Professor Spotlight: Rich McCarty – Managing the Growth Business

“Let’s negotiate a deal where you tell me what we should do to get you out of class early.”

The class paused for a second, before a man raised his hand. “We should get out at 10:15 if 15 people raise their hands.”

“Very good! Very good,” the professor spoke, “So….what can we do to make the deal better?”

I wish I could say every class at the University of Iowa is like this. But no. It’s just Professor Rich McCarty energizing our classroom with power talk and hints of always getting out just a couple minutes early. But today was Chapter Six: Negotiating A Better Deal. He was testing us. He was tricking us into learning the material by practicing it! On him. The student behind me speaks up. Rich walks over to him directly and pauses in front of him, eyes forward, almost anticipating a better argument.

“Well, sir. It is Thirsty Thursdays,” the student begins.

“That’s just about reason enough!” We all laugh.

“Haha, yes, but what if we could get out 5 minutes earlier, say 10:10, if someone corrected you? Assuming, of course, you would need to be corrected….” the student continues, but Rich, always eager to push ahead exclaimed,

“Well sure! That sounds good. So, 10:10 if I get corrected and we have 15 hands raised.” Two new students walk into the classroom.

It’s not uncommon for students to meander in a minute or two behind schedule. Rich doesn’t mind. The majority of the class is usually early, with that time spent talking about our days and what makes our entrepreneurial brains tick. So for the latecomers, we haven’t even started lecture yet. It’s about 9:35am now. He turns to them.

“So you missed our conversation!” He begins, “It’s 10:15 if I get corrected and we get 15 hands raised.”

“No!” A student in the back shouts. “We agreed it was 10:10 if you got corrected.” The typical college student “Oooo” swells amongst the crowd.

His eyes look bright and he smiles. I don’t know if he meant to do that, or if he honestly forget. But he snaps his fingers, “Well you got me there.”

We begin lecture finally. More students peter into the classroom. We’re a couple of slides in. Another guy raises his hand. “Number 3! What’s up?” Rich asks.

“So, if we get out early, how far behind will we be?”

There’s a silent daze in the room. College student. Worried about being behind? No. It’s….Thursday.

Rich assures him, “The other class got out just as early. We’re not missing anything.” I think for a minute.

“That makes four. What’s your question?” 

I clear my throat.

“We said we had to get 15 hands raised. But, we never explicitly stated that the hands had to be raised for questions…so, what if, we all raised our hands at once? Would that count as fifteen?”

He blinks and room begins an excited, yet baffled murmur. Hands begin to slowly shoot up across the room, as he laughs.

“Now, you see what she did there?. . . ” He goes into the detail and paying attention that goes into making good negotiations between two business parties. We go through the lecture at the traditional pace, so we could have time for the video.

“Well, I don’t really need to teach you guys. I mean, look; you’re already such excellent negotiators!”

But the video link is broken and it’s only 9:56am. He shrugs it off and says, “Have a great Thirsty Thursday!”

This actually happened. I’m not making it up. I’m not trying to get this professor nominated for any awards. I’m not even saying, “Hey. Take this course if you get the chance.” Then again, I’m kinda saying all of these things. Classes should be fun and knowledge-based and encouraging. We can learn and laugh and loiter together. It’s okay to lecture your students with stories and diagrams. Expect them to sit through videos and read chapters and highlight notes. We are paying for a university level course on becoming leaders.

Rich says we can make $5million in our first five years. Now, he’s got a house in Vegas. He was CFO for quite a while. He seems like a bit of a know-how with finances and gambling. I want to make sure that he’s betting on the right crowd. And so far, TTH Class @ 9:30 hasn’t proven him wrong yet.

Powerful Women in the Workplace

Nothing angers me more than reading something that tells me a woman cannot be powerful. This is in response to a wonderful lady’s comment on the NYT article, “A Woman’s Path to an MBA at Harvard.” Excuse me. But what the man that doesn’t raise his hand in class? One who listens more than he speaks? Does that mean he is behaving like a woman? What about the woman that does raise her hand more than she “so-called” listens?

Listening is entirely up to the individual’s own learning style. I find it difficult to imagine that a woman or a man who really vyed for an opportunity to learn, would silence themselves unless they were programmed by the “end physical result of powerful social conditioning about sexual roles that begins in infancy” (Listening, End of Page).  It is these roles that influence how we perceive a woman’s interactions as “passive” versus a man’s as “aggressive.” In aggression is truly a man’s trait, let me give you some examples of wonderful “women” that are apparently not role models as women, but as men.

She devoted four years of her life to marching band, three to jazz band, and her entire high school career to doing exceptional academically. She was one of the best saxophones, being second alto her first year, and first alto (a la #1 player) in her last two. She still had a social life. She also traveled to Italy, Greece, and Turkey before starting her university career. Where she continued to do marching band in university, despite having her true passions lie  elsewhere: Journalism.

An avid blogger, she kept a record of her thoughts and opinions throughout high school. The extra-writing she did was on always her own time. She joined The Standard as a writer, then earning Managing Editor her Jr. year and leading her team as Editor in Chief for her fourth and final year. Her piece covering the Joplin Tornado of May 2012 was published in the USA Today . This summer she turned a family vacation to Gettysburg as another way to follow her dream of writing. Her piece was featured as a guest post in The Joplin Globe. Even when she didn’t get a job out of university, she sought out her own internship to keep her passion moving forward.

She now works at Security Management Magazine in Virginia, where she continues to push herself forward to accomplish her dreams. Her name is Megan Gates, a life long friend, and hopeful accomplice for changing the world. You can believe she’s taking the world by storm.

I am seriously up-in-arms. I just cannot believe that our gender roles and societal expectations of “normality” are clouding the way we see progress! Society changes every day. We as individuals are influenced by and influence the world around us. Here’s another example of a strong woman that was never afraid to raise her hand.

Four years of high school tennis, Four years of intense high school debate, Four years of dedicated weekly piano lessons, Four years of women’s soccer, Four years of foreign extemporaneous speaking, Four years of ADV or Accelerated high school/college level work, Three National debate tournaments in three different events, Too many trophies,  and this list just keeps going on. Oh my gosh, can you imagine doing all of these in high school? Sprinkle in some community service, add a dash of founding a Youth Leadership Organization, and you have a really tenacious and devoted individual on your hands.

One girl did all of this. Before University. Without parental pressure–if anything, her mother wished to see more of her! She got fantastic grades academically. And was the first woman from our school to go to California, University of California San Diego specifically. Then, she got accepted into the International House and continued to overexert her academic career each quarter.She wrote and managed Prospect Journal. She belongs to the YAL Chapter at UCSD. She now works as a Marketing Assistant  for UCSD’s Recreations’ Department and has a position as an undergraduate at the typically “graduates only” International Affairs Group for USCD.

Her name is Alexsandra J. McMahan and you better believe she’s going places. She doesn’t raise her hand. She raises the bar. She wouldn’t let anyone tell her otherwise.

I’m sorry. But I don’t want to hear about how a woman is acting like a man, because she is going out and accomplishing things. Woman should be owning at life. We can and will take it by storm. And by all, if a woman wants to go to class, sit quietly and say nothing, or go to class  and raise her aggressively raise her  hand proudly and ask a question, then don’t you backlash her for saying she’s not right.

Don’t anyone ever dare to tell either a man or woman that are anything but what they are at their best–themselves. Gender is not a role. It is not a status. It is not an orientation. It is. Period. End of story. It is what you make it. It is what people see. It is something that is quite arbitrary and has been an issue in the past, I’ll admit, but would be great if we can broaden our perspectives and think, “Hey. Ya’ know. John acts like John, because he’s John. And Jane, acts like Jane, because she’s Jane.”

Normal people never changed the world. And I’m sorry. But if you want to be normal, you go be normal. More power to you for accepting the status quo. But if you really want change. And I mean, really want to see the world change. Then you cannot. You can never accept normalcy, or “normative mentalities.” Because normal, is stagnant. Normal doesn’t care about changing.

In the end, it doesn’t matter who, what, or which way you act. It only matters what you bring to the table. And don’t hold yourself back ladies, because you’re afraid
of acting like a man.
& Same to you too, men. We all deserve an honest chance to own at life.

OEI: Day 4 and 5

The Okoboji Entrepreneurial Institute was incredible. Our company–Crane Computing–set goals and met them. We didn’t do well grade-wise. The Balanced Scorecard was much better for us, but was much lower than our universe. It couldn’t be helped. By scaling back options and not increasing sales staff, we killed ourselves in Quarter 5. We couldn’t recoup the loss for Q6. However, we will learn from our mistakes.

• Keep the pace steady at sixty. Gradually build up from there.
• It takes involvement at every level. Don’t let other people’s priorities distract you from yours. It’s a team effort. That’s what makes it succeed.
• There can be two leaders. But in the end, one must be the listener and not the director.

Being an entrepreneur is always starting from the ground up, at zero to sixty million in a heart beat. OEI was overall an incredible experience. Look for some lecture notes & series updates in the future. I hope the advice I got can help ignite more passion or purpose to people around the world.

It isn’t something everyone can do. Just like Crane Computing worked well together but whose numbers didn’t stand up competitively, Start-Ups have to realize you don’t have to be competitive to compete in the market.

Continue making your own dreams come true. Together. We can change the world.

Recount: OEI Venture Capital Fair

07 Aug 2013
3:08 PM

Team 1, aka: Crane Computing, sits staring at their respective electronic devices. We’re anxiously awaiting mock investors, who have real VC deals on the side. They want a company to do super well. We need to win our own competition. It’s a play the game moment and all sides are trying to win it. We’ve discussed. We’ve prepared. We feel confident about our presentation; but- we live in the moment. Waiting. Wondering. When.

Mike Vasquez started in a corporate firm called AT&T and gave it all up to pursue his own grand venture scheme as an entrepreneur. With no guarantee of success, he secured a “modest now but tons back then” investment of $15,000 from the Des Moines government through John Papajohn. He had 2 minutes in the lobby with John Papajohn once he got his business plan together. Two minutes. On a Saturday at 9am. The next Monday, he got a call and investment. They’ve been working together ever since.

Our team was the first in 8 years to not have a CEO. VP of Manufacturing answered how lucky we were to have a dynamic representation for a team. Our HR VP  said how everyone was unique. Finance talked about our great team work and skills. I smiled. We’re well rounded. and I wanted to take Mike’s advice. We are in it to win it. We gave numbers, valuations, and statistics. You only get so far on projections.

We need to get that far.