Thinking Edge Interview with Dennis Hanno, President at Wheaton College with a “Thinking Edge” in Education and entrepreneurship.
Welcome to Thinking Edge with Ed Boudrot.
Ed
Today, we’re here with Dennis Hanno and he’s the president at Wheaton College. We couldn’t be more grateful. You are joining us today. Dennis, thanks so much.
Dennis
Really pleased to be here Ed looking forward to a great conversation about a topic that’s near and dear to my heart.
Ed
Great. Love it. Well, Dennis would love to hear your background. Let’s start there.
Dennis
My background. So, you know, if we start backwards, I guess I’ve been president here at Wheaton College for- I’m in my seventh year now, which is is a good run for a college president, especially in these times. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. Wheaton’s a small liberal arts college between Boston and Providence, really a tight knit community of a little under two thousand students and about eighteen thousand alumni. Before that, I’ve had roles at other higher ed institutions and increasing in responsibility.
At Babson College, well known for entrepreneurship, I was the dean of the undergraduate school and then provost there during my eight year career. I was at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for quite a while. I was there for 14 years as a faculty member, but served in administrative roles as well, including being the dean of the undergraduate business school there. I’m an accounting professor by background and that’s how I got my start in higher education. I got my PhD at UMass left for a couple of years and taught at Boston College and before that was a practicing accountant.
Just quickly, why did I end up in accounting? My background is my dad was a farmer in upstate New York. My high school and my entire area was not a place that focused a lot on education. You know we had good schools and and I had a mother who was very focused on education. So she inspired me to continue to pursue my education, even though it wasn’t unusual for students in my high school not to go on to college of any kind. So you know I think that farming background and that environment where I wanted to be safe and secure with my professional career led me to choose accounting and accounting was great. It was a great tool and it served me well throughout my time. But I quickly got out of accounting into teaching, accounting, and then using those skills as being in administrative roles. So that’s just a quick scan of sixty five years of my life, I guess Ed. So hopefully that gives you a little flavor for where I come from and what I’ve done in my past.
Ed
Absolutely. That’s that’s great. I really love the backwards chronology you know of that. And also I’d love to talk about entrepreneurship and innovation. I know you think very globally and love to dig into that as well.
Dennis
There’s a lot of people who say you can’t be born an entrepreneur or that you have to be born an entrepreneur and that it’s not something that you can learn how to do. I don’t think I ever really reflected on entrepreneurship until, you know, about halfway through that journey, I described to you. But when I did, I got thinking my dad was an entrepreneur. I mean, he worked for himself, ran a farm, had to do everything from soup to nuts in terms of running that farm on his own. As soon as I was in college and right after college, I got interested in creating some of my own things. I didn’t think of it as entrepreneurship. I thought of it as, oh, let’s do something different. Let’s try to do something that has an impact, including starting a restaurant business and and actually having my own accounting practice as opposed to working for somebody else.
When I started to reflect on that, I thought, first of all, how incredibly rewarding it was to be able to create something on your own. But more importantly, I realized that if I could do it, anybody can do it. And that really it just took the motivation and the desire and and the and the focus on creating that would bring skills to somebody that would be able to make them be an entrepreneur. And I think that’s how I got started down this path of teaching entrepreneurship, working with students in particular in areas of the world where they probably themselves say, I can’t do this on my own. Basically what I do, and I taught high school students and college students, but a lot of high school students in countries in Africa and beyond, through the work that I’ve done with various projects that we can talk about and my challenge to them is basically you can do this.
You don’t need somebody else to do it for you. You can solve problems. And basically drawing on my own experiences say I have done it and I really don’t have that much of a different background than you do. So how can you take the resources that you have, even if they may be scarce and actually create something that will have an impact on your community? So it’s really been rewarding to work with you know, I love working with high school students in particular and seeing them kind of awakened to this idea of, that they have control and that they actually can create something that will have an impact.
Ed
That’s amazing. I love the the whole arc in a way, thinking about the attributes around farming, because you’re generally in in scarce resource and figuring out what combinations of things would result in a in an outcome or a yield, however you think about that and then taking that that learning across your your career and then the desire to teach people. Right. That I think about it as anything is possible. Right. And know really conjuring up that going back to what you said, that the motivation, the desire, the passion. But I think unlocking in a way that, hey, you can actually do this, right?
Dennis
Yeah. And it’s always I think we all know that the biggest impediment to creating something is lack of resources. And I start off by explaining to young people in particular that that’s unfortunately, that’s always going to be an excuse. I mean, I never had anybody come to me and said, gee, I have so many resources, I don’t know what to do with them. Even the most resourced of organization or individual probably start off by saying, I wish I had more. So if that’s the situation, then what you need to do is to figure out how you utilize those resources that you have here at your disposal and to do it in a way that’s different than what somebody else was thinking about.
And that’s that’s the link for me between innovation and entrepreneurship, is that it’s the innovative idea that leads to an entrepreneur to be successful. But it only is successful if you take action on it. And I think we also many of us know people who have got a great idea. Well, but I don’t and I don’t know, it’s going to be hard work. I’ll let somebody else do it. And so really, I think another one of the ingredients to creating an entrepreneurial spirit is saying, just do something. You know, it may not be right. And we know that entrepreneurs fail all the time and that they don’t hit success or the kind of success they want right away. So I think what we really have to do is encourage particularly young people to take that step so that they are gaining the experience. And it may be something small in their community when they’re 16, 18 years old. That then leads them to when they’re thirty five and they have more resources at their disposal to create something that changes an entire country, for example.
Ed
Yeah, I love that. How do you think- because I love the idea around innovation. Is is the idea in the entrepreneur and coupling that with the entrepreneur who is actually taking action around that creating experience, evolving, changing? I’d like to bring in that concept of scarce resource too and thinking almost like in a startup as well, you’re generally fighting for everything. How do you think that scarcity of resource drives innovation? Where to your point earlier, like if you had everything at your disposal, how do you think about that and contrast that?
Dennis
Well, one of the things in teaching young people in particular about those scarce resources, I start off by saying, just imagine if we all had all the resources we wanted, how many bad ideas would actually be put into play because everybody would say, oh, what difference does it make? I’ve got all these resources so that scarcity of resources is actually a positive in my mind because it it causes all of us to be more focused on: so what can I really do? And and that important question of how, how and who will this have an impact on. And then I, I also preface all of this by saying resources will come to good ideas and in fact, in the environments where I do a lot of work. My pledges, since we’re not talking about usually major projects here, is that I’ll help you with the resources, but you’ve got to actually really, really convince me that this is going to have an impact.
And I have a number of times it’s it’s actually rewarding, challenging, but rewarding to see the number of outreach outreaches I get from some of the students I’ve worked with. This morning for example, I got a a LinkedIn connection from a young woman in Rwanda who I recognized as somebody would have been in one of my seminars. She wrote me within about a minute of me accepting her LinkedIn connection and said that she was in the seminar I did in 2017. And she has a business up and running and could use some advice and support. Again, incredibly rewarding. That was that almost four years later now she’s still thinking about and she said, I’m still using the lessons you taught me then and I’m succeeding and having an impact on her village. Challenging because I’ve had so many of those students that hardly a day goes by when I don’t get some outreach, looking for advice or support and some guidance. It’s a little bit hard to manage. But this one this morning, for example, I will reach out to her later today and reconnect with her because it sounds like she’s got a great a great thing going in her small town in Rwanda.
Ed
That’s awesome. We we often I often use the term phantom farming and phantom farming is exactly as you suggest. It’s teaching others. It’s enabling others such that sometime in the future, adding value to others and never looking for credit. But that’s sometime in the future. You’ll get that call from Rwanda that that person that met you in the seminar and that business will be up and running and it’s- there couldn’t be a more beautiful thing. That’s amazing.
Dennis
Yeah, no, it’s really inspiring. It’s actually kind of the why you know why do I keep doing this when I you know, on some days you kind of think, oh, I could use the time, I could devote my energy in other ways. And you get something like that and say, oh, wow, this really makes a difference.
Ed
Wow. I love that. You reminded me almost as a venture capitalist, you know convince me it will have an impact. I’d love to dig in a little bit more there in terms of- because sometimes I think folks don’t think about potentially they think about the the output, but not the outcome. How do you think about impact in the different dimensions of impact?
Dennis
Hmm so, you know, when I think about the way I approach helping others become entrepreneurs, I really do focus in on a couple of fundamental things that I think are too often overlooked. And I do think they relate to impact. One is to really know yourself, to understand who you are and what’s important to you, so that you can then measure impact in the way you want to measure impact. You know if impact is- I often talk to young entrepreneurs and say, you know, if your goal is to raise money- to make money, that’s OK. But know that there’s other things that are going to have to factor into making money. You may not be out to save your community or whatever, and that’s OK.
There’s a lot of people that have had impact by making a lot of money and coming up with things that have affected all of our lives in a positive way. So know yourself, know what it is that’s important to you so that you can measure impact in the way you want to measure it. But then secondly, a key component of that is you have to know your community. And the number of times I’ve worked with a young entrepreneur and they tell me they’re going to have a Web business that’s going to have an impact on the world. I kind of say let’s let’s tone that down a little bit. I said, you know, that would be amazing and maybe someday will happen. But when you want to start thinking about where you’re going to have an impact narrow in on a defined community where you can understand it really well and you can know what that community needs, that’s how you can have the best impact.
So the first two parts of the rules that I share or the guidelines is to know yourself and to know that community so you can judge impact and the impact and you will know that the impact is going to have to really have an effect on those that you’re targeting with whatever it is that you’re- that you feel is important. So if your passion, for example, is around education and everybody in your village is a senior citizen or but in your community, you’re in the wrong place. So if you’re going to try to focus on that, you’re going to have to move your community or identify in the different place where you’re going to have that impact.
Ed
That’s great. I talked to a lot of VC’s in the in the past. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten that advice. That’s really sage advice. Know yourself. Know what- what your passions are, what drives you as as a person, know your why and then know the community that that you’re serving and making sure that they’re in alignment with with your passion. What you can actually impact within that community. And thinking about it that way is just very, very unique way of looking at, you know, how to think about the impact that you can have.
Dennis
Well, the combination of those two, I think sometimes when we think about entrepreneurs and successful entrepreneurs, we envision them as this lone person that is doing it all on their own. And that’s just not true. You may be able to get a start that way. But if you’re really going to do what you’re talking about, which is impact, you really have to connect who you are with that community.
And to me, that’s that’s moving from being an entrepreneur to an entrepreneurial leader, by the way, is that you really have to gather people around you that share some of your passion and commitment. And that’s that community part of it. Not only do you then satisfy a need of the community, but you also get others to join you and you can take a small idea. And all of a sudden, pretty soon, it becomes a big project that has a lot of engagement and really starts to grow and have an even larger impact. So I just think those two know yourself, know your community, drive all of the success that you have as an entrepreneur and an entrepreneurial leader
Ed
It’s a great distinction, almost starting with innovation, the idea of moving to an entrepreneur, but then moving into a leader position such that you’re growing and can scale around common passions.
Dennis
Yeah. And that there’s know yourself, know your community, you mentioned starts with that idea. How can you have a good idea if you don’t know yourself and you know you don’t know your community? I mean, you could have ideas are everywhere. I start off by describing students I work with. However, you really you know, I can give you a good idea, but if it means nothing to you and you’re in a community where it’s not going to have any impact or no one else is going to be interested in it. So the idea itself has to be generated from this understanding of your values, your skills, and then what your community needs are and what they’re going to buy into that you might create.
Ed
That’s great. Dennis, I’d love to switch gears here a little bit. Clearly, over the past several months, we’ve seen tremendous change in industries. But I think edu or education specifically. Love to get your high level thoughts around what change the world is going under and how how that could impact education moving forward.
Dennis
It’s a great question Ed and exactly something that we’ve seen even before the pandemic. But it’s the pandemic has really accelerated I would I would say. And I don’t think that coming out of the pandemic, it’s all of a sudden just going to kind of go back to the old way basically. The forces on higher education were very strong and ominous even before the pandemic, declining college age population, technology providing lots of different ways for people to learn that we hadn’t had in the past, people questioning whether you need a college degree to go into every profession out there. What I think the way it’s been accelerated is, is that it gets back to some of these fundamental ideas around innovation and entrepreneurship we’ve been talking about is if you’re just going to keep doing things the same old way when everything is changing around you, you’re going to have a hard time navigating that changing environment.
So here at my own institution at Wheaton, I like to say for one hundred eighty five years we’ve been teaching courses exactly the same way, a small class environment, face to face, sitting around a conference table having great conversations. That’s great. A lot of people want that, but all of a sudden we can’t do that the same way that we used to. So we’ve had to be nimble and recreate that environment in a remote situation. We’ve never had an academic semester where we’ve had students taking our courses that were not physically right here on campus. And right now we literally have we have four hundred and fifty students who are remote, literally all around the world taking our courses. And we had to quickly adjust and adapt and figure out how we could integrate them into the same small college environment that we really want to try to to replicate.
And, you know, I mean, there’s all kinds of uses of technology, for example, and we see large organizations popping up and providing literally hundreds of thousands of people with access to online learning. That’s never going to be who we are. So we know ourselves. We know that community of students who are interested in the kind of Wheaton experience we have. And then we try to figure out how can we come up with a different idea, a different approach to being able to deliver that to them. And, you know, I’m not going to sit here and say, oh, it’s early November and everybody is so happy and it’s been a smooth transition. We have transitioned and we do have a very different model that we had for those first one hundred and eighty five years.
And I think lastly, I’d say is that there’s a real awakening within the community of like, oh, this is different, but it’s not necessarily bad. So what can we do leveraging what we’ve learned to be able to take some different forms of action going forward? And to me, that’s what higher education like to be honest, it’s been quite easy to just say, oh, we’ll just do the same thing we did last year. I mean, I recently described to a group that I’ve been on college campuses for thirty five straight fall semesters, and every one of them was pretty much exactly the same. This one is not. And as a result, none going forward will be as well, is that we will figure out. We have to figure out.
We have figured out, but we have to continue to adjust how we can create opportunities for remote learners to be engaged, how we can do things with students to give them experiences that are different than normally sending them off to study abroad or internships and things. Higher ed institutions that don’t confront that reality, who are hoping that, oh, it’ll just go away and we’ll get back to normal, are going to have a difficult time succeeding.
Ed
That’s great. I think it’s really to your original thought around this inspires change, and change inspires ideas that turn into innovation, that entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial leaders like yourself, you’re in a great position to you know, for this change management that we have coming across not only education, but all industries. You know, health care is seeing tremendous change. Every industry is seeing this change in how quickly can you adapt is probably the secret.
Dennis
It is. It absolutely is. And and one of the things we talked about before, it always comes down to the resource question. Again, I get it all the time in my day to day is like, well, we don’t have the resources to make those changes. And my response is, if we don’t identify or earmark those resources, then we are going to be here for a long. The only people who can decide on how you use your resources are are you. Yes, resources are always constrained, but we’ve got to figure out a way to dedicate some resources to development. And if we don’t make that difficult choice of setting aside some resources for for the long term, if you’re mired in that old, just pay the bills and keep going day to day. You’re not going to be around for very long, and especially in this environment.
Ed
Wow that’s amazing. Well said. Dennis, I’d love to to wrap and also ask you, what would the three pieces of advice that you’d give aspiring entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial leaders? What are the three pieces of advice that you’d give them?
Dennis
Yeah, so I early on I sat down and I worked with a group of people to develop a real kind of a guidebook called From Ideas to Action. And that and this is a workbook that we distribute widely, freely and it’s available online. And we from that it really forced me to kind of sit and think about what those key pieces of advice are. There’s a longer list, but I’ll highlight about seven or eight that at the end of the workbook and that what we do when we are at seminars around this that we highlight. I’ve already touched on two of them, quite honestly.
One is I just can’t imagine making any progress without understanding who you are and what your values and what your skills and your priorities really are. And I what I have found and I’m guilty of it, none of us take enough time to really set aside and take a look at who we are and just get too busy. So I think we have to set aside the time to really be introspective and reflect on what’s important to us. So number one, no yourself. Number two that, know your community. And you know that manifests itself in all different kinds of ways, like if you’re a marketing person, you know that knowing your community means, well, we need to do some market research and figure out what they want. But I think all of us, if you’re really interested in being innovative and being entrepreneurial, you have to- I think the most important skill is listening. Too often we talk, talk, talk, or we we might do surveys or whatever. But I think if you just sit back and listen and hear what people are talking about, what they’re interested in, you’re going to start to map your skills, your passions to that community. And I think that the listening part you know think about again, many entrepreneurs are these bold, visionary individuals who like to tell you the way things are.
I think they need to stop and listen so that they can change their own views and adapt to what the community needs. And then the third thing is something we haven’t talked about. But I think it’s implicit in everything we have discussed is that this is extremely hard work. I mean, if you’re interested in being an entrepreneurial leader, it’s not easy. You know, again, it’s back to if it was easy, everybody would do it right. So what is the thing that helps you get past it not being easy? To me, there’s a leadership principle that I read a lot about, and it’s one of the highlights of it is to encourage the heart. I view that as one of the key principles of being an effective leader, because first of all, you need to encourage your own heart. You need to make sure that you’re staying balanced and focused on the things that are important to you. And even when tough things pop up is to kind of remember the long term focus, the vision of where you’re trying to head and that there will be bumps along the way.
No one is encouraging the heart for yourself, but the second part of that is encouraging the heart of others. And as as a leader, I think you always have to take time, especially in times like this pandemic that we’re experiencing, to remind people that you know of what the priorities need to be. It’s not just work, work, work. Let’s get this done. One of the things I shared with our faculty and staff early on when this was all happening is you’re not working from home. You’re living in a pandemic and you’re doing the best you can and you’re trying to get some work done while you’re home. This is not about all of a sudden your office has shifted from being here on campus to my office is now at home. No, you live at home. Get what you can done, be focused on yourself, be focused on your family. And to me, reminding people of what those personal values are and why any of us do the things that we do is all about encouraging the heart, both individually and for others. So you know, know yourself, know that community, encourage the heart, yours and those who are part of the journey with you.
Ed
Dennis what a great way to end the Thinking Edge podcast. And I love the commentary around the heart because it starts with with deep empathy right? Deep empathy for yourself, your team, your community. And we rarely hear that from from leaders. So I especially appreciate that that last comment. So thank you so much.
Dennis
Well, and these last few months have certainly highlighted it. We all have difficult decisions to make and in organizations. You know here we’ve tried. We’ve continued. I just wrote an email to the community, again, coming back to health and safety is the priority. And we’ve been fortunate not having to really lay anybody off at this point and that doesn’t come without sacrifice and other ways by everybody involved, but it’s it’s I think just keeping that focus on the collective, you know, the collective well-being and supporting each other.
Ed
Well said. Dennis, we appreciate you as a leader of Wheaten, but a leader in the world as well. And you’re your sage advice and thoughts are going to go a long way. So thank you.
Dennis
It’s a real pleasure to connect with you through this. I hope we can stay in touch. You know I obviously looked at some of the things you’re doing. It’s great Ed. And I’m thrilled and honored that you thought of me to be part of this, glad to help in any way I can.
Ed
Thanks so much, Dennis.
Overall, we believe in inspiring others to embrace their inner greatness. Thinking Edge helps form a leadership centric community and captures the voices of leaders around the universe. Through interviews on the podcast, we highlight the key insights and perspectives from interesting people who have achieved excellence in both work and life.
Want to be featured on the show? Email us! thinkingedgepodcast@gmail.com
