it in a company, to form a start up, to bring in grant money, some federal grant money. The most significant federal grant money actually must go to a company. We can’t get it as a university, so we need to have a formed company that gets that grant money and then they can subcontract back to the university for various kinds of development activities. But it’s got to go to a company and we wanted to get those dollars. They’re lucrative and they’re non-dilutive, also, that they actually add value without taking ownershi . So we immediately started thinking about it and incorporating that. The very first year at it I think we launched twenty, twenty-one companies, which was great. Brian said, “Now don’t expect this every year,” because our concern was we had a lot of stuff on the shelf and we were cleaning up the backlog and we were getting things moving. Could we do it next year? We had no idea. So that’s how we started doing it. It wasn’t a goal. Because the Association of University Technology managers publishes a survey, it’s always a year behind. So we’d done it, we’re doing it again the next year and then this ranking comes out. I'd never heard of the Association of 41 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 University Technology Managers. Brian had, he knew who they were; he had responded to the survey. I certainly had no idea of what the metrics were, that we would be one of the top offices in the nation. The rankings came out and we were number two to MIT. We were amazed (laughs). I doubt MIT was amazed; they don’t care much. But we were amazed. We’re like, we’re number two to MIT. How could that possibly be? But our first response was, well, how come other people aren’t doing better? We actually, in research funding, we tend to rank in about mid to high fifties, fifty-eight, sixty-one in total research rank funding and the notion was turning research into commercialization and how come we were doing well at it? Then we were also fairly concerned about repeating it. But the next year, so I think we had twenty-one and MIT had twenty-two. Then the next down on the list had sixteen. We’re like, well, this is very curious. Then year number two we were number two to MIT again. Actually I always liked being number two to MIT, because just that statement, “we’re number two to MIT,” tells the whole story, right. It’s incredible to people you’re number two to MIT. I said we’re going to be cursed if we pass MIT because we won’t have that pithy statement. We’ll have to say we’re number one and then people say number one in what and compared to who and stuff, right. So in the third year of the survey we tied MIT for number one, and we actually went down by one, but they went down by two. Then the following year we had actually gone down by one and they went down by two again. So I think we had nineteen and they had eighteen and we were number one. We’re surprised. But that was actually never a goal for us. Our goal was always to add value to the technology and commercialize. We were having great success in generating the companies. Now incredibly important to us was that those companies were being 42 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 successful, that they were getting financing and that they were also employing people. What’s real clear if you look at the progress of how this happens, they have very few employees in the beginning because they don’t have any money, and then once they start having financing the number of employees goes up. Once they start having sales, the number of employees goes up again. The employment generation is not at the point of company formation; it’s at the point of financing and at the point of sales. So we started looking at that. We had a five-year period where our companies raised around $240 million-- $250 million. We’re like, whoa! In our last kind of five year, kind of rolling average, the group of companies raised over $300 million. Then we commissioned the Bureau of Economic and Business Research to do employment studies and the spin off companies had direct employment of nearly 10,000 people. The indirect, plus direct employment was around 20,000 people, jobs. Our average job in our spin off companies pays 150% of the state average. They’re really high paying jobs. They’re career positions, typically, for people. That’s the outcome we ultimately wanted to see. That was the outcome that was important to us was that these were ongoing enterprises that were employing people. They’re employing our alumni, they’re paying taxes to the state. They also do a lot of research back in the university. Those partnerships were very critical in how we thought about what we were doing. So the spinoffs for us was never an important metric, per se. It’s something, yeah, we’re glad to see happen because that’s the starting point of the thing we are trying to do, which is play a positive role in the economy of the state in terms of generating enterprises that are located in the state, doing research at the University, and then employing University graduates and a lot of other people. But our enterprises tend to be technology 43 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 based. They tend to employ college graduates. They hire a lot of graduate students because they need very high end technical skills for what they’re doing. And they rent space in our Research Park. The other thing about these enterprises that I think is important, it’s important to me, is these are types of enterprises that are also very socially engaged. They’re good corporate citizens. They’re the kind of enterprises that they donate to the Leonardo. They are involved with the arts and they donate to the ballet because they’re interested in it. They’re involved with our public schools. They’ve been very involved with our LEGO League, our Research Park companies. So they’re companies that are not only...they are technology based and engaging the University on the research side. They’re companies that are kind of high end corporate citizens that engage their own community because they’re very concerned about...part of their success metric as they think about being a company is also the community in which they live. So we see an awful lot of good contributions to the state of Utah that have nothing to do with the economic contributions that come out of these companies. I like that part of it as well. It’s nice that we’re able to make that kind of contribution beyond jobs to the quality of the community in which we live as well. AP: JB: A rather holistic scope. Absolutely. And what we do, we really step back and think about it holistically because part of the return to the University is these companies do research at the University, the individuals who start them become donors to the University, they support our education program, which benefits the companies as well. They have the internships and they get great employees, but it also hugely benefits our students and the university. 44 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 AP: What is the hardest thing about commercializing university research? JB: Probably the hardest thing is patience. It just doesn’t happen overnight. Our kind of average time to revenue for something that’s a technology that begins to have some sales is in the five year range. One of the hardest things that we do it to work with therapeutic technologies that require FDA approval processes that can easily, easily stretch into twenty years. So it’s hard to show immediate impact. Even the starting of companies, we have our critics who say well, they’re not real companies. Well, of course they’re not real companies, right, they’re baby companies. We’re trying to grow them up. So the world doesn’t always have a lot of patience, but we have to and we have to understand that we’re really‘ engaging in a process. Even at this point now that I’'m kind of seven years into it, we’re starting to see a maturation on our equity portfolio. The University historically had very seldom taken equity in companies. We only had equity in about twenty percent of our start ups that had occurred pre to 2005. We now have equity in eighty percent of our start ups. But even showing that that was a good thing didn’t happen overnight. So we started to have some exits and the exits have produced big multiples of value, four times more than we thought it was worth. So the University’s research foundation is starting to have that payoff come, but it requires a lot of patience and there are a lot of demands on resources. We’ve been through a down economy period and a lot of people would like to grab the cash to bridge over the down economy. We’ve really had to say, don’t grab the cash because you’re really killing yourself long term. You’d much rather help these companies be successful. If we grab cash out of them, we take away resources for them to be successful. But if we align with them and we take equity position, then we’re long term partners with them. 45 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 Seeing that equity actually turn into value -- it can appreciate in value but you can’t access it. That’s kind of a big part of it. But having the patience and that is difficult because the timeframes we’re working on to see some of the payoff from our efforts are longer than administrative appointments, right. It’s one of the dilemmas we have in government as well is can government do things that are long term projects that have long term payoff that are going to be well after the term. One of the things that’s remarkable about USTAR is the legislature agreed to fund a plan that is a thirty-year plan, with expected payoffs really not promised or expected until about year fifteen, where it starts to bring in more than it’s taking out. The tech commercialization is the same thing within the University. This patience, but understanding that we have made an investment of effort, some real funds invested as well, not huge funds, but funds invested. But we’re at the point of being able to show that the University’s return is ten times what they put into it. So we have ten times the resources coming back to us that went into it. With that level of payoff suddenly people start to develop patience. But getting to the point where we could both document it and demonstrate it didn’t happen right away and we had to have about four to five years of ramp up. We were fortunate we had good revenues at the same time. It wasn’t that we didn’t have licensing and royalty revenues, we did. We could demonstrate that we were successful on that side. But to demonstrate this kind of bigger vision of being successful, in supporting our own technologies, of partnering with them, it’s almost very much like that. We’re going to guide them and we’re going to put effort into that 46 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 and help them be successful, we’ll get a payoff for that as well. That is really the real big payoff that that can happen. That’s where schools that don’t have huge revenue streams, like Stanford, they’ve made enormous fortunes for their endowment out of their equity holdings in companies like Google and various spin off companies that came out of there. That’s our notion as well. So patience is tough, and patience is tough when you’re in a budget situation where everybody’s getting cut. We didn’t go up, but we didn’t get cut. Also we don’t have any state funding and what we do, ours is all self funded, but it’s a pot of money that’s attractive to dip into. And it was dipped into. We’ve been able to support the University in a lot of ways, but that kind of patience of an investor is probably the hardest thing for people to do with this. AP: So universities have certain advantages, in that they can attract and then leverage Federal funding. Do you ever get complaints that we have an unfair advantage in the marketplace with the sponsored research being then spun into technology and products in the marketplace? JB: No, not really. And corporate entities can go after research funds as well. In the high tech sector, they actually understand that that’s not what they want to do. Also, so much of our research that’s done is curiosity driven, it’s not commercially driven. Now curiosity driven research can turn into commercial opportunity. So the people that are trying to determine the age of the university is one of the purest curiosity driven bits of science you can do, but they have to develop sensors an other kinds of things that often turn into commercially viable products. Even curiosity driven research generates ideas and technologies that turn out to be socially beneficial. I guess we find out how old the 47 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 universe is, right. I’'m not sure everyone wakes up in the morning going “how old is the universe today?” But that’s curiosity driven research. But it has a lot of residual benefit. But companies, I think understand that. We work real closely with companies in terms of research that we develop. We work with private enterprise. So over, at least seventy percent, somewhere in that range, seventy, seventy-five percent of our inventions go to companies. They are not spin offs. We only do spinoffs with about twenty-five percent, thirty percent of the technologies we develop. Lots of technologies are not suitable to be companies. They’re complimentary to existing technologies. A lot of our spin off companies are doing research back at the university developing technology they then license. That’s part of the virtuous cycle of having companies located here is they pay for research to develop technology that they then license into their company. So we have seventy, seventy-five percent of our inventions in any given year go to existing corporate partners. So we’ve had an awful lot of success with people partnering with us. We have developed approaches to that partnership that create certainty for the companies. One of the things that used to drive companies crazy is they would fund research, but they would have no certainty that they would have access to the results of that research. We developed some very simple processes using option agreements that we can do in conjunction with a commercial sponsored research agreement that gives companies certainty over their access to any discovery that they fund. It’s also made it much easier for companies, who historically their impulse would have been to do their own R&D in their own labs because they provide some certainty, but at the same time, their own labs have a talent limitation on how much talent they can 48 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 employ. They can employ a lot more talent by doing research at the university because they can dip into the diversity of talent and assemble the right talent team and equipment for whatever it is they want to do. The university has a tremendous advantage in that regard, but if we can’t provide them certainty in the ability to own and deploy those discoveries, then that’s a cost to them. It’s amazing to me, I guess, how simple the solution was and how come nobody had ever done it before? But we use the option agreements because we have to use an option agreement because we don’t know what’s going to be discovered, right. It’s uncertain. But we can provide certainty in the use of whatever is discovered with the option agreement. That’s been huge because it gives companies the certainty of making this investment, knowing they’ll be able to benefit from the investment, and it’s an ongoing partnership for us as well because that option agreement is a discussion we continue to have and then we place more research. On our commercial sponsored research in 2005 it was running probably in the range of about $22 million. Last year we booked around $50 million. So we more than doubled that through this partnership approach, by having staff that actually worked directly with the company and the implementation of these research projects. So our staff provide the support on that. The commercial sponsored research agreements still all run through the research organization. All the billing and collections are done by the research organization, but we have people who are project managers and liaisons with the companies to make that process go very smoothly. So that’s been a real big deal. I think that’s an awful lot of why companies don’t really see us as competitors. We’re a resource for them. We complement what they want to do. Then we’ve actually 49 13 January 2012 Jack Brittain developed mechanisms for really working productively together and making sure that they get their projects done—on time is another big issue we struggle with (laughs). Getting the faculty to do things on time is a real critical part of working with corporate entities also. AP: How many people are in the enterprise now, including the TCO office and Tech Ventures? JB: The TCO office has, I think, right at thirty; it may be twenty-nine, twenty-eight, maybe thirty-one, full-time professionals. Then we have at any point in time as many as fifty student interns that are engaged in some way. One of the things that we did early on, it’s been a great partnership for us, is we fund the intellectual property clinic at the law school. So all of those students who are pursuing intellectual property studies end up coming up and doing internships and working on transactional work at our office. We have a very significant number of MBA students who are working in our office. We have a lot of PhDs in various technical areas that are over doing internships. So that’s a very dynamic environment. Our software development center has twenty or...they may have on their own twenty interns at any point in time that are almost quasi employees. I’m not counting that in the thirty. The software development center has probably another twenty people over there. Tech Ventures itself has, we just have six employees counting me, so there’s only five people who work in the Tech Ventures organization. Then on the faculty outreach we have Ron Weiss and Glenn Prestwich. But we’re not a huge administrative overhead. We actually try to do everything using students and providing the student experience. So even our faculty outreach programs and the various 50 Jack Brittain 13 January 2012 seminars we do we have students involved in the planning of that and the delivery of it. We use a lot of student interns. My office, in addition to all the graduate student interns that we have, my office started having undergraduate interns. So we made a commitment to giving young students an internship experience that would allow them to get other internships on campus. So we have a preference for freshman and sophomore interns. They can work in our office. They do a lot of work on the LEGO league, but they also work in marketing and just support activities, event support and stuff. Our goal with them is to train them to be the best interns on campus and go into other internships on campus, which they have done and it’s been great. One of our interns for last year works for Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute now. We have one that’s over in mechanical engineering. One actually took a corporate internship. But, yeah, that’s what we want to have happen. One of them is actually working in sports marketing for the Colorado Rockies. So we’ve done that. My whole organization constantly thinks about how do we involve students. I feel like one of our great strengths is it is total mission integration. We’re not a support unit outside the University. We want to be totally integrated. We want to be integrated with the educational enterprise. We want to have very active engagement with the learning environment on campus and be contributing to that. AP: I feel like that is a great place to sum up what we have been talking about, but I want to give you a chance to talk about anything that I haven’t asked you about before we rap up for today. Sl Jack Brittain JB: 13 January 2012 Well, I think 'm arriving at brain dead here. I feel like I’ve been plucked clean. But I guess the kind of the last thing we covered, and maybe we didn’t, I should have said it from the very beginning because it is vital is that for me the Tech Ventures is not a discontinuity in my career. Why I eventually decided to step down as dean, and part of stepping down as dean was I'd done it for ten years and I felt like it was time for some new ideas. Let’s give another shot. Let’s press reset maybe. But also for me Tech Ventures has been an opportunity to carry forward this notion I brought in to becoming dean of experience enhanced learning, of creating this learning environment where students could pursue their individual passions through affiliated, complimentary programs that really enhance the learning environment. So that’s why I chose to have my office with the education programs and not tech commercialization. Tech commercialization is by far my largest reporting unit, it’s got the most people in it, it’s got the most senior management in it also. But I feel like that is an organization that I can administer. I have good leadership over there. I can administer that. But where I really hope I’'m making a leadership contribution is on the educational and faculty side, on really living up to the total mission integration idea and living up to that idea of we’re making it a better university for everybody who attends school here, for the people who work here. It’s fun. It’s a more fun place. We like having fun. I like having fun. We like that the programs that we provide have this level of enrichment for the students that we’re able to come in contact with. So for me this is, there’s a long kind of thread of continuity in everything that I’ve done and that’s what keeps me excited every single day is the opportunity to really build on that and make it more effective, more impactful and to also reach more students. 52 Jack Brittain AP: 13 January 2012 You’ve got great students going out into the world and coming back to us in different ways. JB: That’s right. AP: So I think you’ve accomplished that mission. Thanks, Jack. JB: Thank you. It’s been fun. END OF INTERVIEW 53 S ., T R’ - PR R 1T .EHL'F TRT Bgy - R f‘l,v‘v":l e, B o . - J' 3 ] 5 ' SR - eI & = : " . ) . ¢ \‘bm. ¥ ) ‘ L 3 (A - '3 i . u ..T. i T-'Uwfl ) vJ Pgy .1."',55.. rr...l—-' T "3.‘. R \fb Sy \ ""1‘.‘.e >¥ ) r o n“»;‘\ I'. 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