We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brad Anderson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brad below.

Brad, appreciate you joining us today. So, let’s start with a hypothetical – what would you change about the educational system?

Coming from a post-secondary perspective, I’d argue we need to educate students on the visceral realities of making something happen in organizations. It’s great to teach students about innovative hiring practices, social justice, and so on, but unless we teach them how to turn the wheels of an organization to make a change, we set them up for disillusionment.

This shortcoming is something I have tried to address. I have developed a course on organizational wisdom based on my doctoral research. It gives students frameworks to understand organizations’ values, rationality, and power systems. With that understanding, students discover means to engage with complex organizations to drive needed changes.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I used to make drugs for a living (legally!). My first life was in the sciences. Armed with a master’s degree in medical science, I entered the biotech industry, where I spent ten years in drug manufacturing and developing clinical trial protocols. In the early 2000s, I joined the dark side and earned my MBA, after which I shifted to business development.

Then, 2007 hit with the Great Recession. I found myself unemployed, with prospects in the industry looking bleak. I got into real estate investment and started to build a consulting practice. With consulting, I found myself drawn to developing training resources.

One day, my wife suggested that if I were taking my consulting in the direction of training, teaching the odd university class would add some cachet to my resume. In January 2009, I began teaching my first university course in undergraduate business, and I fell in love. Teaching, it turned out, was the one job that required me to use all my strengths and none of my weaknesses. I was built for it.

I had been around the block enough times to know a good thing when it slaps me in the face. So, I threw myself into post-secondary education, making a complete career change from a science guy to a business professor. Weird.

Along the way, I began writing and publishing science fiction novels, earned a Doctor of Business Administration researching organizational wisdom in blithe defiance of the fact most people don’t think you can put those two words together without irony, wrote an open-access undergraduate textbook, and developed undergraduate courses. Today, I’m chair of the Entrepreneurial Leadership department at our university.

I am, in short, having a bucket of fun.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Today, I’m a post-secondary educator and loving it. It is my calling. It took me until my late thirties, however, before I entered education. Here’s the thing, though, I knew I loved teaching as early as my twenties. I had plenty of experience teaching as a lifeguard and camp counsellor while working through my bachelor’s degree. Once I earned my bachelor’s of biochemistry, I remember choosing between two paths. One, get a master’s of science and enter the biotech industry, or two, get a bachelor of education and teach.

I chose option one and started a long, uninspired journey in biotech. But my reason for choosing it — oh, I could kick myself — was a pure sunk-cost fallacy. I thought I had spent so much time pursuing my bachelor’s in science that switching to education felt like quitting. Even way back then, I knew I wanted to be a teacher, but my pride and stubbornness put me on a path leading away from my passion.

I see the same mistake being played out among my students today. We believe you have to have your career figured out at age twenty, after which you are locked into it. Balderdash! You can and should make changes throughout your life.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

An old mentor taught me the three Fs of leadership. You need to be firm, fair, and friendly, and you need to be those things in that order.

Firmness — Groups need structure to thrive. As a leader, you are responsible for creating and enforcing that structure. You need to develop processes by which your team operates. You also need to administer consequences when people disregard those processes.

Fairness — Fairness has three components: reasonableness, equality, and transparency. The rules and structures you create need to be reasonable for the context. You must apply rules and consequences equally to everyone. Finally, your systems and rules must be transparent. Everyone should know what they are. The path to success must be clear for everyone.

Friendly — Be decent to people. Enjoy their company. Have fun and learn about the people working with you.

Where leaders get in trouble is when they invert that order. If you sacrifice firmness to be friendly, you have a recipe for chaos and failure. You’re your team’s leader, not their friend. Your role is to create the structure they need to thrive, administer the system you’ve created fairly, and treat people with dignity.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bradanderson2000.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bradanderson2000
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bcanders/
• Other: https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/developingwisdom/, https://books2read.com/duatero/