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Three steps to discovering new ideas

The secret to staying ahead of our customers is learning to discover what they want, even when they haven’t envisioned it yet. Like imagining an iPod in the days of the Sony Walkman.

State Farm has recently designed a pilot experiment called “Next Door” that is designed to do exactly that: Next Door attempts to offer a new generation of customers an insurance brand they can relate to. Their approach demonstrates the three basic steps for discovering new ideas that will strengthen our brands and build customer loyalty.

1. Start with a hunch.

State Farm noticed something very troubling a few years ago. Younger prospective customers, “Millennials”, weren’t acting like younger versions of their parents. Causes and effects that had been linked decades earlier weren’t working the same way they used to—for instance, having a baby no longer automatically led to buying insurance. Millennials didn’t sign up with agents the way their parents had. State Farm saw the trend and realized that their future depended on their ability to figure out what young professionals want from an insurance company.

2. Walk a mile in your customers’ shoes.

The State Farm team heard early rumblings in informal conversations that the Millennial customers had a hard time relating to all of the traditional financial services brands, from banks to insurance brokers to financial planners. According to Brett Myers with State Farm, a team of researchers followed dozens of customers around for days, from bank to brokerage firm to agency, to discover what it would take for a financial services firm to resonate with younger consumers. This is what they heard:

That couch in the bank lobby—it’s not for me.

I don’t want a hard sell every time I ask for information.

I’m stressed about my student loans, but I don’t think they can relate to my situation.

I wonder what other people my age are doing about insurance.

State Farm was onto something: discomfort with traditional approaches and traditional brick and mortar settings + huge desire for information – sales pitch + peer coaching = huge opportunity

3. Imagine what might be.

The research team learned that in addition to the existing live and online options for financial services, Millennials want a live place to gather for information immersion, informal coaching, and impromptu seminars.

And voilà—State Farm’s Next Door was born—an experimental design (currently being tested in Chicago) for a novel, neighborhood hangout that allows people to experience their brand without sales pressure. Next Door offers a place where people share financial information, hold informal coaching sessions, and experience a whole new relationship with an insurance company. It’s branded as State Farm, but insurance is not sold there.

State Farm saw the signs of a risky future and designed a counter-intuitive concept to fix it that is based on research and walking in the shoes of their customers. Just at the time when many companies have abandoned their brick and mortar locations, Next Door represents a new place for Millennials to warm up to the State Farm brand.

Customers couldn’t tell State Farm what to do, but they did give State Farm signs and signals for what to try next.

What hunch do you have today about your customers’ changing needs? If you walk a mile in your customers’ shoes today, how could you change your company’s future?

Andrea Kates (akates@BusinessGenome.com) is the founder of the Business Genome project and author of the visionary bestselling business innovation book, Find Your Next. Connect with Andrea on Facebook: business genome, Linkedin: in/andreakates, and Twitter: @businessgenome.

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Changing the way we think about traditional educational buildings, a team of conceptual designers Ana Luisa Soares, Filipe Magalhães, and André Vergueiro created “Schools in the Sky” as as part of a competition to repurpose roofs. Their idea is to put a school on top of every applicable building in New York City and paint them bright, yellow, to communicate the value and importance of education.

How one man changed his life, and impacted thousands of others from being down on his knees.

If I’ve learned anything over the past ten years, it’s been that the old saying of “It’s far more rewarding to give than it is to receive” is very powerful. I was recently invited to mentor a group of emerging social entrepreneurs, all whom are focused on business models geared towards improving the lives of others, at an intimate conference called Praxis. While I was going there to help and guide others, I left with the gift of being inspired, challenged and full of hope. While everyone I met had a compelling purpose for their business and a number of them really stood apart from the crowd, Matt Emerzian’s brilliant story and business he’s starting to build caught my attention. I was taken aback by his story, his openness, and vulnerability, and I’ve shared it with anyone who will listen—he’s taken a day of the week and made it matter. I hope his story makes you think differently about Mondays and how you spend it as much as it has for me.

After graduating from grad school with his MBA from UCLA, Matt Emerzian found himself in the music business. He started in artist management working with local artists, but was later hired by Robert Kardashian. While most people know Robert as an attorney in the OJ Simpson case, he was actually a music man for 35 years and owned a music marketing and promotion company. Matt was hired as his Senior Vice President.

Now Matt found himself even deeper in the business. He worked with nearly every major and indie label, more specifically on projects for artists such as U2, Coldplay, Snow Patrol, Keane, Avril Lavigne, Black Eyed Peas, Tim McGraw and more. Matt worked in the office during the day and often found himself out at night living what I now call an “Entourage” lifestyle—drinking, smoking weed, and objectifying women, trying to be cool in the “City of Angels.” It was a slow process, but a slippery slope, and soon he had created a life that was about so much that didn’t matter. The narcissism and egos of the music industry had rubbed off on him and he thought he was the center of the universe.

When he would go home to Modesto, where he grew up, everyone wanted to hear Matt’s stories because they were always the best. Imagine being from a small town like Modesto and the next thing you know you’re drinking champagne and smoking a joint while driving to a U2 concert in a celeb’s limo. Then you’re greeted at the arena by Paul McGinnis, U2’s manager, and you watch the concert with Bono’s wife and 3-year-old son. Or you find yourself in the middle of Time Square with Avril Lavigne and her team, and the event you are in charge of has created such a scene that it shuts down all road traffic, to the massive displeasure of the NYPD. How does that happen? How does one process that? I guess, you don’t. You just live it up and think it’s what life is all about.

Matt thought he was doing pretty well until he went to bed on a Sunday night and woke up the next morning thinking he was having a heart attack—his heart was racing, he was sweating like he was in a Monty Python movie, and he was freaking out. He jumped in his car and drove himself to the doctor’s office. Not the best idea to drive a car when you think you are having a heart attack, of course, but he needed help.

After examining him, the doctor concluded that he wasn’t having a heart attack, rather he was having a severe panic attack. The doc told him to just go home and rest, and he should feel better in the morning. Well, that didn’t work, and it didn’t work the next day, week or month. His life began to shut down. His parents had to move in with him. He couldn’t function, couldn’t drive a car, couldn’t eat, and couldn’t sleep. At night, he couldn’t look out the windows because he thought the sky was falling. His “dream” life was literally crashing down. And, he had no idea what happened or how to fix it.

Fortunately, he was introduced to a therapist who changed his life. During one of his first visits she handed him Rick Warren’s book, “Purpose Driven Life”, and told him to read the first sentence, which says, “It’s not about you.” The sentence didn’t make any sense to Matt. Again, narcissism won the day. Then she told him that he would never feel better until he understood that concept. That got his attention because it was like a final life raft—something to grab onto, something to help. Just four simple words were all he needed to read. They echoed in his head every minute of the day, partially from a place of gratitude and partially because he was unsure and confused. But, he was determined to put in the work and find the meaning.

She then prescribed a heavy dose of volunteering—every Saturday morning at 9am Matt would go out and pick up litter, paint over graffiti, feed the homeless, etc. At first, he didn’t understand it, but one day it clicked when he realized that Saturday mornings were his favorite time of the week. They provided an opportunity to go out and serve others and it was “not about him.” It was the best he felt every week.

Matt was still working in the music industry since that’s all he knew, and he wasn’t sure how this new concept was going to work in his life. One day he was walking back to his office with a co-worker when he bent down to pick up a piece of litter on the sidewalk and suddenly it all made sense. His co-worker asked Matt why he would pick up someone else’s trash, only for the conversation to end in an argument.

Pissed off, Matt went up to his office and called a friend, Kelly Bozza, and told her that he wanted to write a book. She responded, “Matt, you don’t even read books. How are you going to write one?” Matt explained to her that he wanted to write a book that could explain that every single one of us matters, and together, we can change the world. They wrote the book together.

His thought was if it took him one second to pick up one piece of litter, what if all 300+ million people in our country picked up just one? It would still be a collective one second, but 300+ million pieces of litter would be gone. What if we each picked up five or ten? Or, what if we got our schools, companies, churches, friends, and family involved? It is just a numbers game.

What if we all smiled more, planted a tree, donated blood, wrote a note of gratitude, or took better care of our health? It just became a “what if” game. They picked 52 of these scenarios and wrote the book “Every Monday Matters – 52 Ways to Make a Difference.”

The book came out four years ago and has sold very well; but more importantly to Matt, it started an organization and the beginning of a movement. A month after the book came out, he received an email from a woman who saved someone from committing suicide, all because of the book. He never imagined his book would literally save somebody’s life. But, that was the sign Matt needed to walk away from the music industry and try to make “Every Monday Matters” a household name.

From day one, thousands of people wanted to be a part of what they were doing. They started letter writing campaigns, he wrote a newspaper column every Monday that became syndicated in over 400 newspapers nationwide, and they wrote a K-12 school curriculum that teaches our youth that they matter through self and social responsibility projects. Today, they are in over 1,200 schools in 43 states, impacting the lives of hundreds of thousands of youths. They created an Employee Engagement/Corporate Social Responsibility program and are working with major corporations across the country to create a work culture where all employees feel as though they matter and have significance, within both their company and their community. They were on Oprah.com every Monday for a year and PBS just shot a documentary on EMM that will air in May 2012.

They are committed to getting as many people as possible to make their Mondays matter and to understand how much they matter. “Every Monday Matters” is about being able to imagine a day when millions of people all over the country or world are doing the same thing on the same day to make a difference in their life and the lives of others, so that millions of people know they matter. Matt believes that together, we can officially change Mondays—and the world.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Matt to find out his thoughts behind “Every Monday Matters” and the true issues they are trying to solve. There are bigger issues than just making your Mondays better and Matt delves into the full details of the concept.

Why does every Monday matter?

It represents a day for all of us to do better, to be better. First, we need to stop dreading Mondays. If you really think about it, we have created a monster out of a day of the week, and the monster is so powerful that it even overpowers our Sundays. So, basically two of our seven days a week are ruined because of Mondays. Not only is that ridiculous to think about, but it’s also pretty sad.

Mondays can be a day of inspiration, a day to celebrate the start of a new week. It gives us an opportunity to make a choice. To make the simple, yet paramount choice of how we want to live our life. What if everyone started his or her week with the mindset of “It is time to be awesome. I am going to make a difference today. I am going to be a better friend, a better husband, a better co-worker, a better citizen.” What if every Monday was seen as a day to be better than we were the week before? That’s powerful. That concept matters.

Why does Monday matter to you?

Monday is the day I broke down, and it is the day that changed my life forever. I certainly don’t want to sound overdramatic, but it was, and it sucked. For the first time, Monday actually became Monday for me, and it was now a “something” in my life.

Why did you start Every Monday Matters?

Every Monday Matters, the company, started whether I wanted it to or not. Once the book came out, I guess it was “game on, ” and people wanted more. So, it really started with the book.

What problem are you trying to solve?

I know it seems like we are trying to do a “Monday Makeover,” but it is obviously deeper than that. At the core of Every Monday Matters is a burning desire to help everyone understand that they matter. I think that every single person on the face of the earth has questioned his or her purpose. Why am I here? Why does it matter? Am I significant? This is life’s greatest challenge, and our biggest question. People are powerful—much more powerful than they think they are and their actions matter.

A close friend once told me that it is just as powerful to be a person who focuses on making the world a better place as it is to be an asshole. So poignant and so true. Either way, what we say and do matter, and the ripple effects we create in the world matter. So, we have a choice. What do we want to ripple? Because whether or not we know it, we do. So, again, we have a choice to make, and why not have it happen every Monday?

What’s the bigger issue that sits above this?

I am not sure if this is the bigger issue or part of the same issue, but there is also this idea of focus and self-perception. I didn’t spend my life being an asshole, but I also didn’t spend my life focused on making the world a better place. I just focused on ME. Things that brought fun to my life, things that I thought mattered, like fame and fortune, and all arrows pointed inward. But, it was the Saturday morning volunteering—giving back—that changed everything for me. It changed the direction of the arrows, and they now pointed outward. And in those moments, I realized that I am at my best when I am not making life about me, and when my life started to change, it started to make sense. I realized that I had significance and purpose in those moments. I realized that I could impact the world in a positive way, and in turn, I would feel more complete as a person. I guess that’s the irony of it all. If you want to feel better about yourself and your life, stop focusing on yourself. It is so simple, but so hard for us to understand.

Give me an example of the most transformational program you’ve implemented.

Last year, we launched our EMM Corporate Program. We believe that Employee Engagement and Corporate Social Responsibility are vital investments in a company’s future for business success. It is about serving your employees and the people in your community that will ultimately result in serving your company. We also believe that great companies are built from the inside out. Our program is all about creating a culture where employees know how much they matter—to one another, to the company, and to their community.

One of our largest corporate clients has a goal of landing on Fortune Magazine’s “Top 100 Companies to Work For” list. When we started working them, they had just completed the Morehead Employee Engagement Survey and received a score of 76%, meaning they were in the top quartile of companies surveyed when it comes to Employee Engagement. They just completed the survey process again (one year later) and received a score of 93%, meaning they are now in the top 10% of companies surveyed. That is a massive jump and success for them, and a great accomplishment toward reaching their goal.

Give me an example of one life changed as a result.

Between the book, our school curriculum, and our corporate program, the number and magnitude of the stories is beyond humbling. From homeless high school students who learned how much they matter and went on to graduate; to convicted felons who never had someone in their life that told them that they mattered; to a single mother that stopped a stranger from committing suicide; to the accumulative thousands of pounds that have been lost because people found a new sense of significance and pride in themselves; to a man that had 400 people at his mother’s funeral each write a letter as to why his mother mattered them and then gave the 400 letters to his father; and to the wife that thanked us for now having a better husband. We don’t even know all of the stories that are out there, but it is interesting how the tables turn. We are supposed to be the ones that inspire, but often feel like the ones being inspired.

What’s been the hardest part of starting Every Monday Matters?

Patience. When you realize you have something that the world wants and needs, you just want it to get better, bigger, stronger, quicker. As we all know, starting a business takes time—that’s not revolutionary wisdom by any means. But, it doesn’t mean it is easy to accept. I always have to be reminded that we are kicking butt and are right where we are supposed to be. That’s where a bit of faith never hurts as well.

What’s been the most rewarding part of Every Monday Matters?

Without a doubt, the stories—they are what drive us to want to reach more people with our message.

What advice would you give to anyone wanting to start a new business?

For me it is all about passion. I have a passion that burns inside of me so bright that it has allowed me to get through things I never thought I could do. Even with all of my education, my MBA and my work experience, it seems like nothing really prepared me for the ride I have been on. The learning curve has been steep at every corner and it is only through my passion, and the passion of an amazing team of people, that has allowed us to do it. So, if you don’t have passion for your idea, don’t even start it—just walk away.

Where do you see Every Monday Matters in five years?

I believe that five years from now, EMM will be a household name. We will have more books; we will be a massive social movement; we will have a radio show, a television show, an Internet show; we will become a program that cities adopt—schools, companies, churches, governments, all working together to make their Mondays matter. I believe that Mondays will have officially changed forever.

What do you love about Mondays?

I get to come to work every Monday to try to make the world a better place, and that is truly a gift.

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Revolutionizing the public restroom, architects Gramazio & Kohler, have created fascinating works of art throughout the city park in Uster Switzerland. These beautifully designed public restrooms are made from of 295 bright green, laser-cut, aluminum strips, folded and designed to create a shimmering facade that changes depending on sun angle and the observers’ perspective. These innovative lavs add an element of urban design to the common public restroom.

How many industries that were around 100 years ago—and are still around today—are making their products almost the exact same way? Can you think of an industry that uses almost the identical methods of production they did 100 years ago, one that hasn’t undergone radical industrialization, innovation, or significant transformation?

How about the American classroom? Our method of teaching hasn’t radically changed over the past century. It’s stuck, it’s dated, and it’s in need of radical transformation. While there are bright spots in the private school system, the public education system—where the vast majority of our children are being taught, guided, and motivated—is a dated, bloated, inefficient, bureaucratic dinosaur. It lost sight and understanding of its consumer a long, long time ago.

Education is in large part the foundation from which our culture is built, and it should be the breeding ground for brilliance, optimism, and new thinking. I have an area of interest in human development, and specifically in children’s education, so meeting the brilliant Sir Ken Robinson last year was like a Stones fanatic meeting Mick Jagger. The author of The Element and Out of Our Minds has a compelling, common sense perspective on what’s wrong with the education system. He offers insights into the human potential and frames the implications of ignoring the problem.

Nations that formerly ranked far below the U.S. in terms of standard of living are racing ahead of us to educate their next generation so they can overcome their cycle of poverty (China, India, etc.), while first-world nations (Finland, Canada, South Korea) are greatly outpacing the U.S. in terms of educational achievement. Our systemic failure to educate and prepare all children to become engaged, productive citizens of the 21st century threatens the very fabric of our democracy. Children who do not graduate from college (let alone high school) face dim prospects at best, and at worst, a lifetime of crime, poverty, or both.

This is not new news, but it’s being drowned out by every other broken system crying out for help and transformation, and it’s being ignored because it’s complicated. This is why we must act and act now. I have hope for when organizations like IDEO, Fuseproject, The Khan Academy, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation get involved, and I’m inspired when prolific authors like Seth Godin stand up and fuel the debate, “What should we do about education?”

When I met Sajan George, the founder of Matchbook Learning, at a conference recently for social entrepreneurs and listened to this courageous man’s story of conviction and common sense, he filled me with hope. I promised to do all I could to share his story of transformation and his quest to change a broken system. Here is our conversation.

SHAWN PARR: What made you jump from the security of an amazing career at the start of the recession?

SAJAN GEORGE: I left a position as managing director and head of education practice at preeminent international corporate turnaround firm Alvarez & Marsal to start Matchbook Learning. While at A&M, I had a front seat to some of the most amazing turnaround assignments in K-12 public education’—restructuring the entire school systems of cities like New York, New Orleans, Washington, St. Louis, and Detroit. I left this work not because it wasn’t impactful—it was—but because the nature of that work was very top-down, driven typically behind a powerful and courageous political leader. This top-down type of reform is difficult to sustain (always a political election cycle away from being halted) and scale (these kind of courageous leaders to do our work behind are a rare commodity). I started Matchbook Learning because I saw a unique opportunity with blended learning to create a model of school reform from the bottom up that is both scalable and sustainable—something our country desperately needs.

How did Matchbook come into being?

It started with a hypothesis: that online learning had the potential to revolutionize public education by the nature of leveraging technology to customize both content and experience for each individual student. This radical customizing technology has disrupted entire industries from books (Amazon) to music (iTunes) to newspapers (Google) to social networks (Facebook). Education is one of the last industries to succumb.

However, most of technology’s forays into public education are happening at the fringes even still. Students accessing it for supplemental learning, advanced AP classes, dropout credit recovery, home schooling, etc.

There’s a missing opportunity to bring this technology into mainstream public education—directly to students in physical schools at the bottom end of the economic and academic spectrum. The Federal Department of Education has put out stimulus funds over the next four years for turnaround school solution providers like Matchbook Learning to turn around the bottom 5% of schools in our nation. This represents an unusual window of opportunity both in timing, funding, and momentum. Matchbook Learning was launched to seize this convergence of technology, funding, and opportunity.

What does Matchbook do?

We take over existing K-12 public schools that are in the bottom 5% of the country performance-wise (typically urban, poor, minority neighborhoods) and manage these schools day-to-day, turning around their academic performance by creating a blended model of school wherein every student receives a Netbook, online curricula, and a personalized path to learning. We train teachers in these classrooms on how to use the data to personalize instruction. This training is daily, in-the-classroom, and helps teachers review, understand, and ultimately act on the stream of real-time data they are receiving on their Netbook about how each student is learning, and helping them see where and when they can augment a student’s learning with their own instruction, guidance, and intervention. We call it a blended school because it blends the best of a traditional school (teacher-student engagement and instruction, peer-to-peer learning and socialization, music, drama, sports, home room classrooms, etc.) with the best of virtual school (real-time data, feedback, personalized content, multimedia platforms, pacing consistent with a student’s progress and capability, and predictability of outcomes).

We manage these schools for a three- to four-year contract period, at the conclusion of which the turned around school returns to its District or State. We do not wish to manage these schools in perpetuity the way charter schools do, but rather hope and intend to transfer the capacity we build back to the school, community, and school district so it stays where it belongs and the system begins to reform.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Children born in the bottom income quartile in the U.S. have just a 9% chance of achieving a college degree by age 25. These bottom income quartile children (and by default, their parents and communities) are trapped inside chronically failing schools, projected to reach almost 20,000 schools by 2014. I started Matchbook Learning because our country lacks a sustainable, scalable solution for turning around our underperforming public schools.

What business are you in?

Turning around our nation’s underperforming public schools.

Tell me how this is supposed to work.

The research shows that an effective teacher is the single most important determinant of a child’s academic success. However, effective teachers are a rare commodity in general, and even rarer still in neighborhoods of poverty. No sustainable, scalable means of producing and retaining effective teachers has existed until now. Today we can create “blended classrooms”—classrooms that blend the best of customized learning via technology that delivers online curriculum to individual students and their individual needs with the best of traditional instruction that leverages a physical teacher’s passion, presence, judgment, and intuition. The online curriculum can track, monitor, and adjust learning paths for each student, providing real-time feedback to the teacher on where and how to intervene with struggling students, as well as students that are progressing. This frees the teacher up to coach, facilitate, and engage students in smaller groups. This combined or blended approach with proper coaching, implementation, and leadership can create a highly effective teacher in every classroom.

We partner with content (i.e. curriculum) providers that meet the State and National Standards as well as our own standards. We also partner with hardware providers consistent with a particular School District’s IT policy. While there is an emerging landscape of numerous software (digital curriculum) and hardware (i.e. tablets, Netbooks, etc.) providers, we don’t feel that any one vendor has an offering clearly superior to everyone else.

Once we select the right software and hardware for the particular school and students we will be serving, we focus most of our efforts on:

1. Designing the blended model for that student population
2. Coaching teachers on how to be effective in that blended model

The blended model design includes not only hardware and software, but also recruiting and training staff, optimizing class schedules, creating culture, developing feedback loops, and prototyping opportunities with the real-time data. When combined with successful implementation through on-site, full-time daily management and coaching, this can be considered the Matchbook Learning product.

Give me an example of the most transformational story/moment you’ve seen when implementing the program.

It was the first day of school in our Detroit pilot this past September: We handed out
Netbooks to each student, providing each of them with their own log-in usernames and passwords. It was symbolic in how it ushered these students into a new era of learning—one that is personalized both for the teacher and the student. The wide-eyed stares, joyful smiles, and sheer giddiness in the room was tangible—visible signs that this kind of education reform is different from every other kind of reform that has preceded it. Ask the average student what the past impact has been of reform initiatives such as new textbooks, new teacher training, lower or higher class sizes, or new standards, and they will shrug their shoulders and perhaps yawn at the question. Teachers will probably respond somewhat the same but perhaps with a greater degree of frustration upon the impact, or lack thereof, of such failed attempts. However, ask our students what the impact of a blended model has had on their daily life, or better yet, see what it did on that first day of school, and you get a completely different response.

Give me an example of one life changed as a result.

Public schools have the potential to transform the lives of students, teachers, parents, and the community by creating a beacon for an entire city of what is possible when we enable children to dream and provide them pathways for achieving those dreams.

We only launched our blended turnaround model just over five months ago, but we are already seeing signs of life-changing transformations as a result. In a city like Detroit, enrollment is shrinking: Even our school, as recently as four years ago, had an enrollment of 1,000 students. We started the year below 200 students in our blended pilot and it has steadily grown to over 215, bucking the citywide trend. We have stories of one parent with two children enrolled in our school who refused to pull them out when she got a job across town. Those two children take two city buses just to continue attending our school. We had over 200 parents attend our first Parent Night. We’ve seen evidence of students logging in during the evenings and weekends to continue learning online without being asked to do so. We had students actually complain when we had a Christmas assembly that was cutting into their blended classroom instructional time. I’ve had parents tell me in the hallway, “Thank you for what you are doing in our school.”

What’s been the hardest part of starting Matchbook Learning?

Convincing people outside of these communities that what we are doing is not only possible, but completely probable with the right vision, leadership, and conditions. There’s a high degree of skepticism with anything new, particularly in education that challenges the traditional axioms of how to create effective schools in neighborhoods of poverty (i.e. close the school, start from scratch, lower class size, fire teachers, etc.).

What’s been the most rewarding part of Matchbook Learning?

Watching children and their expressions when they realize they have a personalized learning path with real-time feedback on their progress. Watching the proverbial light bulb go off in their minds and faces when they realize that their time is now, and nothing but themselves can stop them when the vast array of our world’s information and knowledge is but a few keystrokes away.

What advice would you give to anyone wanting to start a new business in education?

Understand the problem you are trying to solve. Diagnose the root cause(s) of the problem. Be patient and develop a vision for a solution that scales to the breadth of the problem you are trying to solve. Leverage conditions that enable you to pilot, launch, and scale your vision.

Note: Matchbook Learning is leveraging a unique set of turnaround conditions over the next four years wherein the Federal Government is offering radical turnaround solution providers up to $2M per year, for up to four years, including operating autonomy and flexibility to turn around our nation’s bottom 5% of schools.

Do you have a long-term vision?

Matchbook Learning is starting at the very bottom—the bottom 5% of public schools because:

1. These schools are largely ignored when it comes to this revolutionary movement in education and its solution providers.
2. We can create powerful proof points on the potential of students at this end of the spectrum so the rest of the system can take notice, and when they do we can flip the entire system of public education.

Because we are willing to “give back” to the school at the end of four years, we think states and school districts will be receptive to this kind of model. Since these schools will remain public schools (no name change to Matchbook Learning; they remain in their local neighborhoods serving the same kids and not replacing teachers, but improving the ability of teachers), we believe they will not be viewed as competition by unions or school boards. The stakeholders become partners with us in scaling our model. This enables our solution to scale. Secondly, as students and parents become enamored with a 21st-century way of teaching and learning that finally “gets” their kids and meets them where they are academically speaking, they will never want to go back to the old traditional way of teaching and learning (a single textbook, teacher, and blackboard for 30 students in a classroom). This enables our solution to sustain itself.

This is the vision for our scalable and sustainable solution for public education reform. As a nonprofit turnaround management school organization—one that turns around and then gives back the school after four years—we can have tremendous influence operating just a handful of schools at any given time. Every year there would theoretically be new failing schools coming on board while turned-around schools return, which in turn could influence an entire state over a five-year period. We can create enough proof points in a given state (or two at the bottom of the spectrum), all the while having them remain local public schools. We have an influence on an entire state and in turn, other receptive states, by building and transferring capacity back to the customers we are serving.

Where do you see Matchbook Learning in five years?

In at least two different states, having created powerful proof points of what is possible in school turnarounds with our bottom 5% of schools, and ushering in, along with others, the future of education.

Who else is helping to transform the school system?

Matchbook Learning is not the first, the best, or the last to help transform the system of public education. There’s a growing movement of students, parents, teachers, principals, superintendents, and government officials that are appalled at the lack of effectiveness of our nation’s public education system, particularly for children of poverty and color.

Students on their own are taking courses online even if their local school does not offer them. Teachers are using social learning platforms like EdModo to connect, create, and disseminate their own digital content for learning. Government leaders like Chris Barbic (Tennessee’s achievement school district superintendent) and former NYC Chancellor Joel Klein are forging powerful visions of what systemic education reform looks like. Entrepreneurs like Sal Khan are offering students virtual lessons for free. Venture philanthropists like our funder, New Schools Venture Fund, are taking risks and betting on the next generation of education entrepreneurial organizations to positively disrupt the K-12 public education system. Foundations like The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are funding important research that help incubate the next generation of learning tools, apps, etc.

Was there ever a moment you thought you’d fail?

Yes. In February 2011, a couple of weeks after leaving Alvarez & Marsal and trying to figure how and what to launch, or what to even call this venture, I woke up late one morning. The house was quiet, as my wife had left to drop off our three children at school. I realized that I had no appointments, calls, or scheduled meetings that day. In other words, I had no real reason to get up. A sense of fear came over me. What am I doing? I had left a great career in the midst of arguably the deepest recession in our country with a family of five to care for, and no business plan, no funding and just a vision in my head—a concept. I thought to myself, “I am the stupidest man on the Earth.” Two questions came to mind quickly: “God, do you love me?” and “God, is it okay if I fail?” While no audible voice answered, I deeply sensed the answers to be yes.

After that I was good, and have been good since. We launched our first blended pilot school in Detroit in August 2011. We had received a late notice that the contract would happen and had only three weeks to hire, structure, and get our blended solution in place. It was stressful trying to get the right Program Director hired (we found a great option in Dr. Susan Claiborne), making sure my subcontract vendor providing the technology piece didn’t walk (they got nervous and almost did), and getting the school’s leadership and faculty ready to embrace this radical approach to schooling (it took a few months but we got through the hump and they are strong advocates for this new kind of blended school).

If you can ask for one thing for Matchbook Learning what would it be?

That stakeholders in a particular state—state and local superintendents, philanthropic funders, principals, teachers, parents, and students—who collectively embrace a vision of customized education and personalized learning can come together to launch, implement, and successfully scale Matchbook Learning’s blended model.

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We’ve all seen how kids can miraculously take a package of 20 stickers and make them disappear in two minutes flat. Artist, Yayoi Kusama, takes this concept to the extreme with his creative exhibition ‘The Obliteration Room’. This amazing installation uses a room as a blank canvas and over the course of two weeks invites children to decorate as their hearts desire using vibrantly colored stickers—transforming the space into an explosion of color.