I was pleased to participate recently in The Midwest Roundtable on Talent. The event brought together business leaders and presidents from more than 60 colleges and universities to exchange ideas about how to prepare students for success in the 21st century workplace. It’s a topic I care deeply about, and I enjoyed discussing Opportunity Education’s Quest Forward Academies and its Pathways Program with the group.
The Quest Forward Academies are powered by Opportunity Education’s Quest Forward Learning curriculum. It’s an approach to learning that focuses on giving students the skills to succeed in today’s world, and tomorrow’s. The Pathways Program, which begins in 9th grade and supports students for up to 10 years, brings the importance of career readiness into focus before students have made the commitment to attend college.
Real-life skills, career planning, financial literacy, and the important role that businesses play through internships and early jobs are things we need to be working on today if young people are going to live successful lives tomorrow.
Ever since I founded my first business in the 1970s, I have liked to be in the office and see people working. The idea that employees had to be supervised in order to be productive was branded on my brain. So, when the pandemic arrived, and it became clear that lockdown would keep many of my employees at home, I was more than worried. I had to take a deep breath and say to myself that if they could not be productive from home, I would have to take them off the payroll. No one wanted that.
My employees went home and continued to work using all our modern communication methods, and they did remarkably well even though I wasn’t with them. Our business did not slow down. For an old guy like me who has been managing people for so long, this was an enlightening reminder of what these times ask of business leaders.
We continue to face uncertainty and accelerated change. Even with the promise of vaccines for the COVID virus, we will have to make permanent adjustments in the way employees work, not just in terms of how they communicate but also when or if they will come into an office, the role of travel, the use of hotels, and the kinds of relationships any of us can have with our fellow workers and our clients and customers. The natural human tendency is to see these required changes as further burdens that make success more difficult, as if COVID is a business-unfriendly government administration that burdens us with new regulations. We would do better, however, to adopt the mindset of an entrepreneur and look for opportunities.
When I decided to send my employees home and see what happened to our productivity, I was running an experiment. I’d love to say that I had a special insight, that I knew in advance what the outcome would be, but the fact is that I only tried remote work because I had no other choice. Even so, it was an experiment and a successful one. And that’s what entrepreneurs do. Experiment. Entrepreneurs have an idea for a product or a method of production or distribution, but it is at best an educated guess. They have to try it out and see what happens. They don’t figure out the result in their minds; they let the market give them the results.
In this moment of profound and unexpected change, we all need to be entrepreneurs in our thinking, viewing change, even unwelcome change, as a chance to experiment and succeed. We need to look at employees at home and think, What a wonderful thing. Look at all the time saved! People who used to commute to offices in city centers have given up their commutes plus the time they used to spend getting ready for work. That might be a saving in time of 25%. They have also been freed to use their time as they think most productive. What might they do with it? How can their companies help them be most productive?
The shift to remote work is giving all businesses a new opportunity to innovate. It has never happened before, and we had better not miss it, because, in five years, I predict, the successful companies will be those who have learned to adjust all aspects of their work and policies to seize this moment. How does a decentralized workforce create opportunities for employers to hire people they would never have considered before? How can we align the incentives of remote workers with those of the company? We need to rethink compensation to reward the employee who gets inspired and works for twelve hours straight or otherwise contributes to the company’s success. We need to find new ways to manage employees and to evaluate performance – performance that produces results, not just looking busy.
We also need to remember that the success of a business depends on more than short-term productivity. We need to think beyond efficiency and find new ways to support our employees’ well-being and sense of purpose. When we were building Ameritrade, every Friday after the stock market closed, many of us went out for a drink to let off some steam and celebrate the week’s success. We had memorable office parties. My wife, Marlene, got inspired to bake birthday cakes for employees, and we found it meant a huge amount to people to be recognized in that way – decades later, former employees are still reminiscing about those birthday cakes.
I don’t know how you get the remote equivalent of an office party or a chance to share a personalized birthday cake with your co-workers, but I know that remote workers still need those things. I think employees will always need a desk in an office, even if they only work there occasionally, as a reminder that they belong somewhere, that their efforts are part of something greater than their to-do list. We may need to give them incentives to come in at least occasionally. And though I can’t predict the answers, I know how we will find them: the entrepreneurial mindset. We need to run the experiments now to discover the innovations that will define the future of work.
As an entrepreneur and philanthropist, my mind naturally thinks up new ideas for businesses and charitable ventures. Sometimes, the new idea has to do with trying to tackle a serious problem. Other times, it’s just something fun that I decide to go for. So it was with The Ice Bar at Jackson Fork Ranch.
Made of ice and packed snow, The Ice Bar at Jackson Fork Ranch is a truly unique place to spend time after having fun with wintertime activities like fat tire biking, cross country skiing, and ice skating. I got the idea for it after seeing an ice bar while traveling and thought it would be something interesting to bring to Little Jackson Hole, WY.
It’s a fun place to spend time and I’ve been delighted to see the local community pick up on the idea.
The following article ran in the September 21, 2020 issue of the Wall Street Journal.
By Daniel Pianko Sept. 21, 2020 7:12 pm ET
Remember paying your broker $200 a trade? Higher education is at that stage today.
The Covid-19 pandemic forced colleges to shift to online learning, often with disastrous results. Students are no fools and many of them are suing for a discount. They have realized what higher education is loath to admit: Instruction is not what they, their parents and the American taxpayer are paying full price for.
The most common discount on offer appears to be a 10% tuition reduction, but some students are pushing for far more. They claim that nonacademic activities, from school plays and concerts to networking and parties, represent a lot more than 10% of the price tag of college. Such discounts imply that students are still getting 90% of the value of higher education (about $45,000 worth, on average) from their Zoom lectures, but much of the educational content has become widely available for free. Students and parents can’t be faulted for suspecting that an online education should cost next to nothing.
At some institutions, it already does. Primarily online Southern New Hampshire University recently announced a free first year for incoming students in light of the pandemic. California-based National University-which offers an array of online classes-cut tuition by up to 25% for full-time students and says that new scholarships will make enrollment nearly free for Pell Grant-eligible students.
Can the pandemic finally bring the traditional college pricing model to its knees?
Or will these examples remain outliers?
Insight into the future of higher education may come from an unlikely source: the brokerage industry. Like higher ed, stock trading is a highly regulated field with massive barriers to change. Recall the stereotypical stockbrokers of the 1980s: Tom Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” or Merrill Lynch’s “Thundering Herd.” For years, the traditional brokerage industry was considered too difficult to replicate with technology. How could the internet replace a white-shoe adviser who not only took trade orders but also answered the phone, offered personal advice, and took part in estate planning and other higher-order wealth-management tasks?
The mighty were felled quicker than expected. Over 30 years, technology reduced the cost of trading a stock from hundreds of dollars to virtually zero.
In 1988, a ragtag group working far from Wall Street began disrupting the brokerage business. It was led by Joe Ricketts, the larger-than-life founder of Ameritrade, who was the first to enable stock trading by touch-tone phone.
Ameritrade introduced online stock trading only seven years later.
My first client as a junior investment banker out of college was Ameritrade, and much of my job involved carrying bags for Mr. Ricketts on roadshows. In 1998, when most other firms charged $199 a trade, he revolutionized the brokerage industry by offering to trade unlimited shares for $8 a trade. After days on the road together, I finally worked up the courage to ask him: “How much lower than $8 a trade can stock trading go?”
With a twinkle in his eye, Mr. Ricketts responded, “One day, Ameritrade will pay you to trade.”
I thought he had lost his business sense, if not his mind. Who gives away a product that everyone else is charging $200 for?
Yet Mr. Ricketts saw the future: Today, almost no large brokerage firm is charging for stock trades. Firms make money from new revenue sources, like selling order flow to market makers. It’s not unlike the way Gmail is free for users, whose data then helps Google sell targeted advertising. In the first quarter of 2020, fintech unicorn Robinhood raked in $100 million in order-flow sales alone. Ameritrade’s successor was sold last November for around $26 billion.
Higher ed is where the brokerage business was in the late 1990s: poised for transformation. Even before the pandemic, momentum was building in the education market away from high-cost operators and toward low-cost ones. Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University, nonprofits that charge less than $10,000 a year in tuition, have already become some of the largest and fastest-growing institutions in the country. They each serve more than 100,000 students by using online delivery and competency-based instruction to drive down costs dramatically without sacrificing quality.
These mega-universities will leverage technology to drive tuition revenue to zero over time. Some are already on the way, and the pandemic may accelerate the shift for many others. Rather than collecting tens of thousands of dollars from students up front, colleges might make money by forming partnerships with employers, by charging students a percentage of their post-graduation income, or via government-issued social-impact bonds tied to successful outcomes like graduation rates.
Mr. Ricketts’s lesson should be clear to every college president in America: Technological change affects industries in deep, novel ways that established players ignore at their own peril. New education models are already driving tuition down, but there’s still room for massive, structural price-driven disruption in this industry. In the wake of the pandemic, the winner will be the institution that takes the cost of online learning down to free.
Just as no one 30 years ago could have foreseen what would befall brokerage fees, few now can imagine what will befall colleges in a world without tuition revenue. But that world may be coming. If it is, the debate over free college will become an anachronism. Will you greet it with disbelief or a twinkle in your eye?
Daniel Pianka is co-founder and managing director of University Ventures.
A few weeks ago, I
posted about why I named my ranch Jackson Fork Ranch. Some folks asked me about this blog post and
why I refer to the area where my ranch is as “Little Jackson Hole.”
Since we bought Jackson Fork Ranch a little
more than 20 years ago, I’ve tried to learn more about the area – the Upper
Hoback Valley. My early research revealed
some interesting things. First and
foremost, I learned that the name “Bondurant” is a relatively recent creation,
having been introduced in the early 1900s when Benjamin Franklin Bondurant’s
ranch served as the area’s first post office.
For more than 70 years before that, however, the historical records
suggested the area had been known as “Little Jackson Hole” or Jackson’s Little
Hole.”
But I’m no expert,
so in 2018 I asked historian Elizabeth Watry to conduct comprehensive research into
the area’s history. Ms. Watry had served
as Curator for The Museum of the Mountain Man in Pindale, WY and came to the
project with a deep knowledge of the area.
(Fun fact: The Ricketts Art
Foundation partnered with The Museum of the Mountain Man and the Buffalo Bill
Center of the West to create Fur Traders and Rendezvous, the largest collection of Western art by
Alfred Jacob Miller.)
I learned some absolutely fascinating
things about the Upper Hoback Valley from Ms. Watry’s 110-page report,
including:
The nine-mile
long and four-mile wide valley in Sublette County, Wyoming recognized today as
Bondurant was once known as Jackson’s Little Hole by hundreds of fur trappers
and traders, a few missionaries, and assorted other Euro-American travelers and
explorers in the area between the early 1830s
and 1878.
Warren
Ferris may have written the first usage of the place name Jackson’s Little Hole
in early August 1832.
Almost
70 years later, Benjamin Franklin Bondurant became one of the first settlers in
Hoback Basin once known as Jacksons’ Little Hole. His ranch served as the first
Post Office, which began operation in 1903. Mrs. Bondurant worked as
postmistress until 1926. Bondurant was the Post Office name from 1903 until
1935. From 1935 until 1938, the Post Office was named Triangle F Ranch. In
1938, the name Bondurant was reinstated.
I find the history of this charming place to be quite interesting and thought I would share Ms. Watry’s excellent work with those who might enjoy reading it for themselves. Ms. Watry’s complete report – along with its copies of the maps and historical artifacts – is available right here. I hope you enjoy it!
