Creative Confidence and Moral Courage: The Leadership Traits Business Schools Should Be Betting On

Student disengagement, the rise of AI, and many other pressures on higher ed are stacking up fast. How to change the world and Instructure just released a white paper on the power of mass experiential learning. And yes, I said it, mass experiential learning. You have to check this out. It's a roadmap for reenergizing students and building the skills they'll need in an AI driven world. A link to part one of the white paper is in the episode description. And now enjoy this episode sponsored by our friends at How to Change the World. Hey everybody, this is Darren Francis with Harbinger Lane, and this is Signals in Higher Education podcast. We are doing a deep dive into everything experiential learning right now, and I have a special guest, Doctor. Dale Smith, the dean of the College of Business Administration at Loyola Marymount University. Welcome, Dale. Thanks, Darren. It's nice to be here. Yeah, glad to have you join me for this conversation, and I'm really interested in exploring what it means to do business education in the context of a Jesuit university. I think about social justice when I think about Jesuit education, and I'm really curious to talk about the context of how you bring to life a Jesuit education in the context of a business school, and of course, that'll blend into our experiential learning discussion. But before we get started, do you mind maybe just talking a little bit about your path to becoming dean? Mean, you've had to say yes to business school and yes to Jesuit education in whichever order had occurred for We'd love to hear about it. Yeah, so interestingly enough, think I could go back ages when I was trying to figure out what did I want to be when I grew up. And like everybody else, you're in college, you're taking a variety of liberal arts classes. I remember taking a business law class and thinking, well this is cool, and I'll take the LSAT and I'll go to law school. I mean, had always thought I wanted to be a lawyer, so this is going way back to undergraduate years. And I took the business law class and it was interesting, but I realized this is not what I wanna do. And so I figured, oh, I'll get a master's degree and I'll still continue exploring it. And I ended up doing my master's at USC and really focusing in on organizational communication. And I think that's when I found that path to business. And as a graduate student, and then I was in the doctoral program there, and as a graduate student, I was taking a lot of courses in what's now the Marshall School of Business at USC, and discovering, wow, I love the dynamics, the people aspect, what does it mean to manage people and values and culture? And those were the things that started to excite me, I realized this is what I love doing. And I was working part time in the business school at the time. So when I ended up putting my dissertation committee together, I actually chose somebody from what's now the Annenberg School of Communication and Marshall School of Business. So it was a very interdisciplinary degree that looked at the intersection of communication and organizational behavior, and the business context. And that's what got me super excited. And then you finish your doctorate, and you start applying to schools, and had a number of opportunities, and I ended up going to Georgetown University. First introduction to Jesuit business education. Being sort of the curious one, there was a wonderful opportunity the summer before I started teaching, and I still remember this at Georgetown, it was a program that was done by Campus Compact, and it really fits in nicely with what we're gonna talk about, because that opportunity was to learn how to integrate social justice into your teaching. And knowing I was going to a Jesuit business school, I thought this would be part of my educational transformation. And Campus Compact had us working that week with a group called So Others May Eat, S O M A. And it was a sense of working in the local community, working with homeless populations, and basically a soup kitchen. And it completely made me rethink the way I would be a teacher, that in engaging in audiences that I hadn't had much contact with as a child, all of a sudden I'm connecting and learning from what was at that point our community partner that we were working with, so others may eat. And that community partnership made me think about how do we develop our values? How do we develop the way we will be in the world? And it was an intense week that eventually resulted in us working on our syllabi and how we were gonna teach the course. And for the next, four or five years, I was teaching an organizational behavior course where the final capstone project that students worked on all semester was this deep dive into working with a community partner on all kinds of issues that were related to nonprofits, that were related in some respect to social justice, now I would say related to the sustainable development goals in some meaningful way. And this is going back forty years. And the class would understand theories of organizational behavior in terms of the way they experienced it playing out. And they would learn not just from the classroom and their peers, but they're learning from their community partner and that's shaping who they would become as they went out into the business world as business managers. So I share that story because I think that was a foundational experience of the teacher I would become, the university ecosystem that felt really comfortable. My husband was teaching at another institution, so next step was a joint career opportunity, and that's how we ended up on the West Coast. And then spent the next twenty years of my career at University of San Francisco, which was another Jesuit school. And again, I did not grow up Catholic, so but this was something that really spoke to me in terms of the Jesuit perspective of formation and how students become who they are in their world, in engaging with the world. And as a professor who taught everything from power and politics and organizations, to organizational behavior, to small group dynamics, these were the courses I was teaching at the time. And that just enabled me to integrate what I had learned and how my formation was happening, which was very experiential. And continued to be involved in what we call service learning. Was very involved at the University of San Francisco in a group, the McCarthy Center for Service and the Common Good. So these were all shaping experiences for me. And then, you know, when you're in a university and you've chosen the academic life opportunities come your way, chair of the department, I had a Fulbright in Hong Kong and continued the service learning with audiences in the Pacific Rim. And then when I came back, I came back as an associate dean, and once you're an associate dean, then schools start talking to you about becoming a dean. And that was my first foray out of Jesuit education. I went to a university in upstate New York as the dean of their business school. Then my world kind of shifted in terms of my responsibilities. I was out of the classroom, but now shaping what would the curriculum look like? How could we differentiate ourselves as a business school? And they said that living in upstate New York was one of those things where you'll get used to the weather. It's not about the weather, it's clothing choice. Let's just say when Southern California came knocking at my door and my husband's in the background saying, Choose the palm trees. That's how I ended up at Loyola Merrimont University, where I've spent the last eight years as the dean of the college, working with an incredibly talented group of staff and faculty, and really shaping what can we do in our college to make a difference, to have a distinctive education that helps our business students maybe stand out from business students at other AACSB accredited schools across the globe. So that's the Reader's Digest version of my career. Yeah. Well, no, it's great, and it's exciting, and you've already got me thinking into the topic areas that we're going to cover. The one thing that I take away from, especially even just your own way in which you plugged in and engaged and were lit up to pursue this path, is sort of the something like service learning. I've been talking with some other founders of companies about when they're building technology for learning, they're often seeking to track something other than learning outcomes. They're often seeking to track something beyond what is typically tracked. I think it's because learning outcomes for learning outcomes' sake are great, but it seems like you've identified something early in your career that let you up and that motivated you to propel forward, right? It feels a lot like, as we talk about business education in the context of a Jesuit education at Loyola Merrimount, you'll start to help us understand what you're building as fuel inside of the student to persist and to hopefully carry these characteristics forward. So you have a pretty distinctive mission at LMU to develop business leaders with moral courage and creative confidence. Those words are not typical business words, but they draw back. But they can be, they can be, And they can be, and I, well, I want to hear about that. I want to hear you help me understand why it's at the center, and to be a force for good in the global community, all of this component, which is obviously very Jesuit in its sounding, but help me understand what it's like in practice, too. Sure. You know, it's funny, when you're an AACSB accredited school, everything is about mission. And AACSB accredits what about seven percent of the schools around the world. So it's a very distinctive thing that requires us to really think about how do we operationalize mission. When I came to LMU and I started to do my listening tour to understand who our faculty were at this Jesuit institution and what were they passionate about and what spoke to them. And I shared the themes that came out of that listening session, and it was very clear to me that there was something different, there was some secret sauce. And it's not uncommon, I'm very active with the Jesuit business schools, not only in the United States, but around the world through different board positions that I've held. And get the sense that there is something different and distinctive about being Jesuit educated and going to a Jesuit business school. As I was on this listening tour, I'm hearing this. We get our strategic planning committee together. We spend a lot of time in the conference room, lots of Post it notes and poster boards and things of that nature to really capture what are the themes that were coming out, the people we're talking about, the students we're talking about, that our alumni had shared with us. And I remember one of my marketing professors saying, let's come up with something that's really not twenty sentences long, but something that's really, his words were shareable and wearable, wearable and shareable. And so we took the themes and wordsmithed it, and that's how we came up with our mission of advancing our students, developing business leaders with moral courage and creative confidence to be a force for good. And the way we looked at moral courage and creative confidence as being very distinctive is we talked about moral courage capturing that ethical perspective of what does ethical leadership look like? What does ethical leadership feel like? The ability to stand up and say, hey, I disagree. Moral courage, the ability to look around and say, This isn't right, what we're doing. And we knew that in our classes, and then the case studies that our students were doing, and in the speakers that were coming to engage with our students in class, they were talking about what happens when there's those hard decisions that a leader has to make in an organization. And it's really easy if you just look at it one perspective of, well, we do this because this is what makes us most profitable, without looking at the larger context and the ecosystem, is this good for our employees, is this good for the communities in which we live and work? And this theme of what does it take to form a student, you know, eighteen to twenty two, or even in our graduate students, early 20s, early 30s, to start thinking about how they want to be in their organization where they're sitting at a table or in a meeting, and they're not afraid to raise their hand and say, you know, I think we're missing a perspective, we're missing a stakeholder. It's not about maximizing shareholder value. Not that I want to raise or shape or educate, you know, naive advocates. A company can't do well unless they're also profitable. But that there's more than just doing well. Could you do good by doing well? Could you invest in your communities? And so that's where the theme of moral courage came from. Many different ways we operationalize it in this college and in the speakers that we bring in. But the most important thing that we really wanted our students to have this formation experience is to take what was happening in their foundation of their liberal arts education, where they're taking courses to help with this Jesuit concept of formation, of who they want to be in the world and what values they'll have, and how do we bring that into a business school? And that's where the words moral courage came from. And I will also say for me, I always thought about moral courage as the kind of leader who has a moral compass, that there's going to be tough decisions that come across your desk. And there's a wonderful book by Bill George called True North. It's one of my absolute favorite leadership books ever. I have one autographed copy of the book on my desk, on my office. And then the other thing I have on my desk, these aren't just words, is I keep this on my desk. And this is a compass that's just right here and it sits and it reminds me always to make a decision what's in the best interest of our students, what's in the best interest of the larger ecosystem in the community, how might this shape the community. So I'm always thinking that way, and I wanted us to have that in our mission. And I think the most exciting thing that happened my first year as dean here at LMU, is I'm invited to the Accounting Banquet Society that's completely put together by the students. It's a brilliant event every year. And they had a theme, and every year it has a theme. And that first year, which was the first time our students at LMU's College of Business saw our mission, the theme was moral courage and creative confidence. To be an effective accountant, whether you go work for one of the big four, or whether you go to work in any other small regional firm or in another context, It's this is who you are. This is what it means to be an ethical leader, to practice accounting in an ethical way. So moral courage was really resonating with the students. And so it's talked about not just in one class on business ethics. I mean, we have a cap stone on business ethics and sustainability. But moral courage comes out from the very first course that our students will take in a business school. And it's woven into many of the courses that they'll take. So So by the time they're seniors, this is just who they are. They think about, Where's my true north? What does a moral compass look like? How do I have the confidence to stand up and say to my boss, who is above me, this isn't right. This is going in the wrong direction. And feel safe in doing that and recognizing if it's not safe, and I'm gonna lose my job to ask the question, is this the organization I wanna be in if moral courage doesn't exist? And there's so many wonderful corporate examples of leaders from the C suite down to mid level managers who had to make those tough decisions and what went into it. So our students are very much taking courses in philosophy and ethics, in the liberal arts. They're getting that foundation. So by the time we get them, particularly in upper division, they're not only talking about moral courage and what it means to be an ethical leader, but they have all of this foundation that came from that liberal arts education and their philosophy and theology courses that have them think about it. So that's what moral courage is about for us. That's great. That's great. Let's see, the other one you said was creative confidence. Mean, you want me to check? Yeah, well, was going to say there is the pairing of moral courage with creative confidence, which is interesting. Yeah, and they kind of go together in the sense that to have moral courage sometimes requires creative confidence. But when we were talking about that competency and wanting it to be in our mission, we said, what does creative confidence look like as we're forming our students, as we're helping them become somebody that could transform both an organization and the communities in which they're working and living? And the words that came to mind really, we borrowed a little bit from a lot of the work that was being done at IDL and IDO dot org and thinking about how they were using that entrepreneurial mindset to think differently, whether it was using design thinking methods that was an IDO thing, or whether it was just, what does it mean to create environments where people will share their ideas, they're not afraid to fail, they'll have this agility about them, and we can put them in an environment where we're helping them develop that, not only the knowledge of what is creative confidence, but also the ability and the skill sets that go with that. So at every yield event that we do, every prospective student event that we do where we're trying to recruit students, talk about our mission. And when I get to talking about creative confidence, I share what creative confidence is fundamentally about is not being afraid to take a risk and not being able to be afraid to fail. Because failing forward is very much entrepreneurial language and we want to develop your entrepreneurial mindset. That's what creative confidence is about. But around here, we think of fail as FAIL, first attempt in learning. And that's how I talk about it with our first year students, our seniors, our graduate students. It just captures that sense of we want you to start to experiment, to pilot, to take a risk, to not be afraid to pivot when new information comes in, and developing the confidence in yourself, that self awareness that, hey, we could try something different. We need to be able to pivot. There's new information that's coming in, a new opportunity we want to be able to go after. So that's where creative confidence is. You develop that comfort, that mindset, that skill set, that's going to enable you to make a difference in the organizations you work with. So what I like to say is, we're all entrepreneurs. We may not have our own businesses and startups, but the way we want to be as business leaders is have that kind of mindset. Yeah, it feels very much like a handbook for startup founders, as you describe this. One of the things that we see a lot of times when we're working with new founders is driving towards an outcome with urgency sounds like a great thing, but I think if you insert this concept of both moral courage and creative confidence, you can maybe more confidently be driving with urgency or in pursuit of your mission, but not at the expense of other you know, other things, and in particular, you know, the effects of the business that you're building the community, on your staff, there's a lot of different variables that this draws in. So I really love the framing. You know, it's interesting that you picked up on that, because that's really where those two competencies go together, and it really ties back to Jesuit formation and Jesuit education. All Jesuit universities and schools really talk about the idea of what does it mean to be with and for others. And theologically, that's how the Jesuits talk about what does it mean to be with and for others. But when you think about it from a business context, imagine a C suite leader who is inculcating those ideas, which are humanistic ideals, they're not religiously determined. But what does it mean to be with the people I'm working with? With my customers? What does it mean to be with and for my customers? With and for my stockholders? With and for my employees, with and for the communities in which our organization is producing product or providing service? So when you start to think about it in that context, it all makes perfect business sense. And if we can create, in this business school, business leaders with those two dimensions of moral courage and creative confidence, and recognizing that you're doing that with that background of Jesuit business education of what does it mean to lead with others and for others, that really changes the way you approach leadership. In leadership theory, people might talk about it as servant leadership. Know, there's a zillion theories out there, but I think that's the notion of, I'm not at the top of the pyramid leading down, but I'm maybe at the bottom supporting up or I'm walking with. And I think that's the key. Love it. I'm getting such a good education here. I've built a bit of a curriculum for startup founders to help them through the process of getting their first signed agreement. I call the process not sales. I basically always I frame the idea of sales as being a dead concept in B2B, and in particular in higher education, that the former concepts around selling were always conveyed in a predatory nature, and there was a client and supplier, and so what we've done at my company is we've developed a framework that we just call the co readiness framework, and it's really establishing with somebody very transparently what you're for, right, and what trying to establish, and then if there is interest, that's great, but you want to sort of work together with that potential client through a process of discovery of each other. Like, what are your, like, both at an institution, what are the processes to getting this off the ground? And for me, as the founder, maybe, what are some of the concerns that I have about, you know, about how this works? But just going through it in collaborative state. Yes, And so when you talk about with and for the customer, and you frame all these really great things around moral courage and creative confidence, I feel like I just need to have everybody go take a course at LMU, Heidi Vista School, and then come back and join me, and we'll talk through how to be effective leaders. This is Well, You know, it's funny. I think what you just captured is you described your own business, is this notion of whether you're working with founders or anybody else. The key is relationship, not transactional, right? It's a relational thing that we're co creating together, as opposed to this transactional thing where I have a product, you're going to buy it, or I have a service that'll help your company and you're going to buy it, and then it ends. To be effective, I mean, even in old traditional sales, way we used to talk, to be effective isn't the first time I sell you something, great, you bought it, but it only works if you want to come back and you tell ten other people to work with me, right? That's when they're successful. That's because we developed a relationship, there's trust, there's integrity in the process. If you have a problem, you're not afraid to come and talk to me about it, or if I have an issue or something my company can't do for you, if we're trustworthy in a relationship and it's not just a transaction, then we can have that conversation and do joint problem solving. It's a very collaborative process that builds credibility, it builds reputational capital, and it doesn't matter if it's a restaurant and it's a meal, it's how you are treated. If it's just, you know, you're at an expensive restaurant and you pay and that's it. But if you're made to feel like, no, we're developing something special here, you are going to tell other people, and you're going to come back. And when there is an issue, you're not going be afraid to talk about it. And I think to be effective in business, that's got to be part of the culture. Yeah, I can't agree more. Well, is great. Let's talk a little bit about I want to move into the curriculum on some level, but I've also tagged that you have something called the CBA Advantage Program. And I wonder if we should start there, because I know this gets into mission competencies. Sure, yeah. So one of the things that was important to me when I got here to LMU is we were trying to figure out what's the product that we create as an educated student, and that's done in collaboration with lots of people across the university. And we were saying, but what's going make our business students stand out? So we had this idea that not everything that a student learns and not how a student learns how to be in the world comes from textbooks and classrooms and lectures. It's something more. So we imagined, working with a group of people, what would it look like to establish a really strong extracurricular and co curricular program that is completely connected to our mission? So we divided our mission into these five competencies, moral courage and creative confidence were two of them. You know, leadership was one. The notion of being a global citizen, you know, what does it mean to be a force for good in the world? And then obviously the knowledge, the discipline knowledge. So you have knowledge, moral courage, creative confidence, leadership, and global citizenship. And we said, those are the competencies that we want every one of our graduates to have when they finish their undergraduate degree, and let's build programs. You know, a speaker comes in, a kid goes, gets extra credit points for going to a speaker, and that's sort of it. And we said, that's not what Jesuit education's about. So how could we make this CBA Advantage Program, that's what we called it, lives on a phone, on an app, and you go to events, you go to workshops, you get little badges and certificates. There's hundreds of things that you can do. But what makes CDA Advantage distinctive is you don't just do it for the points, although it is gamified. What you have to do to get those points is you have to really reflect, go through a discernment and reflection process, which is inherently Jesuit, to start to think, what did I learn? How did it help me think differently? From that experience, how might I think differently? How might I behave differently? What are the nuggets from what I just experienced that I'm going to remember, and that I can use in some other context? So every single event or activity or workshop that a student goes through, whether they get certified in Excel or Bloomberg Market Concepts, there's a zillion things they can do. They actually have to write very short, it can be bullet points, I mean, it's short content, short form stuff that this generation can handle, but it causes them to take that time out to reflect. Yeah, I heard a speaker, you know, last night we were all listening to the CFO of Trader Joe's, two nights ago, the CFO of Trader Joe's talk about what it meant to drive a values driven company. And the kids who were getting CBA advantage points for that, had to stop and think about what were they learning from Mitch Nadler, and what was he doing differently, and what did I like about him that is going make me think differently when I choose where I'm going to work, or when I'm managing a team, managing a crew. So they have to go through this reflection and discernment, and then share that information in the app. They can do it three or four sentences, a few bullet points, and then the app, the CBA Advantage app, which we built on the Suitable platform, that app allows a student to prepare for an internship. So now a student has this internship opportunity, there are fifty kids who are all competing for the same position, they all went to a good business school someplace, right? How's our kids going to stand out differently? Well, because they have that app, they can go back and look at two, three, four years of those things that they experienced outside the classroom, and what they learned from it, and how it shaped who they are, and how they think. And now they're one on one with you, Darren, as the prospective employer. And they can say, you know, yeah, I've got the background in marketing, but I don't want to just tell you what I know. Let me tell you what I can do. And they start to talk about what they did that could be outside of the classroom that really shaped who they'll be in your organization if you hire them. And so that app allows them to take all of the reflections that they've done over a four year experience and really think about what all of that means and how they're differently. So they're not just going to tell you what classes they took and what knowledge they have. They're going to talk about values and behaviors and attitudes. They're going to talk about their challenges, how they saw opportunities. It's a very different kind of piece of their educational background. They'll remember those experiential opportunities they had when they were at a business plan competition. And it wasn't so much who won the competition, but what it was like working on the team and when they had a challenge and how to wrestle with that. And the questions that we ask kids for the points that they're earning in CBA Advantage gets them thinking deeper about the experience. Yeah, it sounds like it really would. Yeah, and it's the kind of thing that I feel like is a gap in a lot of education today from knowledge to application. I love that you've just put this We force the application, because if I just say, Tell me three things you learned from last night, that's not meaningful. But if I asked you, How did what you hear last night help you think differently, and what might you do differently as a result of what you heard? You're going to think deeper. And by the way, AI can't do that for you, right? So you're going to think about it differently. It's not just executing on the question. You have to make some judgment. You have to critically evaluate. You have to discern. Captures a different way of being. It's the only way I can, I think that's very powerful. So why don't we pivot a little bit over into what actually happens from your standpoint around experiential learning in the program. So one of the things that we've seen a lot of, and we know there's a lot of data out there about internships not being available, and so there's kind of a call for different types of experience being built into the curriculum or co curricular. Talk about what is the design at the program level for building experience in? Clearly, great opportunity to go and hear the Trader Joe's CFO talk, but I mean, so they're getting these different types of opportunities, but what about just Yeah, because that happens, all schools have great speakers, so it's not that. That's not the piece of it. Right. Yeah, what is it that, and how do you think about it programmatically? Are there opportunities before you get to that capstone? Oh, sure. Experience learning and such. Well, know, it's funny. We start with experiential learning in the very first year, and there's experiential learning happening across the campus because the Jesuit pedagogy really causes you to think in experiential ways. It's the experience, it's the reflection, it's how you think about and discern about that reflection, and then how that might change your behavior. So that cycle, which is a common learning cycle that's used in lots of universities, we're very conscious of because we think that's how formation happens. And, you know, in our business school, you can look across the curriculum in the different classes and we say that, you know, you can go and do a lecture, but quite frankly, you can get online and get content, just pure content, lecture content, from experts around the world in just about any topic anymore. So something's gotta happen differently in the classroom. So we talk about it much more as philosophy. And I remember even thinking about when we were having these faculty development workshops in the College of Business, we called it what's happening in the classroom next door, so that faculty could talk about and share what was really helping students learn in new ways. So we don't have necessarily a top down approach to you must do this. But what we discovered is that people are doing experiential learning, problem based learning, applied learning in just about every course. And we start them very consciously in the very first course that all first year business students take with us. It's called Business for Good. And we give them a project that is very similar to maybe a cap student senior project at a lot of business schools around the world. But we do it in the first year and we turn it upside down and it's a bottom up approach to learning. They are working on a project with students to create a product or a service that they could introduce in an impoverished part of the world, a world where there are multiple problems. We work with NGOs around the world to do this project, and our students are interviewing and learning from community members that live in India, in Honduras, in Mexico, in Tanzania, or in Africa. So they're talking to community members and understanding what those community members are experiencing and then trying to take what they're learning in the class, these business principles, how could we apply that and come up with an idea that we could then take back to this community and say, would this work? Know, tell me, you know, are we in the right direction or getting feedback to test a concept. And while the students aren't necessarily going to the community, although we do have lots of opportunities where students can do that, that first year is giving them a sense of a business principle or concept that I learn until I have a chance to talk to a prospective customer, who are the stakeholders that would be involved in this project, and test that idea out with them, and then learn from what I hear from them, and then tweak and iterate to get the concept better, and to recognize that I can't continue the work unless I'm also profitable. They're learning all about business models, but that I can also impact people and planet, etcetera. So it's a very triple bottom line kind of orientation to business, but they're doing that experiential piece in the very first year. And then all during their four year experience as undergrads, and this happens in our graduate programs as well, things are very project based. They'll work on a project with a community member for a company. I just sat in one of our marketing classes literally on Wednesday afternoon of this week, and they're working with a company around a marketing idea to help the company imagine how do they market a product that had very traditional values and a traditional audience, and do it for a Gen Z. And they go through all of the processes, so all the theories they're learning of how you might develop brand strategy. But then they had to work with the company, talk to customers, do interviews, you know, very hands on learning activity, distill all of that information through this experiential learning cycle, if you will, and then present. You know, in the room they were presenting to the CMO, to the brand managers, trying to remember who the other person was, but basically that they were presenting and at the end of, the kids presented on Monday, three of the projects, three of the projects on Wednesday, and then the CMO is going to pick two of those projects, and then they'll do the creative for it. And this is all happening in two marketing classes, and our professors have brought them together. One group's working on the strategy and envisioning some creative, and then they'll turn it over to the creative people, the class, and they'll actually work together with them, what they learned on the strategy side to now create things. You know, when the CMO says to the kids, hey, the stuff that you're coming up with, the ideas, the insights that you're sharing from the process you went through to learn, that stuff, you know, we're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to Madison Avenue to come up with, right? So it's a real world project, it's problem based learning at its finest, it's experiential, it's building a student's knowledge, but it's also building ability, skill sets, creative confidence. One of the teams presented that also showed the moral courage coming out because they took something that was really going to be edgy for this particular very traditional company. But they did it in such a way of, if you want more demographic, you're going to have to appeal to them in a different way. And how can you do that consistent with your corporate values? So it was really good. It pushed the company. I give a lot of credit to the company who decided that'll be one of the ideas they move forward with. So as I start to think about some of the things that happened, a couple of weeks ago in the college, we had a big data thon. So there are students that are working in data analytics at both the graduate and undergraduate level. And the faculty invited fifteen schools in Southern California. There were about one hundred and fifty kids all in. And we worked with a company that gave us a dataset that was around a business for good idea. So that was gender equity and salary. There were two data sets. And another one was response time on when there's an emergency and you have to send helicopters out and you have to do that with the labor law. You know, really great sophisticated data sets. So the kids were working on how do we analyze this data and make recommendations and tell a story. But it's real data. It's a real problem set. And they have to do it with this perspective of business for good. In other words, decisions that you make, the recommendations you make are going to affect communities and people. And so that's the kinds of things that and for every single discipline in the college, I could probably share other experiential things that we're doing. And then in the university, we have a center for service and action where students can do projects there. Remember a few years ago, we sent a group of kids to Africa who were working with women entrepreneurs and learning from the women entrepreneurs there, and then also volunteering and doing work. And the debriefing process on that was just brilliant in terms of how students thought about the issues that they were being confronted with. And for many of them, it was the first experience, not only out of country, but out of state, and some out of county. Right, right. Reminds me, was going to ask you a bit, given your international experience, whether or not you feel like the current state of experiential learning in business schools, if you notice that it's different in different countries, if you notice that it's the way that schools are structured, are they ahead of us? What's the No, no, I think you're raising a good issue. I think doing experiential learning, an approach where the knowledge is really created from the direct transformation of experience, I mean, to be able to do that well, you can't do it in a class with five hundred students, right? Mean, that would be so difficult to do. So I think our business school and other Jesuit business schools around the world who are all able to do this learn by doing, coupled with this reflection process, I think that's much easier to do when you've got classes of thirty, maybe even forty. But ideally, if you've got classes between twenty and thirty, the key components of what experiential learning is fundamentally about to really develop this critical thinking and problem solving and skill development kinds of things. To do that, you kind of have to have small classes. Mean, I am sure there are schools around the world that have opportunities for students to do it maybe outside of the classroom, but to actually be in a classroom around the world, or here in the United States where you're at a giant school and there's four people in the class, I don't know that you're gonna do that much. Maybe in the labs you can do some of that, but what I can tell you is in classes where, I mean, at LMU there may be five classrooms across the campus that hold more than thirty, thirty five students. Our learning spaces are intentionally smaller. So that makes it easier to do that kind of process oriented method, if you will. I think it is harder. Are we ahead of everybody? No. I think experiential learning is happening in the most innovative schools across the globe. And I think it's really unfair that higher ed is being so criticized and crucified in the press these days for not providing a value education. Because the truth is, when you actually take a chance to go deep and find out what's actually happening on a campus, how are students learning? When there's a lot of experiential learning, problem based learning going on, and it's coupled with this reflection process, that is developing a student in a very different way than a student who's in a classroom with four hundred, one thousand students. But I don't think our institution is necessarily ahead. I think we're definitely one of the leaders in this space. I think most Jesuit institutions are because Jesuit pedagogy, that's how we operationally define is that we're going through those processes of reflection and discernment and how that transforms who we are in the world. Lots, I mean, when I talk to colleagues through the International Association of Jesuit Business School, the Jesuit business schools around the world are definitely doing this kind of work. When I go to an international AACSB meeting, and different schools are sharing the innovation that they're doing around curriculum development and how they're using everything from internships to pedagogy inside the classroom to help shape who a student is, you can see great, brilliant examples all over the world. And I think that's what frustrates those of us who are in higher ed to read how we're being butchered in the press about we're not providing something of value. And I feel like saying, You don't know what we're doing. I don't know what your vision of education is, but come and spend a week with us before you write your article about saying there's no value in higher ed, and how we've just been crucified on the press. Because I will put our students who go through this experience up against a student who hasn't been in this experience, and I'll show you a different kind of leader, I'll show you the person who was formed very differently. Now, that's not to say there aren't other great experiences that can help shape who somebody becomes in the world, and not everyone has the same access to an education as we hope that we can provide, and we continue to try to provide more and more access. I'm just saying that you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater and do the homework. I think we're seeing it not just in colleges, but in the best education in primary schools and high schools are diving deep into this, particularly in an AI world. I mean, what makes us fundamentally human? When we start to deconstruct that, what comes out are things that you need to give students experience in, and then you have to do guided learning. How do I make sense of that distinctiveness? And it's when you have that gifted teacher who can help a student do that, that you create these memorable moments from a student's educational experience that is second to nug. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. I think there's a I'm inspired with a lot of the conversations that I'm having with different types of institutions. Really, I just had a conversation with the rector, which is basically the president at this Brazilian university, he was talking about, they're an engineering school, and he was talking about how fundamentally they've seen this massive shift in their own retention of engineering students because they've always sort of they used to always have a almost a pride in the fact that they couldn't retain students because students would quit because then only the best ones would stay. Right. And I think what he learned was that there are ways that we can enable a lot more of the students who are dropping out, and so they created this idea, or started to really double down on this idea of human centered engineering, which is really a lot of what you're talking about. Oh, absolutely. That's when we talked about these concepts of really driving home, in that case for an engineering student, not just the value of building the bridge, but the value of what that bridge will be in the community, and going deep into the community itself to find out what the needs are, and really attaching your work to a level of value and meaning that if you just left it on the page of the textbook or in the lecture theatre, you would completely miss so much of what sort of propels you forward. That's such a great example, because, I mean, human centered design very much is that sort of design thinking approach, and it's recognizing that you're not just learning from experts, you have to learn from users. And, you know, going into the community and learning from people, it just fundamentally changes what you come up with. And the fact that they're doing that, I mean, I can only imagine that if you're an engineer of an engineering mind, and you're designing for people, you're not designing just on the technical specs, you're thinking about every aspect of it. And that's going to create a pride in what you're doing that's very different. You're feeling it in the heart, not just the head. In fact, it's funny when students create products, and our entrepreneurship program generates a lot of startup and new ideas and new products. We've got some really cool experiential programs that bring engineering students, science and business together, they're creating. And I always get a question from a student, Well, if I create this here, are going to steal my IP or take a piece of it? And my classic response is, No, I take equity in hearts and minds. In other words, I want provide you with the I want you to feel it here so that you can pay it forward. Twenty years from now or sooner when you're incredibly successful, you're going to remember where you got all of this. And then you're going to want to come and mentor the next generation. If your company makes it big, maybe you'll fund that best experience that a donor funded for you to be able to do. But I said, So no, our equity stake is in hearts and minds, and that's how a university should function. Now, easy for me to say that at a small university, I'm sure the research in universities take a very different perspective, but No, I mean, it makes a ton of sense. I feel like we've covered a lot of ground today. You've given me a real view into business education in the context of the Jesuit philosophy and design, but also how you've really sharpened the experiential learning journey for students. But I wonder, from here, where you sit today, looking out, we always are in uncertain times, but they feel more uncertain today for various reasons. I just wonder, what is your biggest hope or dream for where a lot of these great possibilities can flourish and grow five years from now? Yeah, it's a tough time to be in the world right now, right? Think ironically, it probably goes back to my hopes and aspirations probably go back to our mission statement of what does it mean to be business as a force for good in the global community? You know, when I get together annually with my colleagues from Jesuit business schools from around the world, and I see the collaboration that's happening and the research opportunities for faculty to work together across Global North and Global South, I feel like what we're doing really matters. It's important. And my hope is that we can continue to create understanding across the globe. Pope Francis probably said it best when he said, you know, our mission is we have to care for our common home. Well, what does it take to care for our common home? It's not one country acting alone around something. It really is going to require the kind of global collaboration and cooperation that my hope is in the next generation. I don't see it now. I mean, you see it in bits and pieces. But if we're educating the next generation to feel that business is so interconnected, the global community is so interconnected, I mean, supply chains are inherently global for any major product that we're making. What can we do to educate this generation to recognize that it's not just the business knowledge, but it's the ability to collaborate North and South, it's the ability to think of the global community as we all have this home that we share. So we're gonna have to work through our issues, we're gonna have to work through the conflict, we're gonna have to work through cultural differences. So my hope is that we continue to educate starting at a very, very early age, that there's more that brings us together, there's more that makes us similar in terms of our values and our attitudes and what we want. And to do that requires education. And how do we create education for everyone so that no matter whether they're at a small private school or a public institution or other modes of bringing people together to learn so that they can apply and make the world a better place. That's why I got into education. It's what motivates me. It's the joy of my job every single day that I think that what we're doing as educators is in some small incremental way, ultimately making the world a better place because we'll turn out these students who think about the world differently and who they want to be in that world. And if we can do that, then the planet that our generation has wrecked, I believe I'm really hopeful of what can happen. And there are these, I mean, the business school accreditor talks about business school accreditation is one of the most important things we can talk about in business schools is what's our societal impact? How are we making society better? So those aren't just words to me. I mean, live that. It's what keeps us going and what motivates me to tell my husband I'm not ready to retire. We still got work to do. We got work to do and we have to do it. And we can't do it alone in our own little ivory tower school. We have to do it in collaboration with other schools, not just in California, not just across the US, but truly this global community. So I'm super excited about those conversations continuing this summer when our school hosts the International Jesuit Business Schools to come and engage around these issues about disruption and sustainability and how do we make the world a better place and use business as a force for good. And then at the end of the week, we'll have a conference that is going to bring together all of the schools, not necessarily faith based institutions, but all of the schools who work on innovation around the sustainable development goals and care deeply. It's called PRIME, it's Principles of Responsible Management Education, and we're hosting the biennial North American meeting. And so that week and we threw another conference in the middle just because we could, and needed something to tie it all together. We'll bring corporate leaders and private and public sector leaders together with educators to do some trisector innovation around what can we do to make the global community better. That is so amazing. Think, now that goes on in what week in July? July twelfth through eighteenth, it's called The World Comes to LA, and you can read more about it on our website, no, it's not like a commercial, you can read more about it on our website, just click on LMU, The World Comes to LA. They are coming to play football too, but the last game in Los Angeles is played, I think, on July tenth, and our conference starts on the twelfth. Great, great. Well, I would encourage everybody to make it for important conferences like this in particular. It is kind of conference season as we think about a lot of options, but I really think three packaged into one week in LA sounds perfect to me. Well, thanks, Karen. This was fun. I mean, I love to talk about this stuff, so. Yeah. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time, and I look forward to learning more, and we'll talk to you again soon. Sounds good. Thanks so much.