suppose that I have to go all the way back, uh, to being a kid in in Idaho, where I grew up believing that I could do anything and never hiring anybody to fix anything at our home And, uh, in in the middle of my college years at Brigham Young University, I chose to serve a mission and was assigned to key to Ecuador, where I encountered some of the most impressive people I've ever met that they lack the one thing that I had in abundance and that was opportunity and, uh, came back from that experience with an Idaho mindset thinking, How can I fix this? Uh oh. Someone's gotta fix this. I guess I will started economics at BYU. I went to the Rand Corporation. There began kind of an odyssey of working on big thorny transformations. Initially in former dictatorship led come countries in Latin America and in Eastern Europe, former communist countries thinking about how does the how large scale transformation happen and what the Harvard Kennedy School to do the same, but then found myself much more enamored with the potential for entrepreneurism and the market and went toe, uh, Forrester Research Kind of at the peak of the dot com era and got to know this thing called the Internet. And there was an analyst helping large businesses. Global 2500 companies understand what this new Internet infrastructure might mean to the business models. And so in some respects there's a golden thread. But looking back, it feels a lot more like a golden ah, roller coaster. And ah, spent some time as an entrepreneur had my own failures, which was great schoolmaster. And then I was asked to join a team at Brigham Young University, Idaho, where the former dean of the Harvard Business School had taken the helm to launch a new online learning effort called The Way Pathway, eventually to be called Beaulieu Pathway. That now has grown into an offering that thinks serve students in 150 plus countries. Taking kind of what I learned about internal transformation inside of, Ah, an organization like BYU, Idaho, observing what I was trying to help large companies do was in higher did a regional media company here in Utah to do the same to foster their digital transformation, and we ended up generating tremendous worldwide audience via new channels of distribution like Facebook and Instagram, and I built technology platforms that allowed us to be really rapidly responsive to Newmarket Transit to develop new new content, be a contributor network to match the velocity of change. Most recently was hired to really lead corporate strategy and development at the largest nonprofit educational institution in the United States Western Governors University, where I have the opportunity now to think about which complementary new businesses and offerings might we generate to serve students more broadly in the United States as well as internationally. So one day hope to fulfill kind of my dream of being able to help folks in Quito, Ecuador. I had a bit of an interstitial opportunity work with media companies across Latin America as the president of the Internet Inter American Press Association, where you got to fight for, uh, D uh, the purpose of maintaining freedom of expression in countries across the Western Hemisphere that wasn't really instructive. An aspiring experience so have maintained those relationships in the in the region. And so here I am in education once again but armed with much more of a an international mode, more recent experience and hoping Teoh continue the transformation innovation story that I've been pursuing since a since I was a kid in Idaho.

my responsibilities are to first and foremost operate at an executive level in service of the mission of a non profit organization. So I work directly with the president of the university, Scott Pulsipher. And he is, of course, is accountable to the board of trustees. It's interesting in a non profit, it's not owned by anybody. It's effectively owned by a mission and a special tax consideration for non profit, uh, structuring. So I report directly the president. But I work across now what is an emergent system at WG you, which includes the university, uh, in R and D Lab in Incubation Group, A venture capital fund and a social impact in philanthropic management organization. And then the Corporation of Western Governors University, which is effectively the parent. I live at the parent, and we help, uh, manage, uh, the development and an ongoing, uh, progress against five year strategic plan. A swell as large strategic initiatives that may may include any anything from the pursuit of a new initiative to build a new enterprise to consider it, considering the strategic transaction with another organization. My weekly hours very significantly, uh, I'm an early riser, so they usually start early. I use you started thinking about things early and they can extend into the evening. I try to constrain my time to more traditional business hours for the purposes of being first and foremost a family man. Uh, but naturally, my executive and kind of ongoing management responsibilities will extend into later hours or early hours and sometimes into weekends.

whenever you're tasked with doing something new, especially where it is adjacent to complementary to or sometimes orthogonal to or or has friction with the existing organization, you end up in a especially in the early stages of what you're trying to endeavoring to pursue their certain levels of ambiguity and certain levels of frustration and even jealousy like, Why can't we be working on that? Or that's what I wanted to do. Or that's a stupid idea. Who got the Idaho uninvolved, right? That guy's not that smart anyway. Uh, so you, naturally, in any any time you're trying to work on something net new, you create a tapestry of challenges. Ah, and and so one more complicated parts of my role, at least in the lab. This, and my previous to experiences is, is that I also work in environment that has a lot of traditional structure with accreditation, with faculty with financial aid and lots of different regulation, both on the national on state level. That puts people in a frame of thinking that well, this is how it's always been done. Therefore, this is the way it ought to be done and naturally so naturally they're optimizing to their current environment. But what we see in higher education or in education general, is what's being done is not sufficient, not sufficient to deliver equitable access entertainment to those who are most or least served or poorly served. And you see all in society now lot frustration about that. And so it's It is a challenge trying to inject something, really, sometimes just incrementally new, sometimes radically new, and the way in which we do do business and that that tends to ruffle feathers among the among the traditionalist. This isn't unlike, uh, experience. You might have it. Ah, at a large tech firm where somebody gets to work on a project that you wish you work up. Um, I could give you an example of, uh oh, perhaps more, Uh, rather than giving an example of my most of my current role, I'll give an example of when I was in the media when we were building our contributor network. There are certain, uh, industry standards organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists that put their stamp of approval on the type of work people do. Their code of ethics, the quality they give awards and it's a It's a long standing, reputable organization. So naturally, when we built a platform to invite contributors ranging from a high school student to an Oxford Dawn, uh, journalists worth thought, how in the world could you go outside the existing structure of journalism and felt very threatened by that and, uh, naturally so and I had a lot of empathy for that. However, in order to do what we needed to do to become a digital enterprise, we need to think differently. And I remember that one of our the light boat finally turned off for one of our journalists who I really, really respect. And he happened to be the Utah Jazz beat reporter. And there are a few things that air more important to Utah's than Utah Jazz, maybe the Utah Utes and BYU Cougars. But I don't know which one ranks first, Uh, but very important, certainly in bed basketball season and this beat reporter finally realized, Wait a minute. If I have a contributor, do these three things like a statistical review and social media review and maybe a response from fans on on In a certain setting, I can get oh and goes much, much deeper with the president of the Utah Jazz with specific players. I could do what uniquely I am. I am tasked a tool to do, and the rest of it can be handled by contributors. That took a lot of time for him to see the complementary nature of the new innovation. And I would see in my role. And I guess in my last three rules, that's been the biggest challenge is to help my colleagues fuel like they're part of the innovation when possible. I feel like that benefit from the innovation when possible and feel like they can champion it in their in their existing role because they truly understand how it benefits them. So, uh, that I think that's the most challenging part of innovation, But it's Israel, and it take. It does take time, takes a lot of time. It's very different doing being intra preneurs or inside an organization or alongside an organization that being entrepreneur, building a completely separate business with different kinds of governance and rules, and I've done both