 I'm Dan Moguloff from the Campus Office of Communications and Public Affairs, and I'm really thrilled to welcome Rich Lyons, who is UC Berkeley's first Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer. From 2008 to 2018, Rich served as Dean of UC Berkeley's Haas School, and is currently the William and Janet Cronk Chair in Innovative Leadership. Does that mean you're on the faculty? I am still on the faculty. Excellent on the faculty. For two years prior to serving as Dean, Rich oversaw the Goldman Sachs University as Chief Learning Officer. We'll ask a little bit more about what that was. Received his BS with highest honors from UC Berkeley Business and PhD from MIT in Economics, and before rejoining Berkeley, Rich spent six years on the business faculty at Columbia University. His research and teaching expertise is in international economics and finance, and his top applied interest is the how and why of setting strong institutional cultures. So lots of great raw material that we're going to jump into, but let's start, Rich. Why don't you just start off the job? Like whose idea was it, and what exactly are you doing all day? Well, thanks. I think that's a fair question. This is a job, as most of you know, that didn't exist before. So we're as a campus piloting it in some sense. If we don't get some good work done together, there's no reason we have to continue it a few years out. But when you look at just how much our ecosystem, as we call it, of innovation and entrepreneurship has developed over the last 20 years, it's absolutely stunning. For those of you that haven't seen some of these time-lapse graphics, it's just remarkable how much has happened. So one could look at that and say, we're doing just fine. Thank you. As a thousand flowers bloom, which Berkeley is very good at, we don't really need a lot more. But I think adding a layer of intentionality, which is the way I think about this job, to that whole picture, is there are some opportunities that are bubbling up, and we can talk about those. But I'm just excited about the opportunities here. So when we talk about innovation, are you responsible? Are you looking at the way we facilitate and support students who are interested in entrepreneurial activity and innovation in faculty? Or is it about how we're more innovative as an institution and how we do what we do? Which is it, or is it both? Well, I think it is a yes and on that question. You know, we're still defining what the scope is. But some of the things that I think we'll talk about are things that you might think weren't in the job description and are a little bit wider angle than you might have thought we'd be working on this early on. I formally started in the role on January 1. Like for example, I have two direct reports just to get concrete. One of them is Caroline Winat, who oversees Skydeck, right? So we've got this Skydeck being the campus-wide accelerator, right? These startup teams, how do we accelerate them, right? And there's a lot that goes into accelerating them. These are teams that are already formed, though. So they're sort of downstream a little ways. And then IPERA, which is the Intellectual Property Management Team, the Technology Licensing Office under Carol Memura, also another very strong team. So those are my two direct reports. But as we start thinking about how do we develop more curriculum, the kind of curriculum that students really want and this kind of curriculum that should be fitting in lots of different units on campus, not just one or two or three. So we want to be sort of as inclusive and wide ranging as we can be as we develop this. What's the problem we're trying to solve? Well, here's the way I think about it. You don't have to share this view. But it feels like the problem we're trying to solve in this role, at least as I see it, is pretty close to the problem I think we're trying to solve as a university. Not that my job is the university's job, but I would state it this way. Look, the intellectual creativity that is Berkeley, enormous, vast. Nobody could challenge that. Over here, societal benefit. What is the transformation from Berkeley's intellectual creativity to societal benefit? And at what efficiency is that transformation happening? Whatever you think the current efficiency or effectiveness level of that transformation is, call it 50%. If we could by working together move that from 50 to 55%, we will have done an enormous thing not just for the state of California but for the world. So that's a pretty high level problem statement. But I actually view that as the problem statement. As opposed to saying, are we going to license more IP, which we want to do? Or are we going to do 10 more entrepreneurship classes? It's mapping the intellectual creativity that is Berkeley into even greater societal benefit. And so does that reflect or is that somehow connect to a change in the very role of the university? Because you're talking about some major things and taking a stake in intellectual property and making sure that we sort of reap the rewards of all the discoveries and goes on here but also in terms of what students are looking for, what they seek. It's not just reading, writing, and arithmetic anymore, not that it ever was really. But you're talking about things that seem to represent an expansion of like what the institution's purpose is. Do I have, what do you think about that? I think, well put, a great question. I think there are at least two dimensions to this. One is what's happening in higher ed generally, right? Is what we're talking about being seen at all the great top tier research universities. I would argue, yes, maybe to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon their geography and so forth. But I think this is a quite generalized phenomenon. But then there's also Berkeley, right? Berkeley's fundamentally different than those universities that we compete so intensively with for faculty and for students and staff. I mean, just to put a finer point on that. If you look at the Harvard's or the Yale's or the MIT's or the Stanford's or that whole category of private universities, every one of them is operating in an undergraduate scale that is about one-fifth what Berkeley is operating. Most of them could dial that up by two or three times within five years if they wanted to. But they're solving a different problem. What they're going for, in its essence, is exclusivity. That's what drives their model. Berkeley lives over here on the inclusivity side of the spectrum. This is a fundamental difference. And so as we talk about these broader societal changes, which I think are affecting universities generally, Berkeley needs to address those in its way, coming from its history and what it stands for, which is actually pretty different than most of those other institutions. What do you think sets us apart? Because you sort of kind of danced around the edges of it about the unique qualities of the Berkeley campus and scale is certainly one of them. But are there other defining characteristics that you're attempting to support in this role or accentuate or embellish in some way? There are. One that I think not a person in this room could disagree with is a phrase like question the status quo. I mean, is that a Berkeley norm or what? And part of what I think is helpful to me is you want things. Look, there are a lot of things that we could say up here where we'd say, yeah, that's Berkeley. But part of it is, suppose I said, Harvard's a great university, obviously. Suppose I said, Harvard, question the status quo. There are a lot of universities that can't say that, right? So how defining is it? Let's lean into the stuff that makes us defining. And then I think even more so, it's not just about defining ourselves, it's not just about identity making. We want to identity make in directions that create value. So if we're talking about a more entrepreneurial, innovative way of being for a society than a university that has in its very DNA, a mindset of question the status quo is a pretty valuable asset to have. So it's like, well, great, let's double down on it. So it sounds like you think there's this perfect confluence between the interest of the institution and the interest of the greater good. That somehow, if we do better on this front at Berkeley, it would be good for do I have that right? How do you see that? Well, I would love it if it was a perfect confluence. I see the confluences as wonderfully aligned. But things are never perfectly aligned, especially given that all of us sort of have a slightly different view on exactly what Berkeley should be doing. That's part of why Berkeley is such a fresh and lively place. So we can agree to disagree on certain elements of that. But I think Berkeley has a whole this idea that societal benefit is really fundamentally, I mean, we must be doing basic research. The pure research is, there aren't other institutions that are able to do that in society. So Berkeley and other great universities absolutely need to be doing that. And I think the idea is, societal benefit is the goal. Now some people might argue that, no, I mean the ideas are the goal. The ideas in and of themselves are the goal. And that's not an undefensible view. But I think most of us feel like it's that mapping to societal benefit either through the education of our students. It doesn't have to be just, are we licensing the technology, right? Part of that transformation from intellectual creativity to societal benefit is the students we educate, right? That's part of that process. So don't think of it too narrowly. So I view it as wonderfully lined up, or maybe if I can use one other metaphor. There's this metaphor of escape to where the puck is going. In so many ways it feels like the puck is coming right at Berkeley. And that's a good place to be for the future. What does that mean? Well, what I mean is that, where we think things need to go and should go, right? If we think that technology development needs to be more human-centered, for example, right? And that a Berkeley that has this beyond yourself attitude, that it's not just about you, that stewardship for something larger is fundamental to what people in a university should be doing. I think Berkeley can really claim to have that in its DNA. And that's something that we can bring to the more human-centered technology development. For example, right? So it's not like, we still have to be thinking about the future. But some of the needs of the future, I think, load pretty heavily on what Berkeley has to offer. So we're going to come back to us. I want to take a little detour, just sort of a personal question. So you spend time at Goldman Sachs, right? What was that? What were you doing there? So that was about two years. I was on leave. And for me, it was fascinating, because it was a totally different environment than anything I've done before. When I went to graduate school, I got an academic job. I've been an academic my whole life. But I had these two years. And so Goldman has, most of the lots of big companies, have something they call Goldman Sachs University. And so it's sort of like, well, what courses would you teach somebody just out of undergrad within a Goldman Sachs or within a general electric or name your company? And some of these things are sort of like presentation skills or really concrete stuff. Or they're obviously in banking. So there's certain banking and financial related stuff. So Goldman Sachs University was trying to develop this within company curriculum, because it was part of the offer. If you want to keep great people at any company, they have lots of choices. Being able to say, we have a university and a curriculum and an education and a way of shaping you that's going to make you want to stay here, that becomes part of what firms like that have to do to keep talent close. And so I was part of that equation. And did you carry anything back from that that you're sort of implementing or tapping into right now and what you're doing? Well, thanks for that question. Because I mean, it was really eye-opening. That company need not be your favorite company. But I think it was eye-opening to me to see how different so many parts of a company like that are than the environment we live in. And that's a helpful thing to understand in my view. But more specifically, like for example, when I use the term culture, I'm talking about shared norms, shared behavioral norms, shared values, that kind of thing. An anthropologist wouldn't define culture quite that way. But that's the way I'm going to define it. And so Goldman Sachs has a very different culture than Berkeley. But what opened my eyes, your question was did you take anything away from that? Intentionality around managing and shaping culture? They are very intentional about their culture. So again, there's culture content. And Berkeley can differ a lot. But when I came back to Berkeley, one of the biggest realizations was, at least for the business school, I can't speak for the whole campaign. We have been unintentional about managing our culture. And it's time to be more intentional about it. And that was an eye-opening that would not have occurred if I hadn't had that experience. So the other thing I was curious about too is I know a lot of people, they step down from a position like yours, dean of a business school, head right to Wall Street. Huge salaries, huge incomes, move away from both the pleasures and the pain of the academic life. I'm wondering why you're still here. I don't know what's going on. So I could leave at any time. It's a great invitation. Look, for the same reason, I think a lot of us are here. So I'll tell a very quick story, because I think it's relevant. When I was dean at the Haas School, the staff, like most staff teams, we had a town hall. And they said, well, we're going to interview you at the next town hall. Great, let's do it. And they sent me the interview questions before they did the interview. Well, some of you may have been there when we did that. One of the interview questions that they gave me in advance was, what is your six-word memoir? Now, I didn't know the genre existed. If you Google six-word memoir, it's like you get six words to define what you're about. It's like almost impossible, right? Well, I'm going to get asked this in front of the whole team. And it's like, oh my gosh, what am I going to write down? Here's what I wrote down. And I still feel pretty comfortable with what I wrote down. By the way, if you have six words, there's some things you have to leave out. So my family's not in this definition, which is a little sensitive. No, here's what I wrote. Here's what I wrote. Lifelong, one word, hyphen lifelong, okay? It's important that we get the math right. Lifelong love affair with ideas comma learning. It's just what gets me going. And Berkeley did that for me. So Dan mentioned that I was an undergrad here. Neither of my parents had a four-year college degree. I don't know that I knew a PhD when I got to Berkeley. But it's so lit me up as it has lit up so many people that it was just like, oh my gosh, I am having fun. And I kind of never looked back. So we're going to go into some of the questions that are starting to come in from folks in the audience. And it was actually the first one is one I was thinking about. As it happens, most folks here, we believe are members of staff as opposed to faculty or students. And I'm wondering about innovation and entrepreneurship within the university context in terms of the working life we have as staff people. And the first question is, the departments on campus are so siloed. How do you get buy-in and create interdisciplinary programming? And on a broader level, how do you change the culture? How do you make it more innovative? Let's do this together. I mean, no one person gets something like this done, but I also think it's an imperative. I think we all sort of feel it. So let me try one idea that is bubbling up. From a lot of people are working on this, but I want to talk a little bit about this. So I'll start with another very quick story. I had an engineering faculty member in my office maybe a month ago. And what we were talking about is the felt separation between the humanities and STEM fields. Now, that's not a Berkeley specific phenomenon. That's a higher ed phenomenon. But it's obviously felt here, you know, STEM fields tend to get more attention in capital campaigns, student demand is flowing. There are lots of elements on the surface of that, but it's the way he said it. What he said to me in my office was this, feels like we're not rooting for each other anymore. That's like an arrow through the heart, right? This is a university, right? So how do we span that? So just as a small example, you mentioned innovation and entrepreneurship, which is my job at some level. If Carol came out, Carol Chris came out tomorrow and said, going forward, Berkeley's gonna be all about entrepreneurship. It's like dead on arrival for a lot of reasons. Number one, a lot of our research faculty would say, show me the research in that field that you're calling out as the field for Berkeley. It's actually a quite thin field in terms of academic quality, Berkeley quality research. Nobody would take issue with that. But more fundamentally, I think, is this idea that entrepreneurship to some of us in this community, it's sort of like, do you really want to bring this great public university to so commercial a place, right? And that's a very real sentiment. So I think part of the answer is, what we're playing around with is this notion of, all right, can we come up with a narrative? I mean, one way to think about it, we're not in a post fact world, really, but competition between narratives has become a profoundly important way that society is evolving right now. So how do we sharpen Berkeley's narrative even more? We've got a strong narrative. And one of the things that we're talking about is, well, too long an answer to a great question, but there is a narrative bubbling up and developing that we are calling the Berkeley change maker. And some of you have a one pager in front of you. If you want to know more about this, there's more on that one pager. But if we thought about a Berkeley change maker, if we thought about a curriculum that helps young people, 17, 18, 19, 20 year olds understand that actually living a life of agency, understanding my role, that the traction that my life will have on the world is a really fundamental part of who I want to be. Now that need not be, I want to run out and do a tech startup, right? That's about sort of how can you be entrepreneurial in the public sector, in the civic sector, and whatever you want to do, we need you to live, sorry, we need you to live a life of agency. So how do we give you those tools and that inspiration while you're here? So we taught a pilot class last summer called Becoming a Change Maker. There were 17 different undergraduate majors in that class. The average course rating was 6.7 out of seven. It was incredibly successful. And so how do we scale that, do more of that, and I think just to conclude this point, every, like Janet Brout and many leaders in Lisa Wymore, many leaders in the humanities departments and fields have really responded positively to this. And I think if you thought about an engineering student or a business student, they can also see entrepreneurship and other things that fit perfectly with them. So could this be a coalescing narrative? How far could we push it? That's one of the things that we're working on. Yeah, and it's interesting. You're touching on something that actually the next question was about, which was how your office and the university will elevate research in the social sciences and arts and humanities? Because there is this sort of division between STEM and humanities. Is that something new? Is that something dangerous? Is that, how do you see that, this sort of bifurcation that a lot of people use when they think about a place like Berkeley? There's the humanities, there's STEM, and how does it intersect with what you're doing right now? There are a lot of different views on that. My view on this is part of, look it's a higher ed thing I mentioned before, that you'd find this phenomenon at every university. But part of why I think it feels different at Berkeley than at Stanford, for example, is because our humanities are so wide and deep because it's such a big part of what Berkeley has always been, right? So it's sort of like really central to who we are and who we have been and who we will be. And I think part of that, if you look at these multidisciplinary themes, right? These so-called, well, the themes that are going to be launched as part of, well, they were part of the strategic planning process that many of you saw, but they're gonna be part of the capital campaign which gets launched in its public phase, literally this weekend, literally on Saturday. And so I think if you look at those multidisciplinary themes, those sort of signature initiatives, you'll see fundamental participation from the humanities. And I think that's also research founded. So just thinking a little bit about, there's a very narrow point, but if you thought about the evolution of technology and its impact on society, does that need to be more human centered over the next 10 years than it's been over the last 10? I don't think you could find a person that would say no to that question. And if the answer is yes to that question, then I think Berkeley needs to continue to organize itself so that everybody feels like they're in the game. So leading up to the next question that came in, so you and I have known each other for a long time and I've always been struck about by the extent to which you're interested in communications and narratives. And a sense that you think we don't do as well as we need to or should do in that realm. We as an institution. And that our narrative needs sharpening. And this person says, how do you plan to communicate your own objectives and incorporate Berkeley's entrepreneurial alumni? Why is so much of how you think about higher ed and think about where we need to go and thought about your role as dean, why is that so much of that bound up in communications and narratives? It's a fundamental question. It's a really important question. I need to get better at to address the question at sort of communicating it more widely so that people understand kind of where the thinking is. That's part of what this event is, obviously, but I need to be more intentional about that. But the larger context of your question, I think, look, maybe to put it this way. Whose job is it to do the identity making on campus? Is that your job, Diana's job, Carol's job? That's all our job. Identity making is something, like there's this phrase that we use, you sometimes you hear it out in the economy. People will say, lead from where you are. It's like you just got out of college, it's time for you to actually think about exercising leadership. Just as a team member and a lowly person, it's sort of like, if that team, if that group could be doing a better job, just try and figure out how to get that team of that group to a different place. It doesn't matter that there are five people in the group that are more senior than you are. And if people hear that idea and they say, yeah, lead from where you are. But if we also said, how about leading identity making where you are? When do we democratize the ownership of what Berkeley stands for? How do we sharpen it so that a 17-year-old in Stockton or San Diego or St. Louis or Sao Paulo in five years says, that's the university I must go to. That narrative is so clear and is so me, I need to get to Berkeley. Now, that's just painting a picture that obviously is a quite high bar, but I think that's the bar. And you're not gonna get there with curriculum here and degree program there. I mean, those are neat things. You get there with a narrative that it's sort of like, it's different, it's valuable, it's authentic, and it's where I wanna be. So it feels like to get as much value out of working together, I think we gotta think about our own job descriptions that at least in part as identity making. So talk a little bit, because not everybody here may be aware about how you put that into practice when you were dean up top of the hill, the leadership principles and how important that was to the culture and why the culture was important to the curriculum and to the community and how those things all connected, sort of substance and narrative and principles and all of that, because I think it's a good model. Thank you. A lot of people worked very hard on this. I saw Joe Magnus is here, Jennifer Chiswick was very involved in this, Courtney Chandler and many people were on this. But one of the things that we did, I mentioned this idea of intentionality around culture, by which I mean behavioral norms and values, right? It's sort of like, there are a lot of people, including a lot of people in this room, it's like, don't be telling me what my values are. That's a pretty natural human reaction, right? So did we get some skepticism when we started doing this work? We did. It's a pretty natural thing. When you're trying to kind of change something like this, I think the only place to start is when you're hearing resistance, it's rational skepticism and you've got to sort of unpack where it's coming from. But to give you some sense, when I first came back, so it was 2008, I was starting as dean, I had just had this experience of, ah, so that's what intentionality around culture looks like, I've already described that. I'm literally in my office, it's July 2008, and I go onto the Berkeley Haas website and I search for core values, culture, principles, nothing. Now, obviously de facto, there is a culture in every institution, so there is a culture at Haas, but it had never been written down. So then I went to, I won't mention the names, but five or six, 10 other great business schools. Most all of them had core values, and guess what? They were all the same. They were exactly the same. Nobody had written down something as fun and as defining as confidence without attitude. So which is one of the four? Which is one of the four. So it's sort of like, I told you a little bit about how we, I won't walk you through all four of them, but what are the four? Okay, so the four. Question to status quo, which is, I used that phrase before, but that's as Berkeley as it gets, right? The idea that that's Haas and not Berkeley is ridiculous. Question to status quo, confidence without attitude. Students always, this idea that even in your last job, are you gonna know you still have some things to learn? So this isn't just curiosity. It's a little bit beyond that. And then beyond yourself. Sense of stewardship for something larger. The way I talk to students about this one is sort of like, have you ever worked for or with somebody, one or two levels above you that did something in her or his own best interest that wasn't in the best interest of the team? Did you notice? Did anybody not notice? Sort of like, there are a lot of people that operate that way. You kind of know how they're gonna make hard decisions. But at the end of the day, most young talent, most human beings don't wanna work for somebody like that. Most human beings wanna work for somebody that has a larger sense of his or her stewardship. Another phrase that I like is a phrase that you sometimes hear around military service in the US. Officers eat last. We've all heard that. And so does Haas get this exactly right? No, nobody gets this exactly right. But are we uncompromising with those principles in our admissions? We are. Let me just give you last example. Wait, was that good for admissions? Well, great question. I think what it does is it gets people to self-select in and out, right? We didn't know what apps go way up. Well, apps have been on average up. But you don't quite know because some people will say, wow, cool, but not me, right? I mean, there are a lot of great people out there and a lot of them going to business schools where it's sort of like, look, they're gonna be successful, but confidence without attitude is not a good description of them. And most of them, most of them know it, but not all of them. And so, but you don't know how that selection effect is gonna go, but it's worked well for us. But here's two very small facts very quick and then we can go on. But here's one fact. When we asked the students, the first year MBAs they'd arrived and we surveyed them, we do this every year and we asked them, all right, you get to pick one and only one reason why you picked Berkeley. Now most of the people who get into our full-time MBA get into three or four other great programs, right? So they've got Chicago, they've got Columbia, they've got Stanford, whatever they are, right? Why did you pick Berkeley? You only get one. The third most cited reason, this geography, I wanted to be in Silicon Valley for my MBA. The second most cited reason about the same number of sites is that third one, ranking reputation. The most cited reason with three times as many sites as either of the second two, culture-defining principles. It's the separator. You hit me right here. I was deciding between peers, near equivalents, and I heard a message that I wanna be about. So that's not an awareness metric. That's talent making a decision. That's people that you wanted to come that decided to come. Last example is when we talk about, all right, how uncompromising are you? We do not interview every undergraduate to get into the undergraduate business major and compare them against confidence without attitude. And you might say, well, I thought you said you were taking this seriously. These are like 18, 19 year olds. They've not even been through an interview. Somebody might have straight A's across prerequisites and get into an interview and not do it. Now, do we interview people at the CUSP? We absolutely do. But it's sort of like, how far do you wanna push that? For the MBAs, everybody is interviewed against this. So here it is. It's what we call our sell weekend. So you've all been admitted to the MBA program. Half of you already decided to come to Berkeley. Half of you haven't. I'm the dean, this is a few years ago, and I'm talking to you. Now, you've seen these four defining principles because you wouldn't have gone through the interview process without them. But one of the things that I say to them is, you are meeting what we hope are gonna be your future classmates. They're sitting right next to you. They're impressive, you all are impressive. But if you meet somebody sitting next to you and you think, wow, how did she get through the Confidence Without Attitude interview? And they chuckle, and then I said two things. One, really, let me know. And two, you might not want to come here. Because it means I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. Now, you'd better deliver if you're willing to say things like that. And the team, it's not me, the team in admissions has been delivering. No compromise. So the idea is, are you gonna take a stand on something or aren't you? Even if applications could go down. So here's a really good question that's sort of flipped this all inside out a little bit. This person asks, what do you think the biggest institutional challenges we face are? As a university, and how does this intersect with them, or is this sort of something on the side that not directly related to whether it's funding challenges or issues around the chancellor's priorities to increase the diversity of the campus populate? What are the biggest challenges that you see this university has right now? That's all the time we have. Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it. Well, that is a great question. You know, there are some fundamental, look, the funding picture of the university, it's hard to not put that in the top two or three things. You know, if you look at, when I was an undergrad here, you've all seen the data, right? The state of California covering well over 50% of Berkeley's budget, even when I was an undergrad, which wasn't that long ago. And today at 10, 12 or whatever the percentage is, right? I mean, that's a fundamental restructuring in how the university is running. And for Berkeley to be where it is, with Carol and the whole team, you know, setting records in terms of fundraising, right? I think for some people it's like, do we have to do so much fundraising, right? I guess at some level, you'd love to have the resources that you need to prosecute your mission, what you stand for, which can be very different from a lot of private schools, and not have to do some of that. But I think we have not compromised ourselves in the way that we've gone after fundraising and some of the other things that we're doing. But ultimately, you know, the funding, the sustained funding of excellence is just, it's gotta be in the top two or three. And it has changed a lot over those years. I think I would put diversity, equity, inclusion in the top three. I think part of that is, you know, for what is our license to operate? I mean, in the sense that these institutions, Berkeley is an institution, is a profoundly important institution to society. I mean, let's take ourselves out of the equation. Berkeley and the UC system is one of the most important institutions in society. And the idea that we look so different than the society we serve is gonna get more and more troublesome. It is. And, you know, part of what I, you know, I mentioned Berkeley runs at five times the scale literally every one of those private schools on that list. And historically has had roughly twice as many Pell eligible students. That's five X times two X, that's 10 X, right? And so that notion of inequality and some of these other elements of societal challenge that are related to, you know, not just socioeconomic diversity but diversity more generally. That one feels, I mean, if you're looking out five, 10, 15 years as opposed to this year, that one is way up there. So speaking about funding in just a few days we're gonna be announcing the launch of the campuses next big campaign. And I understand the target is gonna be huge. It's big. How important is that? What kind of opportunity? And not just a financial, is there a narrative building and disseminating opportunity? How do you think about the launch of a campaign like this at this moment in time? Well, Garo and the whole team have done a ton of work on this and many of you have not seen a lot of that work. Some of the people in this room have but you'll get to see it starting Saturday and it's gonna be a really neat couple of weeks actually for hearing these narratives, these stories, look what Berkeley's doing. And in part because we want that public phase launch to be a launch, the team has been keeping some of that information kind of close but you're all gonna get to see a lot of that over the next couple of weeks. I find it all super exciting. You know, here's the way, you know, I'm an economist. So here's the way I think about things. We get to go into the philanthropic markets once a decade with a new campaign, once a decade. And we are going in, this decade's launch is Saturday. So this is a pretty interesting moment. And you know, to grossly oversimplify it's like how strong is your narrative? The difference between a strong narrative and a not strong narrative and a campaign this size? Not kidding, a billion dollars easily. And so I think it's not only an opportunity to strengthen and put forward narratives, it's kind of an essential element of success. Yeah, I'm gonna go to the next question here from the audience. You mentioned the goal is to amplify Berkeley's support for societal benefits, problem solving with income equality, a rich topic for discussion, private companies have been criticized for concentrating wealth. How do you feel about emphasizing equity, promoting mechanisms like worker-owned cooperatives as drivers of innovation? I love experiments, and so I love this idea. I mean, I think, you know, just a small example. So David Card, who's an economist in our econ department, he does labor economics, on most short list to win a Nobel Prize, absolutely stunning. He wrote, some of his research, he's known for a lot of research, but one area of his research is on minimum wage. Now, when I was in graduate school, you talk about minimum wage as a policy variable, and every economist, every neoclassical economist will tell you, wow, if you raise the minimum wage, you destroy jobs, right? You price people out of the market. It's a terrible thing to do. It's just economic sense. I know you want wages to be higher, but you have to think at level two about what that's gonna do in terms of pricing people out of jobs. Please, think at least at level two. That was sort of the received wisdom. So David and others have written this research saying, hey, actually, empirically, it ain't true. You might be able to write down a model that says that's true, and that might stand a reason for some people, but in fact, so it's massively revisionist in the sense that, no, this is a good thing. Even as an economist, a card-carrying economist. So I bring that up because I feel like a lot of these ideas about minimum basic income and many other things, right? The countervailing power of unions, right? That was so fundamental in the last century, and then weighing so much at the end of the century, I think there are a lot of sensible people that are saying, has it gone too far? Right, at what point does kind of labor need a bigger voice at the collective table? And those are some open, live questions. And so anyways, it was linked to innovation, and I'm glad it was linked to innovation. I think we've got a lot of society policy experiments to run, and these are some of them. And I would love Berkeley to kind of play a role in some of those. Right, but when you step onto that terrain, that subject right there, what was specifically asked about worker-owned companies, that's political trade. And so as we move into those areas, do you not have a fear that we begin to politicize the campus even more than it might already be, at least in the public imagination? Are we starting to, when we enter those realms, or is that part of what we need to do? Well, I think potentially, but you know, I think of it as, let's do 50 experiments, let's not do one, right? So you could, if that were the only experiment and you were putting a lot of the campuses and resources behind it, I think people would interpret it that way. It's sort of like, why that? Not to say that it shouldn't happen, but why are you marshaling all of Berkeley's resources for that? But I think if Berkeley is exercising a number of societal experiments, which of course it already does, right, at great scale, but if it becomes even better known as where we resolve some of these open questions, as a practical matter, is this the right policy move? I don't think, I think that risk is low if we're careful. Got it. Here's the next one. The person writes, I feel the need to challenge your idea that pre-business and core science can both be taught in a four year undergraduate program or degree. Trust comes from a deeper understanding of your discipline. You need some STEM, economics, business, et cetera first. What are your thoughts? Well, you know, I can't disagree with that. That's the way I was trained and I greatly appreciate it. I think part of it is at what scale? So if somebody said, we're gonna fire a pre-business curriculum at everybody and then do everything else we're trying to do, I could see why it's like, look, it's gonna cannibalize something. There's a trade-off there. You just gotta recognize there's an important trade-off there. When we think about the very first component, so I mentioned this pilot course that did so well and we're running a summer course this summer for about 5x the number of students, so it's about 250 students and that course will be called the Berkeley Changemaker. If you had to sort of say, what are the buckets of the content? The first bucket of content is critical thinking. Like, how do you ask better questions? Problem framing, is this the right problem? Is this, in fact, the problem we're trying to solve? Is this symptoms or is this causes? And those are things that I think are cognitive assets that are relevant to a whole wide range of fields. There's also some material in there that, for example, I was speaking to one of, won't call her out by name, that's not important, but one of the former deans of Letters and Science and she was mentioning that we could do a better job graduating more humanists that at the time of graduation could stand up in front of a group of people and influence them orally. These sort of public speaking skills and things along those lines. And of course, lots of our humanities grads can do that, but the idea is, is there a set, if living a life of agency, a life that has traction on the world and you can't stand up in front of people and do that, and that is a skill set that we can teach, then I could see the argument that, ah, now that content is cannibalizing chemistry. And at that level, it's sort of like, all right, if we're talking about a half a unit of cannibalization, not eight units, a half a unit, might we be able to find a compromise here somewhere? So you've brought a couple of times and a few different concepts, this idea of living a life of agency and it actually intersects with a number of the questions we're getting. I mean, a lot of what you say is really inspiring and I think people in the room and across the campus are also looking to be empowered, not just inspired. And so for example, a question like this, in other words, how do they have agency within at the workplace, within the context of their professional lives? So question, we're in a digital revolution that UC Berkeley doesn't have a concrete plan to make technology more accessible to units that cannot afford digital services. What do you have in mind to empower staff to make them more innovative with appropriate tools to have a better digital preserve presence, better digital presence? In other words, how do you bring all this stuff? How do you help from the position you're in, bring this stuff right down onto people's desks, right there into their daily lives, what they do during work? Love the question, love the question. It's not an easy question. It's, here's one way to think about it. You know, we, I tend to think about this curriculum, we've always like got a 6.7 out of seven as an average course rating. And I hate to do this, I'm gonna read for you. So this is, I promise I'll answer your question. But I wanna read to you one of the student evaluations from that class that did so well, because I'm gonna link it to my answer to this question. So I mentioned the course did very well, it's called Becoming a Changemaker, taught by a guy named Alex Budeck, 17 different undergraduate majors. Here's what one of them wrote. Everyone at Cal should be required to take this course. It gives an optimistic and change-making perspective to any discipline. It has genuinely changed my outlook on the world and how I want to go through life. Even if you think you are already a good leader, this class will teach you so much about being not just a leader, but a change-maker wherever you go in life. Professionally, socially and individually, this class has changed my perspective on my ability to make change and our collective ability to make this world a better place. Now, you can't write that stuff out of your head unless you're, I think, this person. What if this content, Becoming a Changemaker or this summer's content, the Berkeley Changemaker, is made available to all staff? Now, the course that we taught as a pilot last summer was a very high-touch class. 50 people, lots of lives, guess all that stuff, right? But the class that we're preparing for this summer, which is 250, it's 5X, it's not 5,000, it's 250. But there's gonna be a lot more digital content there because we have an eye toward what if we wanted to do 2,500, not 250? You can't do high-touch, can't really do ultra-high-touch at 250, but you definitely can't do it at 2,500. So I think this is kind of a small tactical answer to a really good, big question. But any content that's in a program like that, it's like, of course we would open that up to the staff as much as we possibly could. I think they would find that fascinating. For any of you that are interested in getting a copy of the syllabus, be happy to send it to you, right? It's pretty interesting stuff. More broadly, look, it is a fun, we've been through as staff members, it's been a pretty tough decade, right? It's been a really tough time. We've been working harder and with fewer people, with more students and the kind of more with less banner, it's hard. So I think it is, I'd like to think that we are at a moment where, you know, capital campaigns needs to be going well, some other things seem to be going well, Carol and the whole team have turned around the budget, we're not massively in the black, but it feels like we're going into a fresh era where there's gonna be a little more room to make some of these essential investments. All right, since we don't have the syllabus in front of us, I'm actually curious about something, it's sort of like the elephant. How do you teach innovation? Well, I had thought that was a personality attribute. How do you teach somebody to be innovative? Well, the same question I think is fair for entrepreneurship. So let me, here's, so here, some people will say you can't teach an entrepreneur, but here's one way to think about it. The students that are in our classrooms are not random draws from the distribution of 18 year olds around the world, right? They're very selected, talented. I mean like top whatever percent, very few percent. They're extraordinary, their potential is extraordinary. So if I reframed it just slightly and said, how do you teach somebody who's in the top end percent where n is a small number to be a better innovator or a better entrepreneur? I think our minds start to think, yeah, probably a lot more room to do that, but whether it's innovation or entrepreneur, let me define the terms real quickly. Innovation has two components, fundamentally two components. New ideas or new combinations of old ideas, new ideas put into action. So discovery, what's happening in our labs is not innovation. If you're gonna be precise about using the terms. It's when you have a new idea and it's put into action. There are lots of different ways you could say put into action, but it's like new product. It affects, you know, that societal benefit part, right? The ideas are really important. Discovery is important, innovation is both. Entrepreneurship is something a little bit different. It doesn't need a new idea. Entrepreneurship is creating a new enterprise. Now that might be based on new IP, but it need not be. So when the federal government does statistics on startups and entrepreneurship, it's like you start a new store that brings fresh vegetables to this neighborhood that didn't have access to vegetables. You could say that's not a very new idea. That's not a new technology, but it's a profoundly important enterprise creation, right? So, all right. Now, so here's a quick example. One of the things that we do with entrepreneurship now is you could say, what is the scientific method as applied to entrepreneurship look like? So we could sit down for five minutes and I could say, look, damn, what's your best business idea right now, right? And you've probably had a few around the dinner table over the last few years, right? It's sort of like, all right. Suppose you wanted to take it to the next level, whatever that is. Here's one of the big takeaways in terms of how you teach this stuff. You could spend six months in your office writing a business plan and putting all the components to it. Or we could say, get out of your office, Dan. Go talk to five potential customers today and see what people that might buy what you're talking about. And this doesn't have to be money in commercial. This could be a civic organization, right? It's like, does the civic organization want to do what you're describing? Or a public institution. Do 10 of those interviews. Come back, talk to some people about it. Do 10 more. Get out of the building. What are your hypotheses that you need to test? Get out there and test. They call it product-market fit. You don't have to like that no enclature. But the idea is, let's be as disciplined in the creation of as an enterprise as we are in the creation of great science. Now, when you read the first article on that topic, if you've never heard that idea, it's like, whoa, light bulb. That sounds interesting. It's a discipline. And it's teachable. So I'm pretty committed to that idea. Yeah, I could do. Yeah. Yeah. Ha, ha, ha. So just we have time for just a couple of more here. What I think one of the stories, if you could pick out untold stories or underappreciated stories about Berkeley is the extent to which really the entrepreneurial success of alumni, young alumni of the start, what changed? And why should we care about that? In other words, why is a university should it matter to us that our alumni are going out into the marketplace? And as you say, you're turning inventions and discoveries into stuff that the marketplace likes and people want to buy. So what happened and why do we care? Well, I think that's, to some degree, always been happening. But you're right, there's a phase change. There's really a qualitative change, I think, that's happened. But part of that is a reflection of society. I mean, we sometimes think of it as Berkeley's changing. It's sort of like society's changing. So when people talk about the gig economy, I've got a 17-year-old at home. My daughter's a junior at Berkeley High. And it's sort of like, no, she's going to have to be pretty entrepreneurial about her career her whole life long. People talk about side hustles and all the rest of it. It's like, well, she might have the same job for the first five years out of college or whatever. But it's sort of like she'll probably have a side hustle. She'll be building something else up. It's sort of like, I'm overstating it. But we're all entrepreneurs now. The labor markets, the economy has evolved a lot. It's sort of like, you have to be thinking about, how do I make my human capital? How do I make my professional capabilities scarce and valuable? And how do I ply them? And how do I connect? And how do I build my career? And sometimes that'll be 20 years at the same institution. But that's less and less true. So I'm not arguing that you should stay in institutions only a short time. I'm just sort of saying there is this external environment that's become much more dynamic. I mean, part of why our unemployment rate is literally at historic lows is because people can drive for Uber. And for you look at that, you say that ain't such a great deal for Uber drivers. And we could talk about why public policy needs to be more careful on Uber, Lyft, whatever. But the idea is those opportunities are there. And now we need another layer of sort of policy development that makes sure that people that are in those jobs are given a fair shake in many ways they haven't been. But so anyways, this quote unquote Uberization of the economy, that's not a cycle. I think that's a trend. Last question. What keeps you up at night in this job? What are the risks? Is there a downside? Because it all sounds amazing and inspiring and commonsensical and in alignment with who we are and what we do. What are the risks? I guess one way to think about it is Berkeley, I started by saying, and I'm happy to provide these available. I actually tweeted a link to them if you want to find them. But that time lapse of the Berkeley ecosystem over the last 20 years, it's evolved so much. So one risk is this role is not able to add enough value to be worth it. It's like, do we really need another expensive administrator? It's like, I get that question. Meaning I understand it, not people will ask me it. But that's a fair question. And so, you know, jury's still out. I think we have some really cool ideas. And if this changemaker narrative might just disappear tomorrow, or it might become something big, we still don't know. But there's some really interesting pilot results and things like that that make it feel like, look, it's not going to be zero. So that's part of it. That's one of the things is how much value add is there. I think a second one, which is always true, is part of why I started. So I'll just tell a very quick story. When they first announced that I would be in this role, and it was actually announced at the end of the summer, the reason I didn't start in the summer is because I had a teaching commitment over the fall. So I was teaching in the fall, and I rotated into this job full time in January. But when they put out the announcement, the first draft of the announcement said, among other things, that Rich is going to increase our licensing revenues. And it's sort of like, yeah, we do want to achieve that. But I'm hoping this is a bigger job description than just that. And that's part of why I started with this idea of intellectual creativity, societal benefit, what's the mapping between the two? That's a very big frame, right? That's a big problem with lots of headroom. But if you're going to paint the big picture and then not move the needle on the big picture, people could say, you promised us promised. But you framed it this way. And here's what happened. Did you feel good about what happened? And so we have to actually deliver into that frame. All right, so before I thank Rich and talk and tell you about the next campus conversation, this is where you need to pick up the guitar. I told Rich you can't end a whole session on innovation in the same old way. You've got to do something different. So he agreed. And you forced me to do this. I just want to be very clear that I was under duress. OK, but not yet. Hold on. Hang tight. Hang tight. Go. Go. We're innovating. Yes. So first, I just want to say the next campus conversation is with the outgoing president of the University of California System, Janet Napolitano. That will be on March 3. Change of venue, it'll be in Sibley Auditorium. And that should be a fascinating, interesting conversation. And without further ado, I want to thank Rich Lines for a fascinating conversation and play us on out, Rich. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. So this is a song that's been covered by so many different people. Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong. In fact, one of my colleagues at Haas sent me a CD with like 10 different covers of it. And I thought, oh, I just love that. Anyways, the cover that I know best is by Bobby Darin. That may be a name that some of you in the room know. And so here's sort of my version of it, OK? Oh, that shark babe has such teeth, dear. And it shows them fair whites like that. Jackknife has owed my teeth. And it keeps it out of sight. You know when that shark bites with his teeth, dear, scarlet billows start to spread. Fancy gloves, though, wear those on my feet. So there's never, never a trace of red on the sidewalk. Sunday morning lies a body just losing life. Someone's creeping around the corner. There's a tugboat down by the river, don't you know, with cement bags just trooping on down. That's in many just it's there for the weight, dear. If I will get you, then, oh, Mackie's bagging town. Hereby, Louis Miller, he disappeared, babe, after drawing out all his hard-earned cash. Now my Keith's span just like a sailor. Could it be our boy's done something right? Jenny Diver, a sukey-tongue red, look out and be starting the engine. I know Lucy Brown, because the line forms on the right bay. Now that Mackie is back in town. Jenny Diver, sukey-tongue red, look out and miss Lolly Miller. I know Lucy Brown, because the line forms on the right bay. Now that Mackie's back in town. Oh, that's short, babe. That's such teeth, dear. Thank you.