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SPEAKERS 

Jeff York, Greg Fisher, Joel Davis, Brad Werner

 

Jeff York  00:14

welcome to creative distillation where we distill entrepreneurship research into actionable insights i am your host jeff york research director of the deming center for entrepreneurship as well as professor of entrepreneurship at the university of colorado boulder leeds school of business

 

Brad Werner  00:31

i'm joined as always with my co host i'm brad warner i'm the teaching director of the deming center for entrepreneurship the lead school of business at the university of colorado these titles jeff are starting to sound like some of the titles of some of the research papers we've been talking about

 

Jeff York  00:45

i can keep going brad you want me to do a few notes it's like also a research fellow at the renewable and sustainable energy institute the division chair of the division for social responsibility and sustainability i think i got some other ones i can pull up on the on the division chair of the organizations and natural environment research division of the academy of management i serve on the editorial board also organization science the academy of management journal the journal of business ventry entrepreneurship theory and practice strategic entrepreneurship journal and a dad that's the most important title of all brad

 

Brad Werner  01:24

you know i thought what's it's like going to the westminster dog show you just gave your entire title but we'll call you max

 

Jeff York  01:34

we did we did tend to collect titles in academia you know you know why they do that mean this is just like corporate setting you give people titles you have to come money works out really well

 

Brad Werner  01:44

oh nice i'll take the money

 

Jeff York  01:45

no you're good you're gonna be the vice president it's very important rule

 

Brad Werner  01:50

yeah what the other 1000

 

Jeff York  01:54

that was very true so how are you doing brad have you enjoyed the snow this week in boulder you went you went skiing yesterday did you know that actually

 

Brad Werner  02:01

i had to back skiing yesterday i just got too busy but i did something yesterday that was actually new for me in boulder as i went snowshoeing up the mountain so i needed to get out it was freaking awesome normally i'm reluctant to bring my dog because of all the altitude cactus and all that type of thing but with a foot of snow he came with me and was running all over the mountains it was it was it was fabulous

 

Jeff York  02:21

very cool i you know what i've never been snowshoeing i've lived in colorado for 10 years never been you guys so she's here for you and

 

Brad Werner  02:29

your wife if you ever want to use them

 

Jeff York  02:31

okay cool yeah so you just went and bought something you didn't random or anything

 

Brad Werner  02:34

no i've had it for 10 years

 

Jeff York  02:37

yeah okay so you've used them but you're from chicago you guys have to snowshoe there

 

Brad Werner  02:41

oh yeah you know it's just like the old days when i had to walk 10 miles to school and all that kind of stuff you

 

Jeff York  02:45

bet huh yeah back in the country times as my my kids say banjos and walked on snowshoes and have no facebook facebook's not cool at all i should have mentioned that my kids have been time i'm super excited because i just got on the list to get vaccinated so i am totally psyched telling everybody i know how to try to do i did and hopefully we can all get vaccinated and start recording this thing real soon in person which we all look forward to because we miss hanging out and breweries and seeing each other no question and seeing our guests in person but on the upside of the pandemic we've been able to bring guests in from far far without having to delve into the massive creative distillation podcast budget that we usually lavishly bestow upon all our guests to welcome today's guest dr greg fisher who is the larry and barbara sharp professor of entrepreneurship at indiana university at the kelley school of business welcome greg

 

Greg Fisher  03:46

thank you jeff it's good to be here

 

Jeff York  03:47

it is awesome to see you my friend greg and i have known each other what 12 years maybe i don't even know introduce at the darden lally entrepreneurship retreat

 

Greg Fisher  03:59

that's about right here

 

Jeff York  04:00

that was the good old days where you would get together with a bunch of cool people and hang out and enjoy each other's company and drink mint juleps on the lawn there at uva top academic stuff all we can spread would have loved

 

Brad Werner  04:17

love that i will i will say one thing though indiana university is a beautiful campus living in boulder is a great place to go but actually i would say that indiana university greg is close it's that beautiful

 

Greg Fisher  04:31

yeah i mean it's a similar kind of college town feel to boulder a boulder is amazing incredibly expensive to live we can get something of the same fuel for about half the price

 

Brad Werner  04:42

this is nice

 

Jeff York  04:43

yeah it's a it's an awesome place and and what you might not be aware of better you might i don't know they have arguably the top entrepreneurship research faculty in the country right now they have literally just snagged up every great person i want to hire before i could hire them for the past probably five six maybe even longer years if just a wonderful wonderful group there and they just hired one of our students today who got hired brittany lambert

 

Brad Werner  05:08

oh nice job they're

 

Jeff York  05:09

so fantastic hire for them and great outcome for brittany i know she is super excited and i'm just excited for so greg your brewery that you picked it's called upland brewing company right i've been brewing yeah on this bottle of got here so i found two beers in boulder from upland brewing company up and sour ales is when it says on the label that you're saying these guys really lean into the the sour ale thing

 

Greg Fisher  05:35

yeah so upland was a tiny little brewery in bloomington indiana and then a bunch of sort of local investors got together with a guy who was sort of washing energy around the sort of craft brew movement sometime sometime around the early 2000s they got together and said well could we turn this into something that's a little a little more significant or a little bit more momentum bigger impact and so on and at that stage the market was already been somewhat flooded with craft breweries especially around this area you know you go up towards chicago towards like michigan and there's there's plenty of them and so they said well one way to differentiate ourselves is by creating or generating brewing sours and so they really lent into this whole idea of sour ales and started by doing it sort of as a once a year release and really constraining supply and generating demand and a bit of buzz around it and have gone further than that and they bolt out a whole what they call the woodshop because these things are fermented in wooden barrel crate things so they've got a whole facility now dedicated to solid

 

Jeff York  06:49

cool i have an opaque beer yet i'm looking at the label is gorgeous it's like an abstract expressionist art maybe i don't know it's very cool i'm gonna go ahead and open this and see what it's like

 

Brad Werner  07:02

so craig i'm from chicago and i've been in boulder coming up on five years now and what i've noticed talking to you though is the accents in indiana have gotten a little thicker since i've left

 

Greg Fisher  07:14

yeah this is this is a typical midwestern accent we've changed things up a little yeah

 

Brad Werner  07:21

yeah

 

Brad Werner  07:21

i gotta come back i gotta i gotta re acclimate over there cheers guys

 

Jeff York  07:27

cheers alright so i'm smelling this thing wow so it's got serious brettanomyces this comes from the tradition of brewing lambics belgian spontaneously fermented ales usually brewed around the brussels region oh what they do is they bring the work as the unfermented beer style and then pump it up to the roof and put it out in giant vats open to the sky let it sit up there and cool overnight become infected with the wild bacteria and yeast and then they put it into barrels that they've kept for sometimes hundreds and hundreds of years are very valuable you never want to lose the barrel you also never like clean a lambic brewery it's like the opposite of everything you normally do in brewing which is why we think sterile clean no wild yeast and you just this thing just reeks of wild yeast i mean it's described as horse blanket brad you'll like that descriptor so brad what are your first impressions of this

 

Brad Werner  08:20

okay you know what when this was on the roof i think that we had some raccoons walking by because this is getting bad oh my god how do you drink i mean are you drinking this purely for pleasure or just to show that you can hear we can go and find a lake put a hole in the ice and do a polar bear thing for a manly thing this is brutal

 

Greg Fisher  08:39

it's an acquired taste

 

Jeff York  08:43

i think it's phenomenal

 

Brad Werner  08:44

i think it smells great grizzly but tastes off

 

Jeff York  08:48

alright you got to take a couple of sips is this

 

Brad Werner  08:50

kind of camera is there a side bet somewhere to see how much of this you guys can get me to drink

 

Jeff York  08:56

like a belgian ale one time my buddies what oh dude we knew good beer we've drink shared about a pale ale this is crap like there's something wrong with this we took it back to the beer store and demanded our money back

 

Brad Werner  09:08

i'm not the only one in the room here though greg is this your

 

Greg Fisher  09:10

forte these things do grow in you bread they do the first time i went to upland and i'm not going to experience the wholesaler experience and i got this and i was like what the hell but the more time you spend and you sort of hear the story behind it they genuinely do grow on you and you know there is that notion in entrepreneurship that what you want to try and do is polarize people put them at one end of the continuum or the other and that's what these guys have done they've sort of said hey i think you're in this sours game and you want to you want to participate and if you don't like it

 

Brad Werner  09:46

get away normally i'm on the front end of the curve but this one i think i'm going to be on the laggards i think that's gonna get you there man we just got to go to belgium to go interview some people sophie to take us on a tour of belgian breweries although she likes one better that'd be cool man this smells great though truthfully and my son so my son went to brew school in germany who heard me he's a really huge fan of the sour beers but i just you know looks at me like i'm crazy when i hand one back to him but i just for me it's not resonating at least that yet maybe after a bottle of bourbon look

 

Jeff York  10:20

at it to like it's just got such a cool like cloudy like farm made appearance i mean it's just beautiful i love this stuff as well i mean i love somewhere else

 

Brad Werner  10:32

i need y'all to pop in here for a second i need i need a little help joe are you drinking this thing too

 

Joel Davis  10:37

i'm not i'm drinking coffee i know that i know better than the drink that kind of beer

 

Brad Werner  10:42

yeah okay so what

 

Jeff York  10:44

we're drinking is sorry i'm there with you brad

 

Greg Fisher  10:48

we joel sent me the list of what beers jeff had picked out i was like oh this is gonna be interesting

 

Jeff York  10:55

well that's just that's the only upland beers they had like cuz upland makes non sours as well right

 

Greg Fisher  11:00

yeah they make a pretty good wheat they make something called champagne velvet which was actually a pilsner recipe that was discovered in indiana pre prohibition and they sort of recreated it but salaries are what travel more broadly across the us so that's why this is what you get in colorado

 

Jeff York  11:20

right and this will compete in the boulder market yeah i just went to the beer store there's like 250 beers from boulder on the wall like much less it is insane it's insane like i mean and they've got like these two bottles and i mean you've got to bring something in it's got to be different right and i think that's what these guys have figured out really nice nice strategy of like hey we're gonna be the sour brewery of bloomington and and the hipper parts of indiana and people and then we're gonna go wider with it i guess i don't know i don't think i've been that good maybe is this brewery like out near that little town that's near where you go mountain but it's not in a town it's like where the vinegar place

 

Brad Werner  11:59

oh that that little town in indiana let's let's be specific here guys

 

Jeff York  12:04

okay no no craig you want to talk about there's a place there's

 

Greg Fisher  12:09

nashville is where that may be a mountain biking right exactly that's a different brewery that that's called qualifying brewery

 

Jeff York  12:19

yes that's right and they have another thing called great woods it's a distillery i think yeah they have a little branch there in bloomington as well

 

Greg Fisher  12:27

correct

 

Jeff York  12:27

yeah that's my we just went through the knowledge of my knowledge of beer around bloomington that i've gained from my visits there i want i'm going to this place is a fantastic

 

Brad Werner  12:36

i'll go but i'm going to bring my wine with me so here we go this is the first time at creative distillation fred's holding up have a glass of wine now okay if you looked at my desk right you cameras and the mics and all that set up and then this line of booze because when i heard sours today i figured this was a setup towards me and i had to have a backup and there's no way that you can talk academic papers without booze so here at three in the afternoon boulder time i'm going with a little bit of white wine before it's five o'clock and i can have some bourbon so cheers well

 

Jeff York  13:05

i i really liked this brewery and i'm definitely gonna go what we're having here is the golden brew it's dry after the weekend citrus it's a barrel aged sour let's say that tastes really that strong to me so you don't have to list alcohol in indiana

 

Greg Fisher  13:21

5.6 is mine so 5.6

 

Jeff York  13:23

yeah this is a nice like yeah you could just pound these like you know 5.6 that brad this is a perfect summer beverage you could have like you know three of these not be too badly affected

 

Brad Werner  13:34

yeah put a nail in my hand too but this stuff is brewing right

 

Jeff York  13:41

so it's an acquired taste for the sour ales it's dry hot too i really like i think the dry hopping like balances out some of the sourness makes it a little more approachable despite what brad says because some of the sour ales you get out here i mean like there's a place called crooked stave in denver and all they do is ours and their their deal is like you know they're kind of like the i mean they're great brewery don't get me wrong but they're kind of like the the ipas that like peel the enamel off your teeth but the sour ones it's like you have to take a few sips where you can you taste anything after that so so we're like sour patch kids almost it's almost a chemical type sourness but this is delicious

 

Brad Werner  14:18

well mine's waiting for you in the fridge anytime you come on down the hill

 

Jeff York  14:22

i'll roll right back down there and get cuz we have a blackberry one too but we'll have to see how long we talk mostly getting like some grapefruit in this like instead of the traditional like sweet tart sourness it's really nice

 

Greg Fisher  14:35

well they say it's got citra which is interesting

 

Jeff York  14:38

yeah that is interesting like so citra is like

 

Greg Fisher  14:41

tradenet salah

 

Jeff York  14:42

yeah and you rica also is not like i mean there's these are traditional like ipa hops like these are big american usually you don't really worry about the hops but i'm getting it in the aroma here too well i like it i like it a lot it is jeff approved and recommended, and you just just ignore anything Brad says about beer cuz he knows

 

Brad Werner  15:05

well here's what I would say. This summer he doesn't like pumpkin beer even oh god this summer a Cubs game and some past that that's a good beer. And that's a good day right being outside. I do that all day long. I'll take a case of paps for for this Oh my god. It's just it's brutal.

 

Jeff York  15:25

Oh, glad you trade you a few paths for this. It's really good. Thank you for the recommendation, Greg. I'm sorry. My coast is not more receptive. But yeah, well, we'll come visit and he can. I will say this. He has an amazing collection of whiskies. We always love to have the Deming center gatherings over at Brad's house. Anytime dimming center party. It's got to be a Brad's because it won't just be like, you know, yeah, when you go up people's parties, and they're like, you know, they'll have a cooler beer around the back porch. And that's nice. Everyone has not not Brad's house, he'll have all these whiskies out. And they're like, good stuff, like someone's that you've never heard of. It's just it's an awesome experience. You just got to have an Uber re the end of the night. Yeah. All right, well, so Greg, we're gonna talk about your paper today, entrepreneurial hustle. And here on Creative distillation, we're always trying to find good new entrepreneurial research to distill, because, you know, we want to try to communicate that to our students, the Deming center, and also to our alums and other stakeholders their interest in what the center is up to. And so I want to first of all, thank you for the title of this paper, because it could have very easily been called do the hustle. And it wasn't. So thank you for that. You know that we have this thing of like putting something before a colon, and then explaining what the paper is actually about. So Brad always likes to stuff before the colon. And then we do the rest of it. And he's like, what the hell? So it's here the full title. Yeah, this could have been Brad, this could have been a paper just called do the hustle. Like without allusion to the Disco's. Yeah. And that would have been painful, right? That's

 

Brad Werner  17:07

right. It's better than some of the other titles we've discussed, actually.

 

Jeff York  17:10

Although this one is called entrepreneurial hustle. You like that? Right? Yeah. I mean, that sounds like something you might pick up. And I actually

 

Brad Werner  17:17

read the abstract. Yeah, exactly. While I was looking through the library at this paper, and so the link that you sent me, Jeff, took me directly to a place to purchase. And when I noticed that the price was $49, to read about the entrepreneurial hustle, I'm thinking No, way. It's a bargain bargain.

 

Jeff York  17:35

Greg, why did you price your paper at $49? Like, I mean, what a terrible pricing model don't change your life, it will change

 

Greg Fisher  17:42

your life.

 

Brad Werner  17:44

How many of you saw Greg it's like

 

Greg Fisher  17:45

buying a good self help program?

 

Brad Werner  17:47

Are there more than 10 people in your family?

 

Greg Fisher  17:49

No. Well, so

 

Jeff York  17:50

you're talking about something? It's interesting not to get sidetracked? Because I bet we will. Because I want to talk about Greg's paper, there's this thing in academia, it's a really interesting business models that these journals have, or I should say, the publishers of these journals have where you know, Greg and I and others, we write these papers, we submit them, we really hope they'll publish them. We're happy when they do we get paid nothing for that. And then the journal sells the access to that information. at a very high rate, as you pointed out, Brad to academic University, they're not trying to sell you a subscription. Right? That's it's a university level subscription. And that's the business model. A lot of people are really unhappy about that. And I would also say, though, it's super tough to break out of

 

Brad Werner  18:36

right, you guys, you guys have lifetime appointments? I would say and the expectations are that you produce these is that correct? Yeah. So in a sense, you are paid right to do this?

 

Jeff York  18:46

Oh, yeah. So don't get me wrong. But the lifetime value of a job I mean, somebody I saw somebody said something about, like a journal pub and a pub as far as how that affects your salary over

 

Brad Werner  18:55

your career. It's a significant impact big time, defects got jobs you can get as a lay person that I am. Everybody's heard the term publish or perish? What happens to an academic if they don't publish? Is their is their career over? I mean, I actually don't know,

 

Jeff York  19:11

depends on if they have 10 years.

 

Brad Werner  19:13

So you publish to get tenure. And once you have tenure, you can stop if you like,

 

Jeff York  19:17

well, I can speak for what would happen to you at our school, you would not lose your job necessarily. However, what would happen is people like me and your peers that review your research productivity every year would say, Hey, what's up, man? Hey, Brad, you haven't published anything in like five years, what's going on? And you could tell us a big story about your hard luck, or you can just tell us having felt like it or whatever. Well, I started my hedge fund or whatever I did, and then eventually that you would just be assigned more teach, okay. And we don't often deal with this. Because the idea is that you give people tenure, they're addicts that publish. Yeah, so they'll just keep doing it because they like doing it. Like that's what we're looking for. Like Yeah, okay, this person's just gonna do this. You guys And I would I really, I love doing I love writing this stuff. I love doing the research, I love seeing it in print and talking to other people about it. So yeah, I would do it, you know, anyway. But um, but yeah, and and, and so there's all sorts of incentives, there's also funding tied to your publication rate. So for example, your research funding budget would very quickly shrink away and nothing. And then eventually, the dean's office would be like, Hey, dude, or gal, you're not a, you're not publishing like you used to, and we got a few more classes that need to be taught here. So they're gonna get they're gonna get their value out of your salary.

 

Greg Fisher  20:34

Some of the support is also something they'll hang over your head. So stop paying you over the summer, because you're not not

 

Brad Werner  20:41

you're not working. You see, I got it. That's actually very interesting to me. And I think that'll be interesting to our listeners kind of about the background. And for me, it's always been follow the money, right? And money is a big motivator. So I think that this is actually Oh, yeah, pull the curtain back a little bit to see this, I think is insightful for our listeners.

 

Jeff York  20:59

Yeah, this could make all the difference between a point 5% raise or a 1% raise for Greg and I, it could be huge, or this year wouldn't make any difference at all, most universities. But what is the saying people have never fought so hard when the stakes are so low. So true. But it does make a difference in Greg's absolutely right. And your research funding because that's that tends to be competitive, and it's not guaranteed. And so if you're not publishing, you stand to lose up to you know, what, it depends on the university. But now, it could be up to a 30 or 70. And

 

Brad Werner  21:27

let's add one more question. Yes. When it comes to research firing, does not where you receive your funding from introduce bias into papers? No,

 

Jeff York  21:38

well, it shouldn't. It certainly could. What do you think, but it does not it for most people, because we're usually not researching the industry that funded us. So as you know, Brad, I do most of my stuff about how entrepreneurship can address climate change. And the Koch brothers and their various organizations like that story about the Koch brothers now, like that story, because it sounds like oh, this guy, you know, wants to do market based approaches to solving climate change. And so I've been approached for funding by various organizations called things like, people against tyranny, or you know, freedom is good. I'm being facetious, but that is about what these things are called. And when you go and Google him say, Oh, that's a Koch brothers, like, you know, front organization to by academics, I'm not taking it. So it depends on your context, right? Like, you don't want to take money from the people you're researching, or the industries that your research raises problems with. On the other hand, you know, I've been funded by the Shane diamond company here in Colorado, I've never even thought about writing a paper about diamonds in my life, they're just interested in supporting entrepreneurship research. And the shame family has been very generous to us. So I see no bias, or anything there. But usually people want to support research that says that they care about and, and Shane and the shame family, we're very passionate about social responsibility in business. So they want to help support some of the research I was doing, which was, which was nice.

 

Brad Werner  23:02

That's really interesting. Actually. I'm gonna give him a toast for my white wine right here at 330. In the afternoon. This is to the shame family continued to support Jeff's research.

 

Jeff York  23:12

Well, yeah, that's about you, Greg. I mean, what do you think does this funding bias researcher,

 

Greg Fisher  23:18

I think it's a it's a very minimal problem in business schools, business schools generally have different funding models from relying on external funding. And so as a result of that, we sort of paid our salary no matter what I mean, in my case, I've got a sort of professorship from Larry and Barbara Scharf, as you pointed out, they're individuals that really got no stake in the game. They're not trying to influence in any way. They just like Indiana University, their alarms, and they want to support what we're doing here. So I think in in other domains or other disciplines, it can be a lot more contentious. If you're studying nutrition, and you're getting all your money from Coca Cola, then you might be influenced. But it but in business schools, it's really a minimal minimum.

 

Jeff York  24:04

Yeah, and it is absolutely rampant political action groups, funding professors with expectation of certain points of view will be supported. Absolutely. As happening out there, for sure. And you definitely see it in the environmental space and big time, at least I do. That's, that's a space where I see more. I think people tend to have more at stake than a lot of studies we do in business, in that case.

 

Brad Werner  24:29

Right. And I was not casting aspersions on either these two fine, gentlemen that I'm sharing the microphone. Oh, no, I did. But right now, I just want to make that clear for the record. But I do think that overall, it is interesting to see a lot of these papers that we're talking about, actually, how are they being underwritten and why. And I think that that's important as well, too.

 

Jeff York  24:47

Yeah. And as Greg says, most of its underwritten by business schools themselves. You know, business schools have a very different model. And when you go across campus and you talk to say, Well, I'm part of this renewable and sustainable energy Institute's I jokingly reeling off my titles. You know, I talked to people over there who are actual scientists that do things with physics and, you know, building efficiency and improving solar cell efficiency. And they wanted me to join grants and things like that. I'm like, Why don't really need to join a grant like, well, you mean, you need to join a grant, you have to be on a grant. I mean, you need to maintain your funding. I'm like, Well, no, I'm just I just get paid either way. And, and in the sciences, they've got, you know, raised money from NSF and other foundations and private grants. And there's a lot more pressure on that fundraising aspect of the job. So it's very different. Awesome. All right. Well, okay, so we've now discussed academic publishing. And we've discussed the first two words of Craig's paper here on Creative distillation, you know, is brought to you today by the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, and I'm sure the dimming Sarah will be most impressed in our elaborate discussion of the first two words of Greg's

 

Brad Werner  25:55

research funding, research funding in sour beer. Okay.

 

Jeff York  25:59

Well, actually, you know, the Deming, sir, we do a lot. I mean, that's the all those PhD students we talk to, we gave them pretty big chunks of change to support their research. And I think those are the people that really need the help more than then, you know, I or Greg, you know, we have good jobs are paid fine salaries. But as an entrepreneurship PhD student, that's not the case. You know, you're you're definitely looking for every penny you can scrape together to try to get your research done. So we're getting ready to do some more grants to them. That's where a lot of the Deming service efforts goes to help those people rather than the faculty necessarily. The faculty are doing okay, they're fine. But the paper actually is called entrepreneurial hustle, which Brad says he would almost pay $49 to read but not quite navigating uncertainty and enrolling venture stakeholders through urgent and unorthodox action. That's not so bad.

 

Brad Werner  26:46

That's that's understandable. I'll give it a one thumb up. It's certainly better than some of the other ones that we've we've discussed. So, Greg, so far, so good head is high praise, Greg.

 

Jeff York  26:59

All right, great. So Greg, why don't you this paper just came out, right. I mean, it's a well 20 reasonably by academic standards, it just came out. I had not read it before today. Boy, I thought it was super interesting. So why don't you just tell us a little bit about Greg, like, what's this paper about? And what were you guys trying to do?

 

Greg Fisher  27:18

So one of the things that really intrigues me, and I think about a lot, and I think about it partly because of my own experience. So I was an entrepreneur, I actually started a business while I was in my MBA program, in E learning business called Learning Lab, and brought that up, and then sort of had a had a pretty unceremonious exit, and started teaching Then, and only then went into a Ph. D. program. And, and one of the things once I got into doing a Ph. D. program, and now all of a sudden, I had to research, one of the things I thought about was what do entrepreneurs actually do? And does their action on a day to day basis make any kind of difference? And is there anything that distinguishes their actions from other people's actions. And then I found a person who sort of identified with that in Sara Sara Murphy, who Jeff had worked with and knows, and she was visiting the University of Washington where I was at, and he said, you know, what you need to study you need to study what entrepreneurs actually do the micro actions they take on a day to day basis. And I thought that was cool. And I did a little bit of work in that space, and then sort of drifted off into other other spaces. But that notion of micro actions of entrepreneurs and what they do from day to day, how they execute from hour to hour, or from task to task stuck with me and was something I wanted to get back to. And then the other thing that I'm a bit of a junkie for is podcasts. And so I got into the how I bought this podcast, and was listening to these things and said, hey, there's something interesting here. We could dive into these, how I built this podcast and into the the nuance of the stories and into the actions that are underpinning everything they're saying, and distill something more interesting. And so I cobbled together some transcripts from some of these podcasts, and we started coding them and started saying, what's really going on here. And out of that was born this idea of a one of the things that's at least necessary, maybe not sufficient, but certainly necessary. So it's common across every single one of these these ones, is the sort of notion of doing whatever it takes acting with urgency, just operating with a sense of, of, I've got to make this happen no matter what. And so we try to label that try to distill down what that was, and try to unpack what it meant for each of these businesses that was being formed what what sort of outcomes positive or negative negative might it have for each of these interesting businesses on the how I built this podcast and and hence came to this notion of entrepreneurial how And look for a place to get it published.

 

Jeff York  30:03

That's pretty darn cool. And this actually is related to our earlier conversation like, so you guys like, you know, you didn't have to go do like, five years of r&d in the lab and like, you know, go out and test a prototype and try to get a department of defense contracts for your scientific research here. You transcribe the podcast, publicly available data. I mean, that's something we can do in this field. That's really kind of unique, I think.

 

Greg Fisher  30:28

Yeah. And I think as as entrepreneurship has taken off into the cultural sort of Zeitgeist, there are interesting sources of data, there are people revealing insights about what they do on a day to day basis, about how they think about things about how they communicate with the world, just through general channels. That mean, we don't need to necessarily spend tons of time any longer doing surveys, which people will lie on anyway. or trying to go out and actually physically spend time with entrepreneurs, because there's so much that's revealed just in in their day to day existence, and we can take advantage of that as researchers. Awesome.

 

Jeff York  31:11

So it's interesting, we're talking about Sarah, because like, you're by definition, studying, the people there on on this podcast are, are successful. So some would say like, from an academic standpoint, wow, you're just sampling on the dependent variable of success there, Greg. So how can you know what these entrepreneurs really do? Like? Well, you

 

Greg Fisher  31:31

sound exactly like the reviewers on the paper, Jeff?

 

Jeff York  31:34

Yeah, well, I'm good at it. That's why I'm on the editorial board of so many fine journals, Greg, because I've mastered how to say this. By the way, we won't do another sidetrack. But Greg is the is an editor at our premier theory journal. So I want to have a discussion sometime with Brad about theory. So we'll have you back for that. That should be fun. Brad will love that. Sure. I will wait for that bread, nothing, nothing ground in reality at all. Just you know, no, I

 

Brad Werner  32:00

love it. But you know, remember, part of creative distillation is distilling academic research. So we have actual results for entrepreneurs on the ground. And when I hear Greg Talk, I'm thinking, no. I mean, yeah, tell me something I didn't know. And Greg is a is a prior entrepreneur, and I would say probably still in your DNA, did isn't this kind of the No, of course, this is the case,

 

Greg Fisher  32:27

I think that's true, then, of course, this is the way you need to behave. No entrepreneur who's out there, you know, pounding the streets, or figuring out how to plug a resource gap, or figuring out how to create a prototype is going to argue with this notion, where it is really interesting, Brad is, is in the classroom. So you get into the classroom, and you're in the classroom, and you're you're teaching these guys all the time on guys and girls, and, and so on. And you see, I can quite quickly distill down, who could have a got a shot at this, they're not necessarily going to be successful, but who could put themselves into the ring, and who's it's not even worth doing based on this notion of hustle. And so I often give students, I give them a sort of mini test, I give them three tasks, and see the extent to which they hustle in trying to fulfill those tasks, go and meet one person, go and build the products are going to do this. And if they can hustle enough to get that done, then maybe they've got a shot. If they don't, then I recommend them to go and you know, get your resume ready to go and get a job. Very easy to distill down and I can split my class who've all self selected to take an entrepreneurship subject by the extent to which they do this stuff, or they're not willing to.

 

Brad Werner  33:44

So is it DNA based? That this is something that runs through someone's blood? Or is it interested in a specific topic or solving a specific problem?

 

Greg Fisher  33:52

It's a really good question. I don't know for sure. I've tried to sort of monitor just within myself. And I realized that some things, I'm almost always trying to set up a barrier or always trying to think, or what's the rational, logical long term plan that I would follow through on here as opposed to the immediate next action? And so I do think it is somewhat contextual, or am I as an entrepreneur, engaging with a problem that I really care about? And I want to solve? Or am I just doing this because it seems like something I should maybe do, and I behave differently depending on those. So my gut instinct, the paper doesn't get into this. But my gut instinct is that it's about people pairing up with problems that they really care about. And they care about so much that they willing to really do whatever it takes to make that happen, as opposed to waiting for things to come to them or making the excuse that they can't get resources, or, I don't know is struggling, struggling with whatever the next barrier is.

 

Brad Werner  34:55

Yeah, I believe what you're saying wholeheartedly just through my life experience. I see that I see that with students. as well, but but I don't think it's a surprise, right if you find something that you're passionate about and and i would say passion is not enough obsessive about, right? It's that level. It's not by taking an interest. It's, it's something that becomes all consuming to you. And you'll do anything that you you have to do to keep moving forward. That's that's how I look at it.

 

Greg Fisher  35:19

Yeah. And one of the interesting things was we with this paper, we started to realize that it impacts more than just resources, which is often what people think, oh, entrepreneurs don't have resources. Hence they hustle, which in this case means they operate with a sense of an orthodoxy and urgency. That's how we sort of described it. The unorthodoxy is they do things that surprise most people. And the urgency is that they're not willing to wait a week to get it done. They go and make it happen now. And people often think that that's just associated with Oh, wait, they're plugging the resource gaps. But really, what we sort of distilled down from unpacking these interviews a little further and then running an experiment was, they do it in order to learn and to figure out stuff that they didn't otherwise know. So there's a learning piece to it, they do it to establish that they're actually legitimate. And they they have a right to be doing this. They're not aware that they creating this legitimacy, but it's changing people's minds about who they are. They do, it's to create and build out opportunities that didn't otherwise exist to really execute in interesting ways that people might not have thought there's an opportunity there, but because of the way they've acted, they build out an opportunity. And they they do it to establish connections that they wouldn't have otherwise had. So there's actually an array of different things that come from this idea of operating with a sense of urgency, and a sense of unorthodoxy that, you might not immediately connect with it, but it has a range of outcomes that are potentially positive for the people who are willing to do this.

 

Brad Werner  36:54

Um, how does general society societal rules come into this? Right? I mean, is it in a sense when they're in the zone? If the rules even matter, right? I mean, if you need to get things done, how did you even look into that? Are they always pushing the envelope everywhere? They're going that not only moving their venture forward, but doing anything that they can within their, their universe to pull this off?

 

Greg Fisher  37:15

Ah, I don't know. It's hard to say. is the question, do they do this in all spheres of their life? Or are they're just doing it in the sphere? In which

 

Brad Werner  37:26

I think it's Yeah, I think it comes to the life question, is this, is this kind of how they live their lives beyond their venture? Or is their life just consumed by the venture?

 

Greg Fisher  37:35

Yeah, I think there is a sense that it is quite strongly tied to the venture. I can't say for sure. But one of the one of the things we did, I actually did a follow on paper, where we sort of experimented with people, and we introduce them to the idea of hustle and gave them permission to hustle. And notice that they behave differently off after that. So they were engaging in an entrepreneurial effort. And we said, here's this idea of hustle. And we've attributed the notion that if you want to hustle, you want to operate in an unorthodox way, sort of bump up against the rules a little bit and do things differently, and operate with a sense of urgency. And you don't always need to get the perfect outcome, you're not always optimizing for the perfect outcome you're optimizing to learn in the next stage of whatever you're doing. And we found that that radically increased their inclination to act and their willingness to move forward and their willingness to take action. And so we call the permission to hustle. And giving people permission to hustle actually changed the way they viewed the next task ahead of them, such that they would take action quicker, learn quicker and hence create more momentum for what they were doing.

 

Brad Werner  38:47

Can you provide an example of permission? Yeah, but permission to hustle

 

Jeff York  38:51

that has huge implications for teaching, because like, I noticed this all the time, like, a lot of times our students particularly I mean, I think our MBA students a lot of times in the first year of their program, it is drilled into them that we are going to teach you to be a master of prediction. You're going to learn how to forecast how to check the market, how to make you make a strategy, lay out the plan, lay out the goals, your your job is to know the answers. And then while I teach entrepreneurship electives to second years, I'm like, No, no, you don't know the answers. And you're not going to either, but you still need to do things. And like you're like you, Greg, when I'm teaching entrepreneurship, I make them go do things. I'm like, you have to go talk to people, you have to actually try sell a product you don't even have, you have

 

Greg Fisher  39:36

sell product you don't even know how to make

 

Jeff York  39:39

like, you know, go try to get someone to give you money. And in that route, what you're looking for is I thought was really interesting about this is the unorthodoxy part, the idea that like generally in our educational system, in the United States and even more so I would argue in many parts of the world. You are not taught to behave in an unorthodox behavior you were taught that is the way to be ostracized to not get resources to you know i mean from the time are very small to learn to not behave and you're telling me that people taking more unorthodox or unexpected action actually increased the propensity for stakeholders to want to get involved with them am i interpreting the paper correctly this to me that is quite surprising or at least on the surface it seems like it could be

 

Greg Fisher  40:24

yeah so the second part of this paper what we did was we created the sort of vignette scenario where we created the sort of typical part that one might take where you build out a business plan you try and use the plan to go and raise money and you sort of following what might be the traditional recipe and then we manipulated pieces within that and changed it up that the person's taking immediate action they're not getting perfect outcomes each time and sometimes it's a little bit messy and but it's always got this unorthodox urgent notion to it and we manipulated just seven elements of the vignettes about two thirds of a page read up about a person and expose that to a bunch of potential venture stakeholders and said the basic question which of these two is more legitimate as an entrepreneur and would you be more likely to support and it was radically more the people who were unorthodox or the people who were doing things outside of the recipe that we often thought in the past is the sort of staged approach to launching a venture yeah

 

41:23

well you think your wife would agree with you

 

Jeff York  41:26

that a little more unexpected maybe i mean i mean not to you but to most people

 

Greg Fisher  41:30

yeah i don't think this to someone like brad and i've listened to a few of your podcasts i don't think this is news this is like yeah this is this is this is how we get things done right and so my implications are not necessarily for the people out there who are serial entrepreneurs who this is how they live their life and the next opportunity that comes on their desk they just gotta hustle to make it happen anyway without thinking that that's what they're doing my implications are for the next 18 year old or 19 year old or 25 year old who signed up for an mba program and and who's been trained to find a positive mvp i mean npv before they take any action and i'm not going to do anything until i find that to realize that if they want to enter this world of entrepreneurship that is going to kill them that is going to get them nowhere and so this paper and so that's the notion that if you if you are looking for those certain more predictable more what you think are upfront valid outcomes you're going to paralyze yourself into doing absolutely zero

 

Brad Werner  42:34

i love it actually sounds like my first day in mba class and then the speech that i give them and it's pretty much forget everything that you've learned right now just throw it all out and start fresh but exactly my question my question greg to you and i'm sorry my drink is how do you give someone permission for this entrepreneurial hustle what does that look like

 

Greg Fisher  42:54

yeah so in the context of how we did it we explained to them what hustle was just based on the prior paper that we had written and said we identified that these people who started airbnb or spanx or instagram or whatever this was how they acted and so we give you permission to act in a similar way to replicate the notion of operating in an unorthodox way and trying to be as urgent as possible and not expecting to create perfect outcomes each time and it was sort of just saying to them look it's okay not to try and be perfect it's okay not to try and get everything lined up before you take action it's okay to try things out and all of a sudden way more action utilizing technological solutions that on the surface seem like rudimentary or overt they're not going to be able to do this or we could just use dropbox to do this little piece instead of having coding up something that's sophisticated or just use google forms for this thing and being willing to do that and then learning from that and iterating from that and then being able to take the next step of action so it was literally just conveying to them what this concept is and the fact that it's okay to do this and not to expect the perfect outcome

 

Jeff York  44:13

yeah that's that's that's super important for technologists and engineers so i'm teaching a class right now and it's about half engineering and technology students and half mbas and you know we were talking about convincing mbas to act unorthodox and without you know getting the right answer necessarily holy cow you take someone that's you know a phd in engineering and you try to tell them that not not all of them i mean but but you know they've been trained and they're incredibly smart people obviously are they couldn't have done the work that got them there but they are not used to saying i'm just going to take action even though i don't know the answer and god knows do we want them to do we want the people designing the next airport wi fi after the pandemic to like this out well i'm just gonna try some stuff hopefully it'll be cool i mean i'm being facetious but you know i think that's an incredibly powerful lesson for them and and i thank you for the paper because yeah i use a lot of services work of course and you know greg alluded to sarah saraswathy you i cannot wait to get on this podcast someday so sarah i doubt you're heard this but we're gonna get you on here and you and brad are going to be peas in a pod that'd be hilarious she is just a wonderful woman was my dissertation supervisor and incredible researcher and just brilliant and what greg's doing here i think builds a ton on her work just to get to more specifics because her work is so insightful about talking about look you know expert entrepreneurs don't necessarily know the goal at the end other than i'm trying to start a business and they're open to changing and evolving the venture as people come on board and change it and that's just such a foreign concept to economists and descend to students a lot of times but greg being more specific here and saying it's that unorthodox behavior to me that's what like jumped out of the paper is being like telling your students hey you know what being weird is going to be actually helpful to you because that's going to make people think you actually have something i see this with speakers in the class they want to talk to the more eccentric students are in entrepreneurship i don't think this is true in all of our classes but in entrepreneurship the students they're a little more interesting a little more non traditional they do tend to attract more interest from mentors i've noticed that i've never thought about before today really in a concrete way i mean what do you think brad do you see a similar thing yeah so

 

Brad Werner  46:28

i'm actually thinking about what you just said about engineers and i'm a co founder of an optical engineering firm which actually just took on $9 million at the end of last year and c round we have world class laboratories and the joke around the office when i was there was if you give an engineer world class laboratory 80,000 bucks a year and a great pizza every day they'll never come out of the lab ever and so i think this relates to me in that respect right that because they're always they think that there's this next iteration iteration and they have no concept about putting something out in the market and getting paid for it and then iterating again they don't even know what the hell that means right they're looking for perfection and it doesn't exist so i think in that case it would definitely resonate you don't have to tell them to be weird they're already there and i'm saying that because i'd love engineers but it's true they they look at the world differently right and they think that they can design their way out of issues and i think that's actually cool

 

Jeff York  47:21

oh i i love them i mean i teach a class on renewable energy brad and like i'm like anyone in this class could design a better technological solution than me like i am not the guy for that if you thought that was gonna happen this class you're talking to someone who's a journalism major you know i took logic as my math and my undergrad like you ain't that guy did you awesome

 

Brad Werner  47:43

yeah i just got yeah that's hilarious

 

Jeff York  47:45

love logic i detail well greg did what do we get it right like do we have the essence of the paper distill down i mean i'm focusing on just one small aspect but but that's just because to me that was the aspect that was like so fascinating like the you know being unorthodox is helpful

 

Greg Fisher  48:03

yeah that's clearly a piece of it and i think the important thing is that this is determining more the entry point and do you have at least the basic necessary willingness to enter into this game as opposed to whether this is going to make you successful we not trying to predict who's going to be successful or not going to be successful but with this construct we can tell who's not going to have it even have a shot so if you're not willing to embrace the hustle as we as we say here or embrace hustle then you might as well not even get into the game and go down a different path so

 

Brad Werner  48:41

let me stop you one second can the hustle part the component that you're talking about can that be learned though i've seen people people have walked into my classroom very very timid on the front end and come out and i don't know if it's a confidence level it's probably a combination of many factors

 

Greg Fisher  48:56

but can that be taught i'm not sure i would call it teaching because i'm not sure you're actually distilling knowledge but i think it can be ignited there's a level of self awareness of the fact that now number one i don't need to i don't need to have the answer before i start number two i'm not looking for perfection number three i'm just trying to get the very next step done as opposed to knowing what the multitude of steps are going to be and if you shift that mindset or ignite that perspective in a person and they care enough about the direction that they're going down then i think you can ignite it but it's not a notion of teaching how to do something or understanding a spreadsheet or even understanding lean startup methodology it's more a recognition of how i'm going to treat my immediate next steps and what's going to invoke me to enact those immediate next steps as opposed to wanting to have a very well predefined plan

 

Brad Werner  50:00

Yeah, I think that was well said. I'd love that actually. Absolutely.

 

Jeff York  50:03

Yep. I got nothing to add as usual. No. Work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just I think that's, that's just great. And I mean, I think it speaks to the idea of giving students a place where they can experiment with, I think that's the best thing we can do an entrepreneurship class, a lot of times give them safe space to develop this muscle, because I could stand there and tell them things all day long about minimum viable product, and you know, all this kind of thing and whatever. But I mean, until they actually try it, and in the best cases, and honestly, the best cases don't succeed at first, but then persist and then do six. That's where I really see the difference. I see a difference when students struggle, or some of them are just naturally this. Their thing is kind of cool about stuff like this, Greg, is, I wonder if you've ever had this experience, like, you know, Brad's got, yeah, of course, I remember I showed up one time to teach a summer class in, in Denmark. And I'm sitting there and I've got my 20 MBA students, I'm going to teach this like four day entrepreneurship thing. And there's this guy in the front row, just sitting there with his arms crossed looking at me, like I have dog crap on my shoe or something. I'm like, Well, what I do this guy, he says, like, first thing you asked us to do so well. He's like, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've sold three companies. I'm doing my MBA for fun now. And I'm really curious what you have to say, like no. But I started to talk about effectuation. And theories like this, I saw him like, kind of just going like, at the break, he comes up. And it's not that he was learning anything in particular from me. It's that he was like, well, this is cool to know, this is how I've always thought, and I've always thought I was a weirdo. But this is just how I think. And it's really nice to see someone like saying that's a good thing. Because usually I've just annoyed people.

 

Greg Fisher  51:49

Yeah, so some of these things are almost about how, and you might frame them as theories, trying to describe how expert entrepreneurs think in the case of effectuation, or how they behave in this case, can just be validation for people who've always acted or thought in one of those ways, who might have might have had some success, but they haven't been able to distill it down and give it a name. And now they can say, Oh, it's actually got the way I've thought about or acted in certain scenarios is actually got some meditation, right.

 

Jeff York  52:21

So I think people often struggle to pass it along to their employees, or to co founders or to explain why they're doing what they're doing. In a way. I think that's a useful toolkit for them. At least this gentleman thought says, Oh, yeah, every now and then we get, we get to feel good.

 

Brad Werner  52:37

And I would say this is the approach that we take at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado elite school of business. I got it in, but I actually am serious. I mean, I

 

Jeff York  52:47

know that this is absolutely our approach. We always have people being taught by entrepreneurs who are making them take action. Now, they may talk to academics like me, but they're also going to talk to entrepreneurs. And I suspect being in Greg's class is pretty joyful experience for most people, too. We would we need to have Greg, next time you have a sabbatical. We got to have you come out to Boulder. I'll take you a drink some sour ales here. And I think this is just great. So thank you for coming on.

 

Brad Werner  53:14

Awesome. This was this was great, guys.

 

Greg Fisher  53:16

Yeah. Thanks for having me love your work, cause I actually did did listen and have been listening and being really valuable in what you're doing. So I am a podcast junkie. So you're selling to the converted here, but I genuinely do like it. So yeah, thanks for thanks for doing it. And thanks for having me. Thanks. Well, thank you. Thank

 

Brad Werner  53:33

you for showing up and in allowing us to to

 

Jeff York  53:37

work 49 bucks, right, but

 

Brad Werner  53:39

no. Anyway, that's a good discussion.

 

Jeff York  53:43

All right. So once again, I'm Jeff York, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and research director at the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, your host of creative distillation. Here, as always, with Brad where the teaching director for the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business. We were joined today by Greg Fisher, who is a Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and the title of his paper again, entrepreneurial hustle, navigating uncertainty and enrolling venture stakeholders through urgent and unorthodox action, which I think is just a crackerjack paper and a decipherable title in the words of Brad. So that's a first for creative distillation. Read liking a title or at least giving it one thumbs up. If you enjoyed the podcast, make sure it hit little subscribe button. Send cases of sour beer, checks anything else you think we'd be interested in having criticism, comments, we'd love it all and reach out to us in the Deming center. If you're interested in connecting or coming on the podcast to discuss your research, we would love to hear from you. And hopefully not too far in the future. We'll be able to do this in person with you and we will have Greg and other guests coming out to beautiful Boulder, Colorado where we will go enjoy some beverages and solve our local breweries and distilleries. Thanks so much You're listening and we'll see you next time.