Unlike Clayton Christensen who writes about innovative companies as a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (thus making his transition to writing about innovative universities less surprising), DeMillo’s background is in engineering and computer science.  His observations, however, stem from his background as a professor at a traditional “brick and mortar” school.  From his position inside the hallowed halls of academia, he notes that the institutions in the middle, those between the elite institutions (top 75) and institutions that admit everyone, are the ones that are in trouble with a value proposition squeeze coming from above (elite) as well as below (business model to serve anyone or everyone at a lower price point).  DeMillo stresses that modern universities are businesses (contrary to some of the myopic ideologues who insist that non-profit institutions don’t have a business model) and are competitive organizations run by smart people.  Similar to Christensen, DeMillo argues that the class-oriented society and culture of higher education creates a faculty-centered model that is difficult to break out of for institutions undergoing competition for enrolled students.  (For a review of Christensen’s book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way to World Learns, see my August 2008 blog article.  To see my review of Christensen’s book, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, see my August 2011 blog article.)

DeMillo states that in any market, the winners are those with competitive brands, price, or value.  Brand is difficult to build for all but the elite colleges and universities, price continues to increase for almost all institutions and in most cases is becoming uncompetitive, and value is a concept seldom understood by the faculty at most institutions.  Because most college presidents are promoted from the ranks of academics, they are ill-equipped to understand the importance of strategic planning and understanding competitive threats from business disruptors like creative proprietary institutions.

DeMillo states that his book is “ultimately an essay about value.”  Most of the world does not understand the traditional American business model for higher education that is faculty-centered and resource inefficient, not to mention costly.  If American universities want to “survive” (DeMillo’s choice of words) over the next generation, they must apply the following three lessons of our global economy to their operations:

1. Focus on value and deliver a degree that is priced reasonably and that is of reasonable quality.
2. Focus on costs by controlling them in ways that are unthinkable by faculty-centric institutions to include:
a. Deskilling (greater use of adjuncts)
b. Better use of physical plants
c. Better use of materials
3. Establish an individual institutional reputation versus continuing to chase the elite institutions at the top.

DeMillo takes the time to review and report on activities of proprietary or for-profit institutions that he credits for being student-centered because students provide their main source of income.  DeMillo states that enrollment growth is a good thing at a for-profit in that it increases revenues and profits and allows the institution to reinvest those profits in additional services and programs.  Traditional institutions determine their charges from a fixed cost model designed to measure the cost of hours of instruction in the classroom with little consideration for the appropriateness of the charge or the specific relevance of matching labor delivered to competitive market costs.  Online programs run by proprietary institutions price based on services consumed or delivered and unencumbered by a high fixed cost structure; because of this, they are able to provide a competitively priced product with a value recognized by the students they serve.

Institutions in the middle are subsidized by public funds, sponsored research, endowments, or church support.  Tuition fluctuations at these institutions create revenue gaps that have to be covered by increases in one or more of the relevant subsidies.  Those subsidies are shrinking.  DeMillo states that it is not clear how much disruption institutions in the middle can tolerate, but for many, resources are stretched and stressed beyond the breaking point.  DeMillo argues that all institutions in the middle have to pay attention to price sensitive customers.

DeMillo spends some time talking about non-profit and proprietary institutions that are process centered and provides examples about efficiencies that lower the production cost for those institutions.  Another topic that he spends a little time discussing is “hacking degrees.”  Hacking is a topic that continues to be discussed by many writers including Anya Kamenentz, author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education.  It is a controversial topic for those focused on traditional education but more strategic for those focused on the capabilities of technology and the learning that the internet and employers provide many adults.  In my opinion, it is a topic that is not covered enough in this book given its potential for impact on the higher education sector.

Like any good researcher, DeMillo provides recommendations for institutions in the middle to “survive” and thrive in the 21st century.  Broadly speaking, institutions should define their value and become “architects” for new business models.  As it applies to the definition of value, institutions should forget about who is above them, focus on what differentiates them, establish their own brand, not romanticize their weaknesses, and be open.  From an architecture perspective, institutions should balance faculty-centrism and student-centrism, use technology, cut costs in half, focus on their own measures of success, and adopt the New Wisconsin idea which is to be truthful to the community that you serve.  His recommendations are sound and grounded.  Because of the entrenched culture at many of the institutions in the middle, I doubt that few will be able to follow DeMillo’s recommended path to improving their performance and financial stability.  Those that are able to follow the path, should see improvements in reputation, enrollments, and be able to distinguish themselves from their competition.

Christensen and his co-author, Henry J. Eyring, take a different tack in this book.  Approximately 60-75 percent of the book provides a narrative of two institutions of higher education, Harvard University and Ricks College, now BYU-Idaho.  While many observers of higher education may not consider Harvard an innovator, decisions made by its presidents over its several hundred year history have influenced the direction of American higher education.  Whether it’s the four-year baccalaureate degree, the creation of various majors, the design of a baccalaureate degree to include general education courses, professional schools with a requirement that applicants complete a bachelor’s degree before matriculating, faculty tenure, the “publish or perish” culture for faculty, or athletic programs; most of those foundational principles that we take for granted today had an evolutionary turn at Harvard.  Christensen and Eyring make the case that the problem with higher ed today is that most four year colleges and universities aspire to “be like Harvard” but only five percent have a realistic chance of pulling it off.

The disrupter to the sector according to Christensen and Eyring is online education.  Whether it’s a for-profit university (DeVry University is one of those cited in the article) or a non-profit (Western Governors University is cited), the authors maintain that the cost of operating online universities is half of the cost of operating a traditional university for many reasons (no athletic teams, no dormitories, no cafeterias, expensive student services, use of adjunct faculty, etc.).  The lack of a need for physical classrooms provides online universities with the ability to offer classes year round.  Also, the recent focus of accrediting bodies on learning outcomes has caused the online programs to take advantage of technology and measure outcomes more effectively in many cases than traditional programs whose accreditation was achieved decades ago.

The story of Ricks College in Idaho has a Harvard connection through the Eyring family and others.  Ricks’ beginnings as a two year college and evolution to a four-year, teaching university is a fascinating story.  Along the way, Ricks’ direction was heavily influenced by its affiliation with and sponsorship by the Mormon Cchurch.  The authors note the elimination of intercollegiate athletics, upward move to a four-year institution, implementation of internship programs, implementation of blended learning programs by utilizing remote sites operated by the Mormon Church for periodic face-to-face classes, and the pricing of the university’s online programs on the margin in order to compete with the online programs run by for-profit universities.  According to the authors, BYU-Idaho is competitive because its leaders didn’t wait to be overrun by the disruptive online programs.

Christensen and Eyring make a great case for online learning as a disruption and provide a few relevant examples of the remaking of BYU-Idaho into a thriving institution in an era when many colleges and universities are taking steps backward rather than forward.  However, their book does not provide detailed analyses of best practices in online education that are continually refined by online educators on a monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly basis.  By the time a traditional institution wakes up to the need for online courses and programs, it may find itself far behind the learning curve and even further behind in its ability to implement the cultural changes required to compete in a world influenced by the pace of technology.

The authors acknowledge that there are many books about adult learners and higher education but inform the reader that their purpose in writing this one was to identify common issues and build profiles of those issues from student, faculty, institutional, and public policy perspectives.  In order to accomplish their goal, the authors organized the book into six chapters, the first of which provides the reader with background issues organized around much of the pertinent research published about adult learners in higher education.  While none of the research is discussed in depth, the 30-page chapter provides an excellent overview and resource for further reading about adult education topics.

Chapters Two through Five provide profiles of student issues, faculty issues, institutional issues, and policy issues related to adult learners.  While too numerous and detailed to discuss in this review, there was one profile that I would like to mention as an example.  In Chapter Two, “Profiles of Student Issues Related to Higher Education,” Profile #3:  The Financial Aid Trap caught my attention.  In this profile, Allegra Straphos (pseudonym) is a working mother attending a prestigious private university in St. Louis and attempting to earn a master’s degree in public administration.  Her employer does not have a tuition reimbursement program and she does not want to take money out of her children’s tuition savings to pay for her education.  After paying for three courses at $1700 each and doing well by taking them one course at a time, the financial aid office informs Allegra that she can qualify for federal student aid loans by taking two courses at a time.  Her grades plummet and she finds herself wedged between the increased academic obligations, her family obligations, her employer’s obligations, and life situations such as her mother having a stroke.  She can’t afford to take one course a semester, but she can’t do the work if she takes two courses.  If she drops out, her loans must be repaid and she will not have earned a degree.  In this scenario, like the others, the authors have provided questions for consideration and discussion that the readers can use to stimulate thoughts, discussion, and comparisons to situations at their institution.  I found the profiles to be well-written and pertinent.

The last chapter is titled “Analyzing and Improving College and University Environments for Adult Learners.”  The authors prepare a framework in which the reader(s) can examine adult learning issues in their institution(s).  The framework is excellent and particularly relevant for someone attempting to make changes at an institution that is not particularly well known for educating adult learners or an institution at which adult learners do not comprise a major component of its students. 

Non-traditional college students comprise approximately 75 percent of all college students and adult students (defined as over 25 years of age) are approximately 38-45 percent of all college students.  With these changes in demographics combined with the continuing return to college of working adults choosing to enhance their careers by earning a degree or additional degree, I recommend this book as a valuable primer to educators, policymakers, and others.

Online games and the collectives that develop around them are a prominent example of how individuals are able to learn through the collective participation of many players working together to share tips and through collaborative team-playing.  Thomas provides an example of a class that he taught on gaming at the University of Southern California and the extra efforts and enthusiasm expressed by the students as they explored the multi-player game Star Wars Galaxies.  World of Warcraft is another multi-player game described by the authors that is used for a comparison of the learning that takes place in a collective environment.

Collective learning is not limited to gaming, however.  Brown and Thomas discuss the experience of a person diagnosed with diabetes who consulted the website Diabetes Daily and participated in a number of the forums where patients discuss their problems and experiences living with diabetes.  The patient learned how to live with diabetes from the social interaction with others diagnosed with the disease.  In a new culture collective, people belong in order to learn.  In a classroom in the new culture of learning, students take an active role to create and provide the latest information to the collective, supplementing the role of the teacher.  According to the authors, collectives scale almost unlimitedly and their learning outcomes improve with increases in size and diversity when assisted by technology.

Traditional learning environments in the classroom or workplace are predicated on a mechanistic approach.  Thomas and Brown state that the new learning environment is a model where digital media provides access to a rich source of information and play where learning is based on engagement with the world, not a single teacher.  According to the authors, the traditional model of education was adequate when change occurred slowly.  However, the rapid rate of change escalated by technology leads to successful learners embracing collective learning.  An excellent example provided in the book is the difference between the traditional encyclopedias popular in the 1950’s through the 1980’s and Wikipedia.  Wikipedia has many more entries (approximately three and a half million in English) than encyclopedias and it is updated much more frequently.

The culture of learning is based on three principles:  (1) the old ways of learning are unable to keep up with change, (2) new media is making peer-to-peer learning easier, and (3) peer-to-peer learning is enhanced by technology improvements that assist the collective nature of learning.  As the authors point out, learning from others is neither new nor revolutionary but educators have primarily ignored it.  The authors recommend that educators adapt to the style of learning as inquiry with answers leading to more questions.

As befits a scholarly work promoting the style of learning as inquiry, Thomas and Brown’s book stimulates the reader to pose more questions using the examples of learning accomplished by technology and social media.  Given our nation’s determination to increase the percentage of college graduates, this book would serve policymakers, college administrators, and faculty as an excellent guidebook for ways to improve learning.  I would also recommend it to educational entrepreneurs looking for opportunities to merge technology with learning.

Most likely for that reason, I pre-ordered The Global Auction when I received a notice of it from the Oxford University Press.  The authors are professors at universities in the United Kingdom (Brown is Professor of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, Lauder is Professor of Education and Political Economy at University of Bath, and Ashton is Professor Emeritus of Labour Market Studies at University of Leicester) and their premise is that the American Dream that emphasizes higher education as the path for the lower class to become middle class and the middle class to become prosperous is deeply in trouble.

The authors discuss the fact that world economics have become more integrated and networked and that the market value of American workers is no longer compared to local citizens, but rather is part of a global auction for jobs.  According to the authors, economists who compare America, Britain, and Germany as head nations (brains) and China and India as body nations (brawn) have missed the point that the new global economy has allowed emerging economies to create a high-skill, low-wage workforce capable of competing for the hi-tech, high-value employment prized in the head nations. 

In the past, Americans with college degrees were sheltered from price competition as long as educated talent was either in limited supply or only available from equally expensive countries like Britain, Germany, and Japan.  There’s a price competition for expertise, state the authors, and it is stimulated by:  (1) a doubling of the supply of college educated workers in affluent and emerging countries over the past 10 years, (2) a quality and cost revolution in the emerging economies that have adopted best practices and produced high skill, low wage workers, (3) the adoption of new technologies by companies that have increased the potential for standardizing an increasing number of technical, managerial, and professional jobs, and (4) the business community’s increasing trend of hiring the best and the brightest students from around the globe and treating them differently from people with the same credentials, experience, or levels of expertise.

The authors discuss the situation leading to an opportunity trap which occurs when everyone works toward the same strategy such as earning a bachelor’s degree or working longer hours to impress the boss.  In those cases, no one secures an advantage except the employer.  The authors acknowledge, though, that most people will view education as a defensive expenditure, necessary to have any chance at improving the middle class standard of living.

While the premise and evidence presented by the authors sound overwhelming and depressing, they present recommendations for creating a new opportunity in America.  Key among their suggestions are reforming education standards to increase the number of our citizens with a world class education in the science and engineering areas as well as working on equalizing the financial disparities between the far ends of the citizens’ income scale.  Political calls will be made for protectionist policies but the authors maintain that the global economy is too intertwined for a significant policy change to occur without drastic ramifications to America’s economy.  Their recommendation is to rebuild the economy in a manner designed to improve the quality of people’s lives and part of that model should encourage senior managers of public companies to focus on the medium and long term performance of their companies, not just the short-term.  With the latter focus, the concept is that less would be outsourced as companies would work to find, train, and keep workers here versus looking outside our nation’s boundaries.

The Global Auction is hot off the press as evidenced by its 2011 copyright date. The authors, as befits their areas of expertise, have done an excellent job of portraying the economic and social issues at hand in analyzing the financial issues of the middle class.  I continue to weigh their recommendations for a new opportunity as economic and social changes are not politically easy decisions, particularly in a political environment as polarized as the last two U.S. elections.  Increasing the emphasis on science and technology at the K-12 level will require a major shift similar to the Sputnik and Race to the Moon initiatives of the late 1950’s and 1960’s.  Political policy changes do not occur overnight and not without considerable debate.  I recommend that you read this book regardless of your political perspective.  It is thoroughly thought-provoking.

Author Craig Brandon was a former journalism professor at a Northeastern party school (Keene State College in New Hampshire) as well as an education reporter. His book combines stories of his personal experiences as a professor along with complementary evidence about other institutions or the higher education industry in general. His writing is hard-hitting, designed to create an action or a reaction from the reader, depending on their point of view.

Brandon’s intro provides the overview for the theme throughout the book which is (in my words) “colleges have sold out and don’t care if students learn as long as they pay tuition.” Additionally, Brandon cites the ever increasing administrative payrolls as well as the luxury “student centers, water parks, hot tubs, workout centers, and climbing walls” as bait to attract new students. He writes that many students expect diplomas for their cash and don’t expect to have to learn.

I am more accustomed to reading about higher education as it relates to adult students, community colleges, and online education. Brandon’s book is about the higher ed sector that recruits traditional students who have recently graduated from high school and who are leaving the cocoon of their homes for life at college and away from home. He criticizes administrators for shifting the focus from educating a student to keeping them as a student by easing up on the academic rigor and allowing a party life to flourish at most campuses. Grade inflation has reached the point, according to Brandon, that 90 percent of all college students receive either an A or a B. Administrators have allowed students to drop classes more easily meaning that the school keeps the tuition even though the student earns no credit for it. With the average student taking six years to complete a baccalaureate degree, Brandon states that most colleges are elated to receive a 50 percent increase in tuition revenue due to the student’s inattention to graduating on time. Furthermore, Brandon states that the lower academic standards free up time for students to socialize dozens of hours a week instead of studying. He cites a study that one fourth of college freshmen drop out by the end of their first year, not because of poor grades but because they couldn’t remain healthy while partying all night on a regular basis.

If I were a parent contemplating sending my child or children off to college in a few years, Brandon’s book would be a worthwhile read. He devotes an entire chapter to the topic of college secrecy about the true number of crimes on campus and another one to the bleak lives of party school graduates when the loans have to be repaid and they’re working in jobs that will not allow them to repay those loans without severe hardships. The data in these chapters should provide a basis for asking sound questions of a college’s admissions staff as well as of your son or daughter after they are enrolled in a college of their choice. From an institutional advocacy perspective, I might have to question Brandon’s statement that only 10 percent of his students were serious learners. Nonetheless, his issues are well-worth considering.

Given that parents of college students seldom directly influence higher education policy, it is interesting that Brandon included seven policy recommendations in his final chapter about how parents can “cancel the five-year party.” I am not aware of parents currently lobbying Congress about anything related to higher education, but perhaps The Five-Year Party can be useful as a rallying tool for future marches on the Hill. The seven recommendations made by Brandon are: (1) Cap college tuition increases at the inflation rate (Brandon cites the cost of college tuition increasing at a rate more than double the consumer income increases over the past two decades), (2) Require students who need remediation to get it before college (Brandon correctly states that using colleges to teach high school algebra, reading and grammar is a waste of time and money), (3) Repeal FERPA and replace it with legislation that encourages parents to participate in their children’s college educations (parents who pay the tuition bills should have the right to see grades and disciplinary records of their children, per Brandon), (4) Get colleges out of the criminal justice business (since they hide crimes to protect their reputation), (5) Require that colleges give parents honest information (the list of stats that Brandon encourages all colleges to disclose would “put the party schools out of business”), (6) Reform the process by which colleges and universities are accredited (accreditors don’t ask if students actually learn), and (7) Require college seniors to pass a value-added test before receiving a diploma (Brandon’s idea is that the test wouldn’t need to show how much a student learned but rather guarantee that the student had learned the minimum).

Brandon’s policy recommendations are topics that are often the subject of books by other academics and policy organizations. While they are merely rushed through as part of the final chapter advising parents about how to avoid the party schools, he has taken the higher ed policy issues espoused by others and summarized them in a parent-friendly format. His recommendation for FERPA reform is probably the most passionate advocacy that I’ve read. Journalists are trained to keep the reader’s attention on the story and Brandon succeeds in keeping the story on track and in front of the reader’s mind at all times. Writing the book from the perspective of educating parents about higher education weaknesses was a great idea. While some in higher education (particularly the “administrators”) won’t agree with all of Brandon’s points, this is another excellent wake up call to some of the changes that colleges and universities need to consider.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink analyzes motivation through decades of research. He organizes his book into three parts. Part 1 provides the reader with a background of studies that determine what motivates people. Carrots and sticks (rewards and punishments) are touted as being successful for jobs in which only mechanical skills are necessary. For creative, right-brain tasks, Pink states that “after the fact” rewards offering praise and feedback are much better than the carrot and stick approach. He creates a “Type I” personality that describes someone whose behavior is more powered by “intrinsic” desires than “extrinsic” desires. People who exhibit Type I behavior are more concerned with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself rather than any particular external rewards. Part 2 discusses three elements, autonomy, mastery, and purpose that are necessary for motivation. In the chapter on autonomy, Pink cites numerous examples where companies have empowered employees to think more independently and creatively with fantastic results. Within the chapter on mastery, Pink provides relevant research under the headings of “Mastery is a Mindset,” “Mastery is a Pain,” and “Mastery is an Asymptote.” In describing Purpose, the author states that the most motivated people attach themselves to a cause that is larger than themselves. Part 3 is cleverly named and designed as “The Type I Toolkit.” In this section of the book, Pink provides seven different guides for scenarios in which an individual or group of individuals could apply the lessons learned in Drive. He also encourages individuals who think of additional lessons and scenarios to contact him for future updates of the Toolkit.

Drive is well-written and thought-provoking for anyone interested in learning more about motivation. Pink makes a valid case for senior management in any business, non-profit, or for-profit, to evolve their corporate culture and incentive programs from Motivation 2.0 to Motivation 3.0. His toolkit is designed to encourage discussions among individuals about the concepts and the benefits of implementing a Motivation 3.0, Type I rewards system. The increasing availability of knowledge through the Internet encourages individuals to become more creative and right-brain-driven. Pink’s encouragement of the development of Type I’s may be prescient for a shift in management thinking given the widening availability of technology and knowledge. I encourage you to read Drive.

When I read that Carr had written a new book, The Shallows, I ordered a pre-publication copy.  The subtitle, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, did not surprise or alarm me since another one of Carr’s books, Does IT Matter, established his provocative thinking about technology and its potential uses.

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr weaves the recent findings from neurological studies of the brain demonstrating the impact of Internet usage around an historical narrative of the evolution of learning.  Plato, Socrates, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Marshall McLuhan are some of the thinkers whose writings Carr utilizes to demonstrate a linkage between the introduction of new technologies and a change in the way we learn.

Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press led to the widespread dissemination of books, newspapers, and periodicals.  The act of reading a book stimulated the mind’s creativity and thought, allowing us to focus our attention on ideas and concepts.  The digitization of knowledge and dissemination through the Internet and indexing of that knowledge by Google changes that learning dynamic.  Instead of focused thinking, our minds are being retrained to think rapidly, skimming content for relevance.  Carr warns that we are losing our ability to concentrate.  He bolsters this thought with a small chapter that describes how he found the time to write The Shallows.  Because he is a writer, he disconnected from much of the technology that he had grown accustomed to over the years.

Carr writes that major changes in thinking shift over generations as technology becomes more embedded in work, education, and leisure.  Carr has thrown a different spin to those books and articles about our children becoming Digital Natives and what the benefits may be to our society.  Like Nicholas Carr, I have always been an early adopter of technology.  My first personal computer was an Apple IIB in the late 1970’s and I have gone through many upgrades, models, and brands since then as well as many versions of cell phones, smart phones, GPS devices, etc.  However, I am not a Digital Native.  I embraced reading and writing at an early age and am able to shut out the distractions of technology when I need or want to concentrate.  After reading Carr’s illuminating book, I wonder if he’s right about the potential effect of technology to reduce our abilities to think creatively, thoughtfully, and grasp new concepts.  I encourage everyone to read it.

The authors point out that for an individual to make a change, changes must be made in their environment, heart, and mind.  Unfortunately for most of us, the heart and the mind generally do not agree.  The Heaths cite more than a few psychological studies that profile the conflicts and benefits between the emotional and rational sides of our thinking.  In order to make change successful, both sides have to be satisfied.  Companies have people who are more emotional and people who are more rational.  Successful teams need to recommend solutions that meet the needs of both of those emotional/rational profiles.

The Heaths have a three-pronged framework for initiating successful change.  They refer to the heart/emotional side as the Elephant, the mind/rational side as the Rider, and the environment as the Path.  Simplistically, their theory is that Riders need direction.  What is sometimes perceived as resistance is in reality a lack of clarity.  Elephants may appear to be lazy when in reality they may be exhausted from trying to keep up with the Riders in the group.  Appealing to their emotions rather than ignoring them will help move them toward the change.  Lastly, individuals who can shape the Path, i.e., change the environment around the situation, will move the Riders and the Elephants toward making the change.

Dan and Chip introduce their framework concept early in the book and provide a significant amount of content with psychological studies that support their theory and practical examples that demonstrate how individuals were able to make changes happen through either influencing the Riders, Elephants, Paths, or all three.  One of my favorite chapters entitled “Shrink the Change” is about making the change seem smaller so that the Elephant can be persuaded to move rather than resist the change.  According to the authors, “when you engineer early successes, what you’re really doing is engineering hope.”

I enjoyed reading Switch.  Once again, the Heaths have taken a topic related to psychology, built a framework, and grounded it with a simplistic explanation of the theory and research and supported it with numerous examples of successes of the framework’s components.  It’s an easy-to-read book and one that might easily be pulled off the shelf and re-read before initiating the next change project in your company or at home.

Murray is one of those interesting people that few of us have the chance to meet.  He was educated as an engineer, graduating from the University of Vermont in 1982, and later obtained his MBA from Pepperdine University.  Early in his career, while at McDonnell Douglas, he had the opportunity to work on the Space Shuttle program as well as the MX missile.  Later, he went into the financial services business, founding several companies and later working at Intuit as its head of innovation.

Borrowing Brilliance is essentially the roadmap to how Murray taught himself to become an innovator.  Murray organized his system into six steps.  The first three steps are involved with the origin of the idea.  Step One is Defining, for defining the problem that you’re trying to solve.  Step Two is Borrowing; Murray recommends borrowing ideas from places with a similar problem.  Step Three is Combining, where you examine connecting and combining the borrowed ideas that you believe relate to solving your problem.  The last three steps involve the Evolution of the Idea from solution to implementation.  Step Four is Incubating, where the combinations created in Step Three are incubated into a solution.  Step Five is Judging, where the strength and weakness of the solution are examined.  The final step, Step Six, is Enhancing.  In this step, Murray recommends eliminating the weak points of the solution while enhancing the strong ones.

One of the strong points of this book is the way in which Murray brings his personal experiences from the three businesses that he started to the businesses started by other people we know like George Lucas, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Steve Jobs.  The concept of using a metaphor to transform your idea into reality is excellently illustrated by Murray’s description of the evolution of George Lucas’ Star Wars script into the phenomenally successful movie series.  According to Murray, George Lucas knew that he wanted to create a science fiction movie, but kept running through a hodge podge of ideas such as science fiction and Western, science fiction and spy story, etc.  Finally, he figured that the right combination was science fiction and mythology and with that borrowed combination, created a unique movie that attracted movie goers like no other movie in history.

Murray also has a blog which has some insightful and worthwhile information along the same lines as the book.  I enjoyed Borrowing Brilliance so much that I bought a few extra copies and gave them away to colleagues of mine.  In an age where knowledge is increasing exponentially, it is helpful to have a system like Murray’s that provides you with an interesting way to define and solve problems.