Chapter 8: Tutoring Lessons

Chapter 8

Tutoring Lessons

 A professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.

— W. H. Auden

An Unexpected Invitation Opens Doors to Progress

Making a wrong decision is understandable.

Refusing to search continually for learning is not.

— Philip Crosby

One day in the fall of 2003, Dr. Michael Cox, founder of Rushmore University (www.rushmore.edu), called me from Vancouver. That turned out to be a momentous telephone conversation for the 400 Year Project although it would be years before I realized it.

Mike let me know he shared my love of reading, especially for business books. He had found my book reviews on Amazon.com and tracked me down to invite me to join his university as a professor. On my long list of planned roles, “professor” did not appear. I politely declined, but Mike would not take no for an answer. He told me that I could do as much or as little teaching (the latter appealed more to me) as I wanted. I would be tutoring individual students (like much of the advanced training I had enjoyed so much at Harvard) over the Internet and my sole responsibility was to grade the resulting papers. I didn’t have to go anywhere, give any lectures, write any materials, or provide any course outlines. I would receive a modest honorarium for the work.

Eventually, Mike got my attention when he pointed out that I could offer courses based on my books. Now that could be interesting.

I agreed to a trial run for a few months, asking that I receive no more than three student papers to grade in a month. As a fast reader and quick writer, I figured that I could fit in that much effort easily.

Rushmore was best known at the time for its graduate business programs. Most students were working on MBA (master of business administration) degrees along with a few DBA (doctor of business administration) and PhD (doctor of philosophy) candidates. The students were typically mid-career people who wanted to use the education to gain a promotion, start a business, improve a small business they owned and operated, or upgrade a nonprofit organization. A few wanted to write books and start strategy-consulting firms; I could definitely relate to that last group.

I was rather pleased when students began signing up for my course based on The 2,000 Percent Solution. But what was that course? I didn’t know, so I made up a course. I asked students to identify some personal and organizational stalls they had experienced and to describe some stallbusters they had used or thought would work to overcome the stalls. In the second half of the paper, I asked them to come up with a 2,000 percent solution for something that was related to their work or an organization they knew well. Why did I set up the course that way? Mike’s idea of a university was to focus on helping students learn important practices and how to apply what they had studied.

I had no idea what kind of papers would result.

To make life easier for my students who were located in inaccessible places around the world with few libraries and bookstores, I sent e-book versions of The 2,000 Percent Solution until e-book versions became readily available on the Internet. Those who couldn’t download the book for some reason could read all but two chapters by visiting the excerpts at www.2000percentsolution.com/. That approach meant that students could begin my course within a few minutes of signing up for it if we both were online at the time. My course became even more popular because of this innovation. Some standard Rushmore courses for new students were based on books that had to be purchased in the United States or the United Kingdom and delays could stretch into months.

While my children were growing up, a new philosophy of education became popular in the United States. Instead of grading students and letting the chips fall where they might, teachers and professors offered to comment on drafts of papers and projects. If a student was diligent and quickly made corrections, the work could be reviewed several times before it was due. A good grade and a better sense of what good work looked like were the usual benefits for the student from this approach. I decided to provide that same kind of support to my students at Rushmore.

Rushmore was also helpful to students. Since many students spoke and wrote English as a second, third, or fourth language, all papers went through an editing process before being sent to professors for grading. This step helped students learn to spot the weaknesses in their English writing styles. Professors liked it, too, because it made papers easier to understand.

Student reactions to my course on 2,000 percent solutions were very positive. They liked learning about stalls and stallbusting and were soon sharing all kinds of interesting business and nonprofit organizational examples with me. My first students came up with ingenious 2,000 percent solutions without much prodding from me. For example, one student in Africa found a way to speed up and improve work-related education for airline employees by switching to Web-based instruction. A student in the Middle East redesigned a chemical plant to increase its capacity by more than 40 percent while slashing costs by making a small investment. A student in Canada identified ways to create very excellent, low-cost education for children who live below the poverty line through simplifying knowledge into easier-to-appreciate modules.

Stalled Solutions

Success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning,

yet most people don’t know how to learn.

— Chris Argyris

After a few months, I decided I was having fun and asked Mike to increase the student load. Wayne McManus, the dean, suggested that I also become a student advisor. That prospect seemed daunting to me, but he offered to mentor me through the process if I would send him copies of all my e-mails to students.

Since I had written several business books, I also began to attract students who wanted to write books. Being used to reading a lot and knowing the current business book market pretty well, it was easy for me to guide students towards producing better books.

At about that time I also started to work with a new type of student, someone who was very intelligent but hadn’t received a very good education. These students had often grown up in third-world countries where educational opportunities had been limited when the students were young. I developed some new versions of courses for them that built basic skills such as careful reading, writing essays, using their time more effectively, setting goals, and developing plans. It was a pleasure to see the students’ effectiveness blossom as their tool kits of skills became more extensive.

My 2,000 percent solution course became more popular, and some students took it as their first course. I quickly learned to discourage that. My course was one of the most difficult in the university, and most students needed to work up to the challenge. But some insisted, and I patiently helped them through the process. At this writing, I’ve been commenting on the work of one of my first students on the course for almost three years despite my suggestions that he work on basic skills in other courses first. He works on his paper virtually every week, but makes slow headway. I expect that it will take him another year to finish this course. He would have done much better if he had worked on improving his learning skills first. I was happy to help him because his problem related to making an important humanitarian organization much more effective in delivering its aid.

Some students were fascinated by creating a 2,000 percent solution but had trouble turning their thinking into a paper. The least able students were often confused about what comprised a 2,000 percent solution. I changed my directions to tell students that they had to propose a 2,000 percent solution goal to me before they could begin on that part of the paper. 

Some students did fine once they had the goal. Others didn’t seem to be able to proceed on their own through the eight-step process to create a 2,000 percent solution. I changed the directions again to require that papers have a section addressing each of the eight steps. With this change, I could be sure that they at least thought about each of the eight steps.

Even that wasn’t enough. A few people struggled to go from the general material in the book into applying that knowledge to a specific problem.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was actually taking a course as well; my course could have been called, Turning Inexperienced Leaders into World-Class Improvers.

Mind-Boggling Solutions

Every misery I miss is a new blessing.

— Izaak Walton

Let’s go back and look at those first brilliant students who employed the 2,000 percent solution process. The problems they addressed, the solutions they found, and the implications of their success fascinated and moved me.

One student was a missionary pilot flying food and medicines into relief camps serving those who were displaced by war or famine. His job was difficult and dangerous. Landing strips were primitive. Maintenance facilities were minimal. Opposing troops might take a potshot at his plane. The pilot’s initial idea was to decrease the rate of flight accidents by 20 times with the same time and resources. He developed a way to do that easily. Seeing that he was a brilliant man, I pointed out that all the safe flights in the world wouldn’t help the people who needed the supplies unless solutions focused on increasing the timely distribution of supplies to those who lived in the camps. The student quickly changed his focus to the whole distribution process, and massive increases followed in aid delivered and used by the proper people. His plan was duplicated in other parts of Africa, and soon thousands who otherwise would have gone without were getting needed supplies. I felt very humbled by seeing to what good uses they put my thinking.

Another student was a nurse who reported that her hospital was so poorly run that people might wait many hours before being seen by a triage nurse in the emergency room. For her 2,000 percent solution, she studied who was being harmed most by the delays. From this, she discovered that some patients who appeared to be well but needed immediate care were dying or suffering irreversible harm. As a solution, she trained the guards to spot such people and bring a triage nurse to see them immediately. Many lives were saved and disabilities were avoided. My awe at the potential impact of 2,000 percent solutions increased.

A student in an advanced country pointed out that the transportation system in his country was inefficient because the needed equipment was being acquired by a poorly designed and expensive financing system. He designed a better system that promised to reduce the cost of all goods delivered in the country by more than 15 percent. When implemented, that result would be like raising the standard of living for everyone in his country by 2 to 3 percent just from one financial innovation.

A pediatrician in Asia reported that her charity hospital could only afford to treat less than 1 percent of the children who needed help in her area. Through redesigning the way medicine was practiced and where facilities were located, her hospital was able to increase its pediatric patient load by 2,000 percent with the same budget.

A teacher in Japan developed a new way for babies and toddlers to learn English. Audio tapes and brief social discussions among young Japanese mothers trained them to teach their children before they start school. The cost for the service was less than 5 percent of individual tutoring for such children, which is a popular choice in Japan. English education began to spread more rapidly among preschool children in Japan where this new service was offered.

A humanitarian organization was able to do more land-mine clearance in Africa by speeding repairs of its vehicles by 20 times through refocusing the same resources. Previously, the organization had vehicles sitting around for endless weeks waiting for parts. Under the new system of stocking the most-often needed parts, better communicating what needed to be done, and regularly inspecting vehicles for preventive maintenance, repairs were usually made the same day. As a result, many children would not lose their legs to unmarked land mines.

I began to realize that the world was hungry for the fruits of the 400 Year Project. Why? Many dedicated people through this course were working on huge problems for which there would never be enough resources if things were done in the same old way. Accelerating improvements would allow those people to do more with the limited resources they had already assembled. Here’s an example. If the charity hospital followed its first 2,000 percent solution with a second one to serve more children, all of the children in that area would be receiving care. Think of that!

A barrier to progress still existed. Obviously, if I taught people one at a time, that approach wasn’t going to make a dent in the opportunity to make improvements. The lessons of the one-on-one tutoring needed to be turned into 2,000 percent solutions for mass education for those who want to learn to stretch their resources to solve the most pressing needs.

Scaling Up

When a man is wrapped up in himself

he makes a pretty small package.

— John Ruskin

Three ideas immediately occurred to me. First, I should find a way to help others learn how to teach the 2,000 percent solution process. Second, students needed a workbook that mimicked the training I gave them in my tutorials to help when they ran into problems. Third, The 2,000 Percent Solution needed to be translated into more languages. Rushmore would turn out to be pivotal in all three areas.

I began offering courses in teaching others how to create 2,000 percent solutions. A prerequisite was to have developed a 2,000 percent solution through taking a course with me. The lack of interest was stunning: Even people who were committed to creating 2,000 percent solutions didn’t see much advantage to passing the skill along. That experience taught me a fundamental lesson: Students often wanted to keep their knowledge of the process to themselves so they could easily outperform their peers and competitors.

The only possible counter to this understandable tendency was to make teaching 2,000 percent solutions a desirable job in organizations. That solution would require leaders to realize they needed this role in their companies. That conclusion was also discouraging; even my CEO students showed no interest in helping their employees learn to create 2,000 percent solutions. Why? I think for some leaders it’s an ego thing. Some people enjoy feeling superior to others because they have created a 2,000 percent solution. They prefer that feeling to enjoying the benefits of having many more 2,000 percent solutions in their organizations.

Even if some organizations did start teaching the process, more trainers would be needed. One option I decided to explore is to develop a business model where teaching how to create 2,000 percent solutions is a highly paid, high-status professional activity.

My next step in creating a core of those who can teach the subject was to establish a 2,000 percent solution major at Rushmore. Dean McManus was very supportive as I defined a series of classes in teaching, developing, and applying 2,000 percent solutions. In many cases, I didn’t yet have the course materials to support this program, but I knew that I could create ad hoc materials to support the first students until the course material development was completed.

Creating a workbook was an easier matter: Carol and I could just write the workbook to satisfy the needs demonstrated by my experiences at Rushmore. The writing, editing, and publishing went rapidly. The workbook came out in 2005 and proved to be invaluable to all who used it. Invariably, some students would decide to save a little money and not buy the workbook. I could always tell who those students were because they were asking for help that was readily available in the workbook. At that point, I would send an e-mail telling them to buy and use the workbook. Immediately, their work would improve. The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook (iUniverse, 2005) has proven its value in so many ways I wonder how anyone ever developed a 2,000 percent solution without it. Carol and I began to appreciate that The Irresistible Growth Enterprise and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage also needed workbooks if people were to get the most benefit from our ideas.

Translation assistance came unbidden. One of my very first 2,000 percent solution students at Rushmore owned a publishing company in Finland and asked if he could acquire the Finnish language rights for that book. I quickly agreed. A Japanese student who had done remarkable work with 2,000 percent solutions asked if he could translate the same book into Japanese. My student and I agreed to split the royalties, and he began the difficult task of turning our many American idioms and cultural references into something that made sense to those who had never left Japan. Another student indicated he wanted to develop a Russian version. Still another student expressed a desire to develop a French language edition.

Deciding that this interest was promising and wanting to know more about what could be done, I spent a day with a friend of mine who heads a translation company. My friend assured me that I could have my book wonderfully translated into any language I wanted for a mere $50,000 per language. We would have to sell over 100,000 books in each language to break even on that kind of a program, and that level of sales was highly unlikely to occur in most languages.

At that point, I also started receiving inquiries from specialists who make introductions to foreign publishers. For just $900 to $1,500, they would send e-mails out to foreign publishers. When I tried to find out what the success rate was, the answers were sketchy. I suggested giving the specialists a lower fee in exchange for a large cut on the royalties, and there were no takers. This path didn’t seem very promising either.

Clearly, it was going to be much more reasonable to rely on Rushmore students to provide the translations. My suspicion was that the Rushmore students would also do a better job of translation because they would have an intimate knowledge of the subject while a commercial translator would not.

Going Public: The Invigorating Smell of Ammonia

Everywhere I go I smell fresh paint.

— Diana, Princess of Wales

When most people talk about going public, they have in mind selling shares to investors who can then trade the shares on the public financial markets. Early in the 400 Year Project, a number of advisors pointed out that the value of what we were working on was staggering. “Create a public company to exploit this new learning” was the advice that many gave. I disagreed. There needed to be as few barriers as possible to accessing the new knowledge and information. In most cases, public companies hoard valuable knowledge, squeezing out the maximum profit, rather than maximizing the usage of the knowledge. The 400 Year Project’s role seemed more akin to what Isaac Asimov addressed in his Foundation Series about Hari Seldon’s public foundation: Public awareness needed to be aroused while the serious work of improving what is already known went on elsewhere in private. It’s similar to the way the American Cancer Society helps people become aware of how to live a healthier lifestyle that will help people avoid contracting cancer while serious research on improved ways to counter cancer occurs in dedicated labs. Once useful findings are made in the labs, those results are soon published.

Intrigued by my experiences with individual online tutorials with highly motivated students, I began to wonder how learning about the key concepts in the 400 Year Project would work in a classroom setting for more typical adults. Where could I find a setting to help me find out? Having been astonished in the past by how some of my personal heroes made themselves available to teach adult education classes, I decided to try that route. This would, in part, be my chance to pay back those who had helped me learn while the teachers and adult students all sat scrunched up at fifth graders’ desks.

However, my timing for this decision wasn’t much better than it had been when I decided to launch The Ultimate Competitive Advantage in 2003. Enrollments for adult education had been rapidly dropping for four years in our area. Everyone was happy to have me send them course proposals, but nobody accepted one.

On my second round of contacts with the local adult education programs, I caught a break. I found someone who is as big an optimist as I am in the Brookline Adult and Community Education program. Monica von Huene was willing to let me offer courses in creating 2,000 percent solutions and business model innovation. Brookline, Massachusetts offers the largest adult education program in New England. I was fortunate to have finally arrived at the right place.

I soon had a regular spot in the catalog and began offering other courses as well, dabbling in teaching entrepreneurship and about artists I know well. Having grabbed a place in Brookline meant that I became more attractive to neighboring Newton and began teaching there as well for fellow Harvard graduate, David Fechtor.

Between the two programs, I was often out at night offering my courses in three-hour-long sessions. I found the experience to be energizing because I was seeing the future face of the 400 Year Project, when millions would be receiving such mass training.

As I walked into a classroom, I was always greeted by the jolting aroma of ammonia signifying that the janitors had already done their work. That experience reminded me of the late Princess Diana’s quote about fresh paint smells when she was attending public events while part of the Royal family. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why the British always paint before the Royal family arrives, to make everyone more awake.

Being an inveterate optimist, I was sure that everyone would want to know about my other subjects, so I packaged up bits and pieces of as many parts of the 400 Year Project as I could into each class. People thought it was just fine; they assumed that I knew what they needed to learn.

Students wanted to learn more than I originally provided. Each term, I added more class sessions and hours per class. Courses that began as three hours in total expanded into six sessions of three hours each. If I wanted to teach it, they would come.

Based on these successes, I felt like it would be easy to create a teacher’s edition for each of our books to turn what we described into a day-to-day curriculum, and I felt reassured by the prospect.

Squared Benefits

Nobody before the Pythagoreans had thought that

mathematical relations held the secrets to the universe.

— Arthur Koestler

One day, a Rushmore student taught me a profound lesson. In reacting to my directions for the 2,000 percent solution course, he asked if instead of creating one 2,000 percent solution it would be all right to work on two. After all, as he pointed out, if you expanded revenues by 20 times and reduced costs by 96 percent, that would expand profits by around 400 times. That result would give him 380 times more profit while doing only twice the work of creating a single 2,000 percent solution.

Of course, he was right. Why hadn’t I focused on the opportunity to create complementary 2,000 percent solutions? I guess that experience is a good example of how the teacher usually learns more than the students.

As significant as this lesson was, the aftermath of his paper was even more poignant. His concept for a new business didn’t get off the ground (despite brilliant work in locating ways to add revenues and cut costs) because he didn’t understand how to finance his business model. From this experience I learned that even expanding potential benefits by squaring great solutions would sometimes not be enough. Under some circumstances, you would also need a third, a fourth, or even a fifth 2,000 percent solution to turn great concepts into reality. What might those other solutions be? I began to think seriously about defining what complementary solutions were needed to make the most out of typical opportunities.

From this thinking, I realized that it was time to develop a body of knowledge for making 2,000 percent solutions complementary to one another so that further exponential increases in benefits could come from combining the right solutions. I added Rushmore courses on this topic and looked forward to finding students to lead me down the path. None came immediately. I assume part of the problem was that if 2,000 percent solutions seemed far-fetched to reasonable people the view of 40,000 and 800,000 percent solutions had to be even more mind-boggling.

Another distraction from making the most of 2,000 percent solutions is that students love to study what well-known authors have produced. In most cases, the students have no concept of how little or how much they will learn because they don’t check out these authors and their subjects before launching ahead. To my surprise, learning enough to be able to talk about some trivial development that was out of date 50 years ago makes the students feel more confident they are learning because other people know about the same subject. Clearly, that herd instinct would be helpful whenever 2,000 percent solutions came to be perceived as a brand-name approach to business and nonprofit organizations. Unfortunately, those days are still ahead of us for now.

Cheerful Progress Goes Best

We are all prisoners of our past.

It is hard to think of things except in the way

we have always thought of them.

But that solves no problems and seldom changes anything.

— Charles Handy

Have you ever used a game to learn something? Many leaders report that doing so is an amazing source of lessons. MIT researchers found, for example, that they could create games that would stimulate leaders to mistakenly pursue the wrong behavior. Making the mistake during the game helped leaders better understand the psychology they need to combat in themselves and others. When people describe that game experience, they can’t help laughing at themselves for making silly mistakes during the game. That cheerful learning makes the recollection more intense and helpful.

How can I describe the reactions so confidently? In part it’s because I took one of the MIT simulations and made all of the same dumb mistakes, too! Afterwards, I was able to chat more candidly and thoughtfully about the experience with my fellow learners.

My classroom experiences with teaching various 400 Year Project subjects quickly taught me to start off every session with some fun that unexpectedly turns the tables on what students believe. Novelists know this trick well: Lull the reader into expecting one kind of a story, then yank the rug out from under the readers by heading off in a more interesting and unexpected direction. In my case, I love to convince students that they know a lot more than they think they do. After more than a decade of being on the receiving end of teachers trying to prove to students just the opposite, students find this approach to be a refreshing change of pace.

I also learned to break down progress toward the ultimate goal into small, manageable steps that help students feel like they are moving ahead at a breakneck pace. That sense of unstoppable progress gives students wonderful confidence and enthusiasm. Usually, students have exceeded their expectations for a course before the end of the first class. How can that be done? First I ask them what’s the most they expect to learn in the course and then I help them answer their own questions about that subject before they leave the first night. Also, I give them tools to dig in and learn more on their own. The students feel in control of their own learning and quickly expand their horizons to make greater accomplishments that reflect their true potential rather than their previously held pessimistic views.

One of my favorite ways to make classes more fun is to encourage students to bring food and beverages. If you are relaxed and can munch away whenever you want, how can learning not be easy and fun? I’ve also enjoyed some wonderful cookies in the process as generous students are inclined to share with fellow students and the teacher.

From the beginning, I set up an opportunity that can provide confidence and a sense of progress: Each student may make a presentation to the other students in the course’s final class and ask for help on whatever the student likes. I explain that this opportunity is optional but that students who take advantage of the opportunity say it’s the best part of the course.

At the first class many students feel shy about speaking in a group. Those who break through that shyness to get help in the last class leave beaming with self-satisfaction knowing they now have the tools to look for and receive the assistance they need in the future. All they need to do is find someone who should know and ask. Then keep asking potential sources until a good answer develops.

From my teaching experience, I realized that I needed to put more fun and accomplishment into my tutorials. Many students find themselves stuck in a rut: They cannot see any other ways to look at an opportunity or issue than the perspective they’ve always used. What they don’t appreciate is that the work they’ve already done in thinking about the course opens up vast new opportunities that they cannot perceive because they are stuck in their usual thinking habits. Send that stalled student off to consult with colleagues, and the student usually comes back with great ideas and filled with joy. Why? Colleagues are invariably impressed with the work that’s been done so far and point out the implications for accomplishing more results that are already present in the work; it’s like an opera singer getting an unexpected standing ovation during a small part. After that introduction to the student’s work, colleagues inquire about progress on a regular basis and offer more suggestions. The student has now become a thought leader, something the student may not have experienced before in that organization. And more thought leaders are just what the 400 Year Project needs.

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.