Making a difference

Jeff Sandefer stands in front of his Opportunity Identification and Analysis class, listening intently to a student’s lengthy analysis of the market for contact lenses for chickens.

He interrupts: "What’s your point?"

There are no chuckles from the rest of us; rather, we each think about how our answer would have been delivered, and most breathe a sigh of relief that they weren’t the one in the hot seat.

It’s a typical scene in Jeff’s class, where myself and 36 other second-years are getting the mind-expanding experience we came for, and then some.

Jeff’s class is amazing in many ways. For example, on a typical day, everyone is in their seat and ready to start 5 minutes before class begins. Why? Because you voluntarily agree to be on time at the beginning of the semester—and you really don’t want to be late.

Even more amazing are Jeff’s effectiveness as a teacher, and the depth of the lessons you take away from every class. Intrigued by all of it, I decided to once again ignore this column’s charter (and you know how much I hate to do that) and instead devote it to a brief portrait of Jeff Sandefer, insightfully painted by interviewer extraordinaire, UT’s own veritable Barbara Walters minus the annoying accent, the guy Jerry Springer calls for advice, moi.

TC: Why are entrepreneurship classes so popular?

JS: I think the best people to ask would be the students, but I personally think it’s because of our professors. They’re hard—they ask a lot from their students—but they reciprocate by putting more into it. We’ve all agreed to set very high standards for ourselves, and we meet regularly to judge our progress. The student evaluations are the ultimate test. If students don’t think a professor’s adding value, I think the school has a duty to find out what is wrong. We’re committed to that sort of discipline. The same sort of criteria will be used to evaluate our new course offerings. If students don’t rank them as being among the top courses in the business school, I think we should stop teaching them.

TC: As far as promoting and growing the Entrepreneurship program at UT goes, what’s in it for you? Why do you put so much into it?

JS: I’ve always been interested in studying bureaucracies and how you apply free market principles to them; that was the point of my first business, which worked with major oil companies. Higher education needs a fresh approach or it won’t prosper in the next century. So that’s my personal curiosity—how do you take something that needs to be updated and update it in a way that works. I also like being forced to ask the basic questions again and again; it keeps me intellectually honest in my own business. It discourages me from becoming lazy and relying on rules of thumb or shortcuts. I’ll either catch myself, or the students will catch me in class. There’s something very cleansing about getting back to the basics every semester.

TC: Judging by the introductory materials for your class, you’re a big advocate of goal setting and life planning. But some of us tend to view a career as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Why and to what extent does our work reflect on who we are?

JS: I don’t think that your career is the most important part of life, and I didn’t mean to imply that. I think that the most important thing is time, because we all have a lot less of that than we think. Since time is precious, I think we all need to choose consciously how we spend it. Most MBAs will spend a lot of time in their work, and by definition that makes it important to them. So it’s important to choose a career that fits well with your long term goals – personal accomplishments, family, community and religious. Otherwise, you risk overemphasizing one part of life, or even worse, not doing anything well. I wish students would spend more time talking with wise seventy year old people, and less time chasing a mythical job that just "feels" right. Too many people worry about prestige or an extra $10,000 in salary, rather than thinking of their next job as a ‘steppingstone’ to what will be important to them in the long run. It’s a hard question, but one worth asking.

TC: Do you think it’s unusual to be able to just take the attitude that "work is work and I’m just gonna do it so I can enjoy life outside of work" and still be successful?

JS: Why spend fifty percent of your life doing something you dislike, so you can finally afford to do what you like? It seems a terrible waste to me, and in the end, a self defeating strategy. Because if you aren’t enthusiastic about your work, someone who is enthusiastic will put you out of business. That means you could end up spending your entire life doing something uninteresting. I want every student to find something that excites them. My greatest fear would be to wake up at sixty and realize I had been doing something I hated.

TC: In the introductory materials for your class, you advocate Steven Covey’s idea of "beginning with the end in mind." In reference to that, what are your goals for the entrepreneurship program?

JS: That’s a great question. Our three goals are to teach students: 1) to learn how to learn; 2) to learn how to make money; and 3) to learn to live a life of meaning. Business is about making money, so we have to give students the tools to do that. But the world changes so quickly that we need to teach curiosity and logic, so they can continue learning as the world changes. And finally, if you don’t apply all of this to make a difference, then why does it matter anyway?

Inside the business school, I’d like to see the entrepreneurship program act as a laboratory to test new ideas about teaching and teachers, which, if successful, may then be adopted elsewhere.

I have no more designs after that. In fact, in the next two years I’d like to disengage from the program side and just go back to teaching. It will all be worth it if we have attracted five or six new first-rate teachers to keep building the program.

TC: Getting philosophical, what’s the most important thing in life?

JS: Personally, my greatest interest is creation and learning. I want to know how things work and I want to get more value out of something than I put in; that’s how I measure if something’s worth doing.

But my daughter is the most important thing…

TC: Would you say that your daughter has been sort of the ultimate realization of that philosophy, given all you’ve learned just from being a father?

JS: Before I had a daughter I might have put it that way, but I now have a different appreciation for the sanctity and specialness of human life. There is just something special about life that kids remind you of, something that supercedes all the other things, including creating. She is such an important part of learning—I don’t love her because I can learn from her, but it’s such a natural compliment that it makes the time I spend with her even more enjoyable. The love is definitely first, but I’m just delighted by how much I learn by being around her.

It’s like teaching—I learn an incredible amount just by being around a new crop of smart MBAs every year. It’s like [Harvard Business School professor Ben] Shapiro said—and he really means it—no matter how smart he may be, that room in aggregate’s always 50 or 60 times smarter, and that’s true.

Once you have enough money to survive—whatever it is that takes you to the level where you don’t feel threatened all the time—then everything else is creating relationships and creating memories. I would have never believed that 10 years ago; then I was much more cut and dried and much more of an economic animal. But I do think now, the memories matter most. And that’s what older people tell me as well.

TC: You’re very big on capitalism and free markets. How would you define the proper role of government in business?

JS: Well, I’m a libertarian when it comes to the role of government. Government should be limited to protecting individual rights, providing for the national defense, and providing a court system.

TC: Of course by now my incredibly perceptive readers know that I couldn’t agree more. But let’s just elaborate on the concept of limited government for a moment by looking at some regulatory issue that is almost universally considered an important government function by business people: I’m thinking about patents.

JS: That’s a good question. But I believe that current patent law is a very arbitrary thing; for example, why 17 years? Who’s to say that that’s the "right" period of time for a patent?

If we had never had a patent system, a body of case law more than likely would have evolved in the civil courts to deal with intellectual property rights, and who knows what that may look like today. I think it would, however, be more efficient than the current situation.

TC: That can probably be said about many current laws. As an aside, you know, our current patent term actually originated in 17th century British law.

Speaking of Britain, how much did your work in Russia affect your beliefs about the free market?

JS: I’ve always been a free market advocate, but I’ve always believed that a free market should result from freedom of choice at a personal level, not due to economic theory.

My experience in Russia didn’t change that, it just reinforced it. People’s lives there were so much more horrible than I had ever imagined—worse than in what you think of as the ultra-poor third world countries. It made me realize that when you remove the pricing mechanism you remove the concept of value, which means that you remove the value of time—because what are goods and services other than the result of people’s time? And if you take away the concept that people’s time is valuable, you destroy their spirit, because time is the most precious thing we have, so if it is worthless it makes people feel as if they didn’t matter. And that’s what I saw—elderly Russians who had lived their lives under communism had an empty look in their eyes—their spirit had been broken.

It was the first time I understood that freedom was not just important for economics, but was critical to morality as well. Because when you look at what rushes in to fill the vacuum created by the destruction of the value of time, you find that it’s politics, which brings with it the corruption of arbitrary power. The result is that value and morals can become meaningless concepts. You don’t need to look any further than the White House for proof.

I’m very concerned that the time is not far off when free markets will be tested, which will make the socialistic principles that were so destructive on the Russian people seem attractive to other countries—including the U.S. Part of my personal mission is to provide students with an appreciation for freedom, free markets and morality, so they have an inoculation against creeping socialism. If even a few people have the courage to stand up if we need them to, then I’ll have made a difference. And isn’t that all anyone can ask for?