Former USC Marshall Dean shares lessons from decades of leadership, teaching, and building global community.
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres speaks with Jim Ellis, former Dean of the Marshall School of Business at USC, about his unexpected journey to academic leadership, the power of saying yes, and building global influence through education. The conversation spotlights his mission of mentorship, philanthropy, and helping students realize their potential—one handshake at a time.
About Jim Ellis
Jim Ellis was the Dean of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California from April 2007 until June 2019, where he was responsible for the education and well-being of some 5700 students, both graduate and undergraduate. In addition, he had a full time tenured appointment as Professor of Marketing where he was since 1997, retiring in July 2021. Prior to being appointed Dean, he was the Vice Provost, Globalization, for the University, responsible for building the USC name worldwide. At USC, he was awarded both the “Teaching Has No Boundaries” award, given by the faculty, and the Golden Apple Award, given by the students. He also was given the Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award from the USC Parents’ Association, and was named one of the top five professors at the University of Southern California by the students. Holding an MBA degree from the Harvard Business School and a BBA degree from the University of New Mexico, Mr. Ellis worked in the business world as President/CEO of Porsche Design, a high-end accessories company owned by Europe’s Porsche family. Additionally, he was CEO of Port O’Call Pasadena, a high end home accessory chain, and owner/ partner in six other companies. He started his career with Broadway Department Stores in Los Angeles.
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Full Unedited Transcript
Alright, so first off, I’d like to welcome everybody. This is our second annual leadership conference. And let me tell you, this has been fun to put together and we have a great guest lineup and we got a bunch of interviews and let, let’s just dive right into the first guest. So our first guest is Jim Ellis.
Jim was the dean of the Marshall School of Business at University of Southern California from 2007 until 2019. In addition, he had a full-time tenured appointment as Professor of Marketing where he was since 1997, retiring in July, 2021. Prior to being appointed Dean, he was Vice Provost of globalization for the University responsible for building the USC name worldwide.
At USC, he was awarded both. The Teaching has No Boundaries Award given. At USC, he was awarded. The Teaching has No Boundaries Award given by the faculty and the Golden Apple Award given by the students. He was also given the outstanding teaching and mentoring award from uscs Parents Association and was named one of the top five professors at the University of Southern California by the students.
Please join me in welcoming. Jim s to the show.
Glad you didn’t go any longer than an introduction. We never would’ve gotten to the, the meat of the subject. I agree with this. Alright, so Jim. I’ve been waiting for this interview for a long time. Sharah has been talking about you for years. I didn’t have the privilege of going to USC or or being part of that alumni community, but he’s been talking about you for years and years and the, the number one question that is, that’s been on my mind has been, what was it like, like when you were younger, did you have this idea of one day I’m gonna be a dean of a school?
Like, how does that happen? Like, how does that happen? Does anybody do that? How much time we got? We got time. So when I was younger, we’ll start off first of all, hi guys. Hi. Nice to see everybody here. Thanks for being here. We’ll try hard not to put you in a food coma. Okay. So when I was younger, I wanted to be a professional golfer.
That was my career goal as I was going through undergraduate school. Now, how do you get from that to doing a Dean’s job and. No, I never had that goal in mind. Ever. Did I even have that goal in mind when I was Schrock’s professor? No. I think so much happens in your life that you don’t plan on, and you really have to keep your eyes open and just take advantage of things that come your way.
I have a problem that I always say yes. It gets me in a lot of trouble. I’ve been doing it for years. My assistants have always said, you ever say no? And I go. Right now I’m gonna say no, but rarely. I think that you just have to say yes and go down whatever path it leads you in. And if it’s a bad path, then turn around and go back.
But the bottom line is that no, I never, that was never in my cards. You want this closer to me? Thank you. That’s the mic. Almost, almost when I started karaoke. Do it. What, what did you celebrate, like at that moment? If I, if I can go back in time and take you there and you’re like, okay, now I’m, I’m now the dean.
Like that’s a big moment. I know you had a career before with USC as well, and you were already tenured, but like, what was that like? So I was asked to be the, the dean by the provost of the university, which is typically the chief operating officer of the school. And he and the president have put this together and I wasn’t the first choice.
And I knew that, and the guy that they had offered the job to kind of put a gun to their head and said, I want this, this, this, and this. And they said, what in the hell are you talking about? No, he already negotiated his position pretty radically. And so they called me in the provost says, president, and I want you to be the dean of the school.
And I said, that is the dumbest idea I have ever heard of. That’s just stupid. Why would you do that? And he comes, looks at me. He says, what do you mean? I said, well, I don’t have a PhD. And I’m a lowly MBA that doesn’t, I I’m not a PhD like all those guys over there. And that’s kind of dumb. Why were you doing that?
Said I, I could do the job, but those pa those guys are gonna cut you to shreds and it’s political suicide for you as a provost to take this job for me to take this job. Don’t worry. We can handle it. You can out teach ’em all. I know I got that part, but I don’t understand that research stuff they do. So that’s a whole piece of what PhDs do.
Anyway the bottom line was that note I did not celebrate. I did manage to call my wife after I had said yes, I’d take the job, which is not a smart thing to do. And she said, I hope you said yes. I said, yeah, actually I did. I said, yes. And you okay with that? I said, this is a two person job. We gotta do this together.
And we did it together for 12 years and it was really pretty special coolest thing that ever happened to me without a question. And not something ever planned. So if you say what it was, your career path, was it where you thought it was gonna go? Absolutely not. Not even close. And did it turn out great?
Yeah, it turned out pretty spectacular. My name’s on 24,000 diplomas from USC and so it’s, it’s really special and I don’t begrudge one minute of it. Hmm. Any USC in here? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There we go. I thought there was my former students, couple of my former students, yes. Always. So, circling back, jumping around a bit here because so a little bit earlier in your career you were responsible for vice provost globalization.
You’re responsible for building the USC name worldwide. What was that like? Like carrying a brand like that and taking it to different, you know, different places? So in your career, you, you kind of build on brick, on a brick, on a brick. You’re building a foundation. You’re starting off in your twenties and you’re putting your toolkit kit together, and then you’re building on it in your thirties, in your forties, you’re starting to maximize things and, and then in your fifties and sixties you really take advantage of all the, all the opportunities you’ve been given.
Well. Early on in my twenties, I got out of business school and I went to work for a now defunct department store chain here in Los Angeles called the Broadway, and I worked for the Broadway as a buyer. I traveled all over the world. I’ve been to 108 countries. I’ve had the opportunity to do all this stuff.
And so when they were looking for someone to build a brand of USC and travel, what do you think? I said, I’ve been all over the world. No big deal. Where do you want me to go? And I had gone to China in 1972 when President Nixon opened China. I was on the very first trip into China with that group of people.
So I had no compunction about any of that travel or meeting those people. And so to go and to put programs together with various universities around the, around the world, whether it was in, in Taiwan, Thailand, India, China, Africa, Europe, didn’t matter. It was a pretty easy thing for me to do.
I wasn’t intimidated by the travel aspect. I couldn’t speak anybody’s language, but I, I was glad they all spoke English. But it was really a, an opportunity. Globalization was a big deal at the time. Now obviously that’s changed considerably and we used to send, in our particular case when I became the dean, we sent every freshman on their spring break abroad.
Hm. And we sent ’em all abroad for one week to give ’em an opportunity to go somewhere and see what the world was like. That probably wouldn’t happen if you were trying to start something today. So things have changed a lot, but you have to really adjust to what, what’s going on in the environment, what’s around you.
And at that particular time, globalization was a big deal. So we were putting partnerships together with universities. We were putting partnerships together with corporations in China, in India to hire our students. And it was just an opportunity for us to expand the brand that we had, which is a pretty good brand.
But for many, many years, USC was a regional brand. Our goal was to make it a national brand. And part of the problem was that a lot of people east of the Mississippi Rivers say us, you say USC, and they go, really? You don’t sound like you’re from South Carolina. And that’s probable. So USC really wanted to build its brand worldwide.
And not just be a west coast regional university. And that’s the vision. We had to do it and I was the guy that had to get out and do it. Yeah. So we obviously know the big USC brand now today, and we know that as an international global brand, a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives that watch this show that are building brands, companies leading industry.
Any tips based on those maybe early experiences of kind of maybe some things that worked? Well, I think what worked is you, you leverage off an alumni base that’s pretty, pretty significant size wise and pretty significant in terms of the things that they’ve done. And the one thing about USC that was different than so many universities is we leveraged off what we call the Trojan family.
And the Trojan family is basically every alums a member of the Trojan family has a, is their entire family, et cetera. And we always said, if you call somebody that’s a USC alum. They’re gonna pick up the phone and talk to you because you’re part of the family. And rarely did someone come back to me and say, you know, I never got a call back.
And people would say, why would they take my call? I’m a student, they’re a successful CEO or publisher, or whatever. I said, because they were in your shoes at one time and somebody took their call. And the fact that you give back as an alum has never been lost on the alumni base of that university. They give back and they are not afraid to help.
If they’re asked a question, their job is to answer the question, see what they can do to help introduce that person to somebody that might help them in their business. You know, we talk about network, talk about network. That’s a focus that we had Just to make sure you got introduced to the network you wanted to be in.
Was that network engineering, was it consulting? Was it, was it manufacturing or what was it? We’ll get you into that network and we’ll get you to, somebody came to me once and said, how do I access the Trojan Network online? I said, you don’t. You walk up to somebody, put out your hand and say, I’m A USC Trojan.
Oh yeah, so am I. Tell me about it. And that’s how it worked. And that was pretty cool. So I didn’t have to do a whole lot work. I just sort of had to make sure it all happened. When you look back at your career during that time period what are some of the challenges or obstacles that you had to overcome that you’re most proud of?
I, there weren’t any obstacles. Woo. I’ll take that. There weren’t any obstacles. You kind of blow through ’em. Yeah. Anybody gets in the way? Just get outta the way. We’re gonna do this. We’re gonna make this happen. I’ll give you a great example. We we had two, two examples that we did. One of which was.
We were into this globalization aspect of, of the world and trying to get people to understand how global the world really is and how, how important it is to understand the way people do business in other countries. So we put together, I, I said once to, to our senior team at the business school at Marshall.
I said, we know what, we know what globalization 1.0 is. That’s where we send students abroad. What’s globalization 2.0 look like? Tell me what 2.0 looks like and when you do come back and give me a good idea of what we should do. And the very next day, our senior academic, now this is an academic, he’s a finance guy.
He, he’s never been accused of being creative. And he came back to me the next morning and he said, I got your 2.0. And I had said to them, whatever it is, when I tell people what it is, I want the very first words out of their mouth to be, oh wow. Now you gotta tell me what the Oh wow. Is. So he comes in the next morning, he says, I got the, oh, wow.
I said, what? He says, yeah, I was drinking wine with one of my former PhD classmates from the University of Chicago, and we cooked this thing up last night. Let me tell you about it. And he proceeded to tell me about the idea and I said, go do it. He said, well, wait, we don’t, we have to get some approval. I said, yeah, you just got it.
No, don’t you have to go to the president or the provost or somebody say, oh no, we’re doing it. This is the coolest idea I’ve ever heard of. Let’s do it. And basically what they did is they put together an idea such that you would spend your freshman year as a business student at USC. Your sophomore year would be spent as a student at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Your junior year would be spent at Boone University in Milan, Italy, your senior year at any one of those three universities, you pick ’em and at the end of four years, you would have three degrees from three universities on three continents. Now was that? No. Wow. And basically it took three years to make it happen.
We had to go through the obstacles of the Minister of China and the Minister of Education of Italy. They wanted us to have our students take an entire semester’s class about the economy of Italy, and that’s about a five minute conversation that is not a semester’s class. They didn’t like it when I said that.
I have to tell you. And we did it. And every student in that. And, and we were responsible to recruit a third of the students, and those other two universities were responsible to recruit a third of the students. And four years later, after the first class came through, every one of ’em had at least six job offers because they had taken the, the, the opportunity themselves.
To step out of the norm and go study abroad for two hours, two years out of their lives. So these companies knew they would be willing to take risk and do something outta the ordinary, and they did. So that was one, and we were the first ones to do it. And actually I think we were the only ones that ever did it.
I wanted to do it twice. I wanted to figure out another way to do it, maybe do the Southern Hemisphere as opposed to the Northern Hemisphere, but I kind of never got that chance. The second one was the fact that 1.5 million people. We’re coming out of the US military every year. Many of them had degrees in English philosophy, psychology, and apologies to anybody who has a degree in that, but you’re not gonna make a hell of a lot of money.
You’re gonna make a lot of money if you wanna be a business guy. And business majors would make more money. And they said, we wanna learn how to make more money. And we just spent 13 average of 13 years in the military. So we put together a master of business for veterans. Only veterans were accepted into that program.
Those who had either mustered out of the military or were about to. And today there are about 90 students in that program. Some of them have done some incredibly entrepreneurial ventures that have been extremely successful. Some have gone back into the military, but it was something that nobody had done in the United States and.
I remember meeting with deans and they’d say, how’d you do that? I go, how did you not do that? Oh, yeah, good point. So now we have one more that’s done it because he worked for us and he went down to Emory in Atlanta and now he’s doing it in Atlanta. So it’s pretty cool. So I think my whole life I was a buyer in a department store.
What buyers learn are a couple of things. Sense of urgency, attention to detail, customer service, and what’s a markdown. And a markdown basically means when it doesn’t sell, get rid of it. And so anything that didn’t work in the business school, we jumped it. Get it outta here. Go on to something else. Don’t rely on something.
Just because you love it doesn’t mean your customers will. And I was a buyer, it happened to me a lot. I’d walk by a rack of shirts and I’d go, God, these dumb customers, why aren’t they buying these shirts? These are great shirts. They’re so stupid. That wasn’t my job. My job was to put something out there that they would buy, not something I liked or didn’t like.
It had nothing to do with me. It was what was the customer’s reaction to it. And so to be creative in my world as a dean was really a cool opportunity to do something like that. And a lot of people won’t do it because they’re afraid of losing their job. I didn’t care if I lost my job, I was fine. You know?
It’s okay. Fir me. Go ahead. I mean, the president of the university looked at that, three degree thing. And he said, you know, that might dilute the USC, the USC degree. And my boss said, the provost, she said to him, she said, you know, you told these deans to do whatever they can do to be creative, right?
He goes, yeah. He said, well, that’s what he did. That means I have to support him, don’t I? I don’t like it. She said it’ll wear on you. He became the best salesman we ever had selling that program and telling people about it in every single speech he gave. Because in education it’s very hard to differentiate your product.
You’re doing the same thing. Business schools teach net present value, discounted cash flow, the four Ps of marketing, whatever it might be, every business school teaches that. Debits and credits. We all teach it. So how do you differentiate your product, which is what we all have to do as entrepreneurs. How do we differentiate?
Who we are as individuals, it’s the same thing. You’ve gotta differentiate yourself to stand out in the crowd. So we had to come up with ideas to differentiate education, which is not a way many people think about differentiation. It’s hard to do. So you, as you mentioned, your name is on tens of thousands of diplomas.
What do you hope that your legacy will be as people look back at your career? Great question. You know, you don’t ever think about legacy. And you go about doing what you’re doing because you wanna make a difference. And when I got into this job, I wanted to make a difference in every one of those kids’ lives, all 24,000 of them, whatever I could do.
And if I could do something to help them, it was gonna help me. And I wasn’t in that job to make money. Money was the very last thing that was important, always has been. And I think the most important thing were were those 24,000 young minds. Where do they go and how do they create something and how do they do something that they want to do that makes them successful?
And whatever that is that makes them successful, that they love, I’m gonna love it. And some of ’em came up with some. God awful, stupid ideas. And they’d come to me, you know, if you want invest, I go, you know, and I think I’ll pass. That’s okay. And I invested in a couple, I haven’t seen a return on any of those yet, but you know, so you take a flyer once in a while, I was like, oh, Lisa, what were you thinking?
But that’s okay. We have to make mistakes in life. Life is a series of mistakes. You learn more from your mistakes than you do from your successes way more. And so I think if I were to look at this legacy thing, my legacy thing is that I hope I didn’t. Make too many mistakes in the things I did, and I hope that I was able to connect our people and our students to the lives that they wanted to be connected to.
And I think at the end I’ll be able to look back and say, yeah, that really worked. It was, the whole job was a give back. I gave my whole salary back to the university. I said, you guys could need this money for scholarships. Don’t give it to me. Said it is all about giving back and paying it forward the way you’re supposed to do.
So I don’t, I don’t know that I ever thought about legacy. I don’t think most people do think about legacy. I think that when it happens, it happens and it doesn’t happen. I’m okay with that too, but I know I made a difference in a few lives, so it’s cool. Alright. Thank.
So my final question then we’re gonna open up for a few questions for the, from the audience. So what’s next? I mean, what’s next for Jim? So, I’m gonna tell you a little story ’cause I told Adam I would tell a quick story about this if I had a second. So I’m gonna tell you a story about, about a professor of mine when I was a second year student in business school.
And I was the youngest guy in my class of 800 students in my business school at Harvard University. And he asked us to write a paper. Where will you be in 40 years and what will that journey have been like? Now, I am not a forward finger. I told you it comes along. I say yes and we keep going until I have to say no.
I mean, it’s just not, that isn’t forward thinking. And so I wrote the paper, I divided it into 10 years and it’s interesting when you think about the fact that he wanted 40 years. I was 22 years old at the time, so therefore, at the end of 40 years, I’m gonna be 62 years old. In, in the mind of that professor, that probably was the end of careers.
Well, that’s not even the end of careers today. That’s kind of the middle of careers. Your career’s gonna last a hell of a lot longer than age 62, as long as you stay healthy. And I will tell you that’s the most important thing you can do is stay healthy. Anyway, so I divided my career into four 10 year parts.
The first 10 years I was going to spend understanding the consumer, I was gonna be in the retail business. I wanted to understand what consumers. Thought about what was important to them, and I kind of was already headed that way. I knew I was gonna work in the department store business. I knew I was gonna get in the merchandising side.
I did that for about 13 years with a couple different companies. Then I was going to, the next 10 years I was gonna be in manufacturing so I could make products that would sell to those consumers that I now understood after those 10 years with them. And I did about 10 years in manufacturing and working with companies that, that made goods.
I, I was the CEO of a company owned by the Porsche family in Europe. They make cars. My job was everything but the car. And I sit at the board meetings and. They start talking about the cars and they look at me and go, what do you think? The only time I ever did anything right in my life was they got in a big fight about should we build an SUV?
And the president wanted to build an SUV and the, the Porsche family guys did not want to build that. We are a traditional sports car family. We’re not building a, we’re not building any fricking SUV. And Dr. Porsche looks over at me and he was a little short guy, about five two powerful guy, but really just a wonderful man.
And he said. Tim, what do you think about this conversation? I said, well, sir, to be quite honest, there’s a woman in the United States that will buy every single one of ’em. She’s called a soccer mom, and he looked at the president of the company, he says, make ’em, and the Cayenne saved, save the company. Wow.
Over the years, and then we had the same conversation a little bit later about a four door Porsche. Oh no, you can’t make a four door Porsche. Are you kidding? We’re a race car company. We know. Like, Jim, what do you think? He said, well. Oh, the guy’s making 400 cars, sir. He said, I think we could easily do it.
I don’t know why not. It’s kind of dumb. People will buy ’em. Panama is doing fine. So they’re, we’re doing okay with that. But anyway, so I did a little bit of that work and, and that was kind of a, kind of a fun thing. And that was manufacturing. So I was involved in that for 10 years. Then my third 10 years was going to be in government.
No,
not happening. Yeah, A, I got too many skeletons in my closet from years gone by, and B, why would I subject myself and my family to that kind of scrutiny? There’s no way in hell I’m doing that. So I skipped that 10 years in the fourth, 10 years I was gonna get into education and I was gonna finish at the end of 40 years as the dean of the Harvard Business School and.
The professor looked at that and he said, oh, that’s quite a reach. I said, yeah, I know I got it. And he said, take the paper now guys. And told the whole class, put the paper away and don’t look at it for 40 years. Just put it away. So I pulled it out 38 years later and I go, holy smokes. I got close. And I hadn’t looked at that paper in 38 years.
I did not plan my life the way that paper, but somehow there was a subliminal thing in the back of my head that I laid out a vision for myself that almost came to pass. And my classmate from business school called me up and he said, Harvard Business School is looking for a dean. Do you want me to put your name in?
I said, well, I happen to know. They only promote from within. So no, I said, but the fact I can even consider that seriously and say no is kind of cool given what I just read in my paper. Now, interestingly enough, it stopped at age 62, in my opinion, to answer a question. If I were to go another 10 years, what’s next?
That really now goes to philanthropy. That really goes to truly giving back. I’m gonna spend the next x amount of months or years or whatever I can, helping our county supervisory Captain Barger to rebuild Altadena because Altadena really needs it tax and we’re gonna raise a lot of money to help the residents of Altadena rebuild those 4,000 homes.
Palisades will be fine. Hm. House stakes will be fine. It’s alad, Dena that’s really gonna struggle because their net worth is in the ground and that ground isn’t exactly good right now. So it’s all give back, whether it’s a give back. In my case, I serve on 12 boards of directors. Am I giving back there?
Yeah, I give back to the, those corporations or those organizations. Is it giving back in terms of what you can do financially? Yeah. You give money to some people and sometimes you give time. And so I think that if I were to do another, if I were to do, or you gonna be 50 years from now. Philanthropy and give back would be that last 10 years.
So that would’ve been my answer to it. They didn’t ask me then because I think at 65 they thought I’d be dead. But that didn’t quite work. So amazing.
Alright, first question, who’s got a question? If you were gonna design a business school from scratch today, what would you do differently from like traditional schools based on today’s environment? The curriculum would’ve to be extremely flexible. To design a business school today, there’s so much going on and I think that we as administrators, as have to be just like the students.
We’ve gotta be able to adapt and adapt quickly. There would not be the structure and the organization and the bureaucracy that exists. We’d have to have curriculum that would be tailored to you specifically as a student. And if you wanted to get off in some. Tangent. Great. Let’s figure out how to get you on that tangent.
And if you don’t wanna study ai, we’re not gonna have you study ai. But if you, if you think you don’t know what it is, then you’re gonna study AI ’cause you better learn it. So it, it would not be the traditional, you know, finance, marketing, organizational behavior. It wouldn’t be that at all. It would be completely changed and there would be a lot more real world brought into the classroom of the success that I had as a professor was because I would bring all my friends in and have them be guest speakers.
They’d get all mad. They’d go, well wait, you get paid and I have to do the talking. I go, yeah, it’s a pretty good deal. But they would come and tell their story. And then, what should I do? I I, I’m a CEO of a company, I own a company. What should I do? And the students would answer it. And one guy said, I’m in, I’m in a crossroads.
What do you think? And the, the class almost unanimously said, quit. And he went, went out and he quit the next day. ’cause they told him to. So. The reality is you gotta deal with it’s, we gotta get outta the theory stuff. There’s just too much theory. I mean, theory’s good. We need to teach theory as a baseline, but not as extensive as we did have been doing.
And we have to change that and be flexible. It’s hard to do. It’s a good question though. Thank you.
Mentor taught tens of thousands of students. What would you say is the biggest attributes of success that you’ve seen? What attributes do they have? What perspectives do they have? What? What? You’ve seen so many people be successful. What would you say? One word? Passion. Somebody’s passionate about selling.
It’s all about passion. You know, you look at, you look at people that have been successful. They were passionate about their concept. They were passionate about their idea. One young man walked in and he says, I’m gonna put 10,000 waterless toilets in India by the end of the year. I said, man, go for it.
What can I do to help you? Just stuff like that. I, I think passion gets you a long way. I’ll give you an example. We were gonna hire a football coach and we had a guy that came and said to our president, I wanna be the football coach. And the athletic director said, the guy’s been fired from two teams in the pros, not a pro coach.
And you know, he’s been fired. I mean, no, he’s not successful. And I remember walking out to the car that night and the president comes over to me, he says, Jim, we’re interviewing this guy to be a football coach, and he really, really, really wants the job. What do you think he, he doesn’t have a great track record.
I said, are you kidding? I hired the guy. Pete Carroll did a pretty good job. Did a pretty good job. Come on. He was passionate. I mean, it is all about passion. Once you get something where you want to go, don’t let anybody deter you. Just stay the course. Yeah, you’re gonna hit the obstacles that he’s talking about.
You’re gonna hit those obstacles, but don’t even look at those obstacles. Just keep going. When I was playing golf, well back in the old days. You know, you stand up and you look out and there’s a whole body of water out there and you gotta hit the ball around the water. I never saw the water, I didn’t see it.
It’s not an obstacle. So a passionate person doesn’t see obstacles. They only see opportunities and, and I think those students that did really successfully did it because they, they saw with a passion and what they could do, and they did. They made it happen. Let’s go on this side. Anybody on this side?
Any other questions? Oh, there we go. You can’t ask a question that this is, this is now after how many years? This is hometown. How many years, Luke? Real fast. My name is Luke Wang. I’ve met some of you guys here. I’m the general manager of the Innovation Lab. Pleasure to meet you guys. Really excited to have you guys all here.
One thing I wanna say, I was a student professor Ellis’s that 15, 20 years ago, whatever it was. I think so, so I think without him, maybe this event doesn’t happen today. I don’t really know. I’d be on the streets. I have no idea. I don’t think you, you’d be okay. One question I have for you is you know, you’ve been in a lot of different roles across a lot different organizations.
Do you have any sort of personal heuristic as far as how you separate the noise from the signal in terms of today’s political economic climate, like nothing that’s happening, you know, say January 24th, 20th onwards. Like how do you kind of keep your head straight between all the different things that are being broadcast in the news and, and what’s actually meaningful versus what’s not?
That’s a great question, Luke. I think that we get caught up in the daily news. It gets us very depressed. You know, we go, oh my God, what are they doing? Why are they doing this? And I think that. What, what I’ve tried to do is if I can influence something, then I’m gonna think about that. If I can’t do anything about it, I let it go.
I just can’t, that, that’s just not in my wheelhouse. I gotta leave it alone and you know, maybe it’ll come back to me some, some other way and maybe if I need to influence it. I think that if I had to influence something, I have spoken enough to the president of the United States that I think I probably could get through to him and talk to him about that.
And one of the coolest things about the job of being Dean is that I always said I could get to any person in the world on two phone calls, and the students would test me on that one. They’d say, how about the premier of China? I’d go, hell, that’s one phone call. Yeah, gimme a hard one. And and, and even Trump, Trump said to one of my students once he was interviewing, he says, you tell that Dean of yours that if he needs anything, he’s gotta call me.
I go, okay, that’s fine. I’ll call him if I need it, but. I can’t get, I can’t let that get me down. You know, I can’t look at the stock market and watch it crashing and say to myself, oh man, I’m losing money. Can’t do that. I, I can’t do stuff. I can’t do anything about that. So I’m not gonna let it drive me nuts.
Whatever I can do, I’m gonna keep doing it. And knowing full well, ’cause I’ve been around long enough to know that administrations change every four years or every eight years, we’re gonna get through this. It’ll be fine, and there’s gonna be some changes made that are gonna be pretty damn good. And there are gonna be some, I, I don’t like the way they’re being done ’cause to me that’s not leadership.
I mean, leadership is really, really important here. But some of the things that are being done, we’ve all been talking about those things should have been done a long time. Well, I mean, we all used to laugh about $10,000 toilets. They’re trying to eliminate that. I don’t know if they’re gonna do it or not, but I think it’s just, it’s kinda letting it to you.
I think that it don’t let the news drive you nuts. And that’s the job of the news is to drive you nuts. It’s hard. It’s really hard. We have time for one more. Oh, you called? Oh, I was just gonna say, what, what do you, what do you what do you say to those that did not graduate college? Congratulations.
You know, do you know what I mean? Debt. You got no debt, right? So you’re way ahead of the game. You know, clutch is not for everybody. It’s not for everybody. And I think the key is. You know, you have to take advantage of the, what, the, the cards you’ve been dealt and maximize what you’ve done. I mean, Steve Jobs didn’t graduate in college and Zuck didn’t graduate from college and, and Gates didn’t graduate from college.
They’re doing fine. So I think that I, I think you gotta make your own path and don’t ever apologize for not going to college. No one should ever apologize. No one should ever apologize for what college they went to or any of that stuff. You, you’re on a path, you’re on your own path. Just keep going down that path with a stand up straight and say, this is who I am.
You know, you see it on television when they, they run the football games and they’ll have the guys say, my name is Joe Smith from the University of Arkansas. My name is Steve White. I’m from North Carolina. My name is Jim Ellison. I’m from North Marion High School. Kobe Bryant did fine and he only went to North Marion High School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
So there’s a lot of examples of people that did not go to college, and it’s, it’s not right for everybody and it’s fine. It’s okay. All right, let’s give it up for Jim.