ASU Magazine
- The 1958 name-change campaign galvanized Arizona State-and recast the institution's future Thousands of happy Arizona State College students surged through the Memorial Union on the evening of Nov. 4, 1958, primed to celebrate the passage of an unprecedented statewide referendum that would transform their school into a university, despite the fierce opposition of their University of Arizona nemesis.
But inside the improvised election command center, Student Name Change Chairman Ron Ellenson watched Arizona State President Grady Gammage'sexpression with growing dismay. Gammage held the thin strip printing out vote tallies as they came out of the teletype machine, his face ashen.
"His heart fell right down to his feet someplace," recalls Ellenson, one of perhaps two dozen students who put their lives on hold in 1958 to work with a grassroots network of alumni and political leaders to promote Proposition 200, a measure that would change the name of their school from Arizona State College to Arizona State University.
Until that moment, the 100,000 votes that had already been tallied had given the measure a comfortable lead, in spite of vocal opposition from the state's Board of Regents, the state legislature and the University of Arizona's far-flung network of alumni. But the figures in Gammage's hand now showed that a huge block of 40,000 votes had come in almost entirely against the name change.
"It was terribly disheartening. We knew it was do or die. It was our one chance, and losing would have been a terrible embarrassment - and probably would have doomed the name change forever," recalls Ellenson.
Bringing the campaign to that point had entailed an enormous effort. Thousands of students had circulated petitions, lobbied their parents and rung doorbells. Hundreds of alumni had served as foot soldiers in a campaign by the Arizona Jaycees to gather the most initiative signature petitions in history.
Gammage and his wife had spoken at scores of rallies across the state, defying his bosses both at the Board of Regents and in the Arizona legislature. Students and alumni had marched on the capitol en masse, flooded lawmaker mailboxes, held parades, pressured their parents, flown a gaily painted private campaign plane all over the state, delivered petitions in an armored car and enlisted the help of celebrities - including television and radio mega-star (and former student) Steve Allen.
But suddenly Proposition 200 wobbled towards defeat on the smudged chalkboard tallies. To dampen the mood even further, a new rumor rippled through the crowd at about the same time: smug and domineering Wildcat supporters had crept onto campus and lit a fire behind the Memorial Union. Up until that moment, it had seemed Arizona State might finally win the right to call itself a university. Now, all that was in doubt. How could such a passionate effort have come to this?
Golden Anniversary
This year's 50th anniversary of the historic name change campaign revisits a singular moment in the state's history and one almost unparalleled in the history of higher education. The recollections of people who played a key role not only illuminate the history of the university, but the profound social and demographic shifts that shaped both Arizona and higher education nationally.
"It's still the seminal event in the history of ASU and in many ways of Phoenix too," said Grady Gammage Jr., who recalls the ceaseless comings and goings connected to the campaign in his father's house. "It was really a different era, but my dad may have realized, earlier than most people, what was going to happen to growth in Phoenix."
"That was perhaps the only time such a name change ever went to the vote of the people," says Don Dotts, editor of the State Press in the late 1950s and a key campaign organizer, who later worked for the ASU Alumni Association, first as editor of the Arizona Statesman magazine and ultimately as executive director. "You have to remember, in those days the whole state was run by U of A graduates. The campaign really sent a message that this is a sleeping giant in Tempe, you'd better watch out. The old politics ain't going to work."
"We knew that the future of the university was going to be determined by getting that name changed," recalls the Rev. Bob Reynolds, a student organizer who was so consumed by the campaign that it delayed his graduation by several years and diverted his own future into a career of service as an Episcopalian minister.
"It was such a different time. It was a small school, rather intimate," Reynolds said. "There was a great deal of pride in who we were - with lots of veterans on campus. There was just one place in the student union to get your coffee or coke, so you could connect with people easily."
Changes brew after WWII
The roots of the campaign dated back to the legislature's decision in 1885 to establish a single land-grant university in Tucson, plus a teacher-training normal school in Tempe. By the end of World War II, the Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe had just 500 students. But in 1945, President Gammage convinced the U of A-dominated Board of Regents to rename his institution Arizona State College and authorize issuance of a handful of liberal arts degrees.
Almost immediately, the renamed Arizona State began a period of explosive enrollment growth. By 1951, Arizona was gaining 50,000 residents each year - three-fifths of them in Maricopa County. By 1954, enrollment at Arizona State Teacher's College had risen to 4,000 and President Gammage was once again pushing for a reorganization and name change to put the school on roughly equal footing with his own alma mater - the U of A.
He proposed abandoning the departmental model left over from the teacher college days to establish seven schools - each with a dean and a mix of undergraduate and graduate degrees. The proposal set off a fresh, fierce debate at the Board of Regents, which ultimately approved the College of Arts and Sciences and just one of the other seven proposed new schools. However, the debate also spurred the decision that would set up the next stage of the struggle: a request for a study of the structure of higher education in Arizona by the U.S. Office of Education.
The resulting blue-ribbon panel spent a year interviewing faculty, students and administrators before issuing a book-length report in 1954 that largely validated Gammage's position. The report concluded that Arizona State College was already rapidly becoming a university and was "literally bursting out at its academic seams." Moreover, the report added, "uncontrolled institutional competition tends to divide the state's influential citizens into more or less permanent factions that sometimes take a sanguinary delight in defeating the efforts of the other institution and its factions, usually without too much regard for the merits of the case."
The panel recommended reorganizing Arizona State into four colleges - Liberal Arts, Education, Applied Arts and Sciences and Business and Public Administration, with an array of undergraduate and graduate degrees.
On Nov. 20, 1954, the Regents debated the recommendations as "fireworks erupted" and "heated regional arguments flared," according to the Arizona Republic. In the end, the Regents approved the federal panel's recommendations on a 5-4 vote, with Gov. Howard Pyle casting the deciding vote.
Now claiming the title "university" was surely just a formality, Sun Devil supporters asserted. Guess again.
Petition Fever Quelled
A solid majority of the Board of Regents favored the University of Arizona and so were resistant to a name change for the rival college. Curiously enough, one of the first spurs for a change came from student Ron Leed's search for a topic for a paper in his American Problems class. Urged to research Arizona State College, he discovered that it was classified as a university nationally - since it had multiple colleges and offered liberal arts degrees. Leeds wrote a paper, "When is a Hot Dog a Hamburger," which ended up catching the attention of the school's administration. Several administrators urged him to pursue the politically sensitive issue, Leeds recalls.
So Leeds and other students organized a rally on campus, which drew more than 2,000 students in 1955, the first of a series of meetings and rallies intended to spur the legislature to change the name through an act of law. Leeds recalls that at least one major business offered anonymous financial support for the campaign. But the resistance also emerged quickly. Leeds father was a Tucson businessman and both he and his son soon found themselves under strong pressure from Tucson business and civic leaders to drop the campaign, Leeds recalls. In fact, one prominent business leader advised Leed's father to "take him out and drown him."
Despite the rallies and meetings with top politicians, the name-change bill never made it out of committee in 1955. Gammage persisted in the next session, working quietly through the legislature, to avoid alienating either the Board of Regents or the lawmakers controlling the purse strings, according to "The Arizona State University Story" by Ernest Hopkins and Alfred Thomas. But the 1956 version of the bill also died in committee.
By 1957, recent graduates Owen Riley Dean Jr. and Bill Kinnerup had decided to take matters into their own hands by convincing the Junior Chamber of Commerce to launch an initiative drive to change the name, partly as a way to boost otherwise low turnout rates. They were printing up the petitions when they got a call from the administrators at Arizona State, Dean recalls.
Dean and Kinnerup sat down in the Memorial Union faculty dining room with Gammage and a phalanx of deans to listen as Gammage asked them to hold off on a petition drive. Friends in the legislature had vowed to push through a name change bill, he said.
"Do you think we can trust them?" asked Dean skeptically. "Oh, yes. Definitely," replied Gammage.
So they put their effort on hold.
But the promised name change turned into a Trojan Horse when Senator Harold Giss of Yuma introduced a bill to change the name to Tempe University, a move which provoked a furor that ultimately fertilized the grassroots campaign.
In a largely spontaneous moment of indignation, several thousand students attending a campus rally against the proposal piled into cars and led a wild, honking caravan down to the Arizona Capitol.
The students milled about in front of the capitol building, angry but restrained.
"I remember saying over the bullhorn 'stay out of the Rose Garden,'" recalls Reynolds. "It was really the most orderly riot I've ever seen."
Soon, Giss appeared on the balcony overlooking the indignant crowd, by now covering every space but the rose garden, and promised to withdraw his bill. After the Giss incident, Dean and Kinnerup vowed to renew their campaign.
Once more, they received a summons to campus, Dean recalls. Kinnerup refused to go, but Dean met again with Gammage and an array of deans and professors. Once again, the administrators fretted that a failed campaign would doom the name change. But this time, opinion was divided. When Dean insisted the Jaycees would go ahead with their drive no matter what, Gammage directed Dean of Students Weldon Shofstall to help coordinate the effort.
Power of the pens
So the war was on. It would essentially pit U of A's graduate network of lawyers, doctors and politicians against Arizona State's 20,000-strong alumni network of teachers and principals - not to mention the still largely unrealized political clout of fast-growing Maricopa County.
But first, name change advocates needed 29,000 signatures to put the measure on the ballot, despite almost universal failure of such measures in the past. The Jaycees mounted a statewide effort, even enlisting clubs in Tucson, whose members were convinced that the measure would lose and settle the matter for good.
Meanwhile, Reynolds and other student leaders handed out petitions to hundreds of student volunteers.
The frequent front-page articles and hand-wringing editorials in the State Press in the ensuing months capture the suspense and anxiety. Hundreds of petitions disappeared into desk drawers of students, with few names turned in as the weeks dragged on. The State Press fervently touted the efforts of sophomore James Green, 39, a mechanical engineering major with five kids who drove a Phoenix city bus and still had time to gather more than 400 signatures - working for hours each day between his last class and the start of his work shift.
But after weeks of exhortations, the State Press concluded dismally, "the way things look now, the students of this campus are too lazy to get 30,000 signatures on a piece of paper. The fact that we aren't over the top yet looks bad. It is bad."
But the editors should have recalled that students put off everything until after finals.
Shortly after 1,139 students collected their degrees in the institution's 72nd graduation ceremony in May of 1958, students fanned out across the state with their long-neglected petitions - even as the well-organized Jaycee signature-gathering campaign reached its climax.
In early July, signature gatherers converged on the student union in front of a giant thermometer tallying the signature count. Nearby, three armored cars, an Army ROTC squad, and a convoy of cars, including one containing Gov. Ernest McFarland, waited. The caravan rushed the petitions to the Secretary of State's office with the maximum possible fanfare.
In the end, the Jaycees and the procrastinating students gathered 63,956 valid signatures.
The band played, ROTC marched, cheerleaders cheered, students hollered, administrators gave speeches - then the whole, blaring, impromptu parade careened down to the state Capitol.
In that heady moment, they felt almost finished.
But then the opposition formed - specifically, an anti-Prop. 200 group in Tucson that vowed to mobilize a statewide network of U of A graduates to kill the name change idea once and for all.
So the campaign to gather the signature shifted gears quickly and became a low-budget, free-form, grassroots effort to get the measure passed. Fraternities and sororities played a leading role in organizing students, since the Greek organizations dominated the social and political life of what was even then chiefly a commuter campus.
Making the argument for ASU
One alumnus painted his private plane with slogans supporting Proposition 200 and barnstormed across the state, according to the State Press. Students and alumni organized phone banks and sold buttons. During one football game, the card section added "U" to "AS," enraging the U of A onlookers. Someone retaliated by burning a swath in the grass of the newly completed football stadium. The Arizona State and U of A debate teams fiercely debated the issue on television and radio stations in both Tucson and Phoenix.
Arizona State's argument rested on the assertion that the institution was already a university in all but name. U of A backers countered that the name change would force a budget increase that would cost at least $5 million. That argument drove Prop. 200 supporters into purple-faced indignation, decrying a campaign of "un-truths, half-truths and implications," the State Press fumed. "This is sad commentary on the intellectual and emotional age of some citizens of the nation's fastest-growing state, for their opposition is borne of thoughtless, unnecessary sectional jealousy," concluded the editorial.
One wag noted that if the University of Arizona's argument was true, then taxpayers could save $5 million by renaming it Tucson College.
Dotts recalled that President Gammage and his wife spent months traveling throughout the state, speaking to alumni clubs.
On one such trip, Kathryn Gammage stopped at a pharmacy in Casa Grande to see if she could leave some pro-Proposition 200 brochures on the counter.
"I'm Kathryn Gammage and I'm campaigning for Proposition 200 and I'd like to leave some brochures," she explained.
The pharmacist glowered at her. "You're not putting those in my store - I'm a University of Arizona pharmacy school graduate."
Ironically, says Dotts, Kathryn Gammage got to know the pharmacist's daughter a few years later - when the girl became a Sun Devil cheerleader.
After all the rallies, accusations, speeches and pavement pounding, the issue came down finally to the fateful election night of Nov. 4, 1958 - when for a terrible hour, defeat (and possibly destruction) loomed.
But then it turned out that the supposed U of A "attack" behind the Memorial Union was just some Sun?Devil fraternity brothers firing up a barbeque. And the mysterious 40,000 anti-Proposition 200 votes turned out to be ballots somehow counted twice. After an hour of nail-biting confusion, the elections office corrected the tally.
Victory dance
The final vote for Proposition 200 was 101,811 YES to 51,471 NO. The measure lost in only Pima and Cochise Counties and won by an 11-2 margin in Maricopa County.
The crowds gathered at ASU cheered wildly, having having learned an intricate lesson in politics and commitment that changed the lives of many. Parties erupted all over campus. Reynolds recalls watching a happy professor dancing on a tabletop.
"That victory rally was the crowning glory," recalls Ellenson.
For Grady Gammage, the campaign proved to be the final triumph of a distinguished career. Tragically, barely a year after his triumph at the polls, Gammage died of a heart attack in December 1959.
For many of the exhausted student activists, the campaign spurred a personal transformation.
Reynolds dropped out of school as soon as the campaign concluded, got a job in a bank and pondered his future. Then the fraternity council came to call and made him a regional representative, due largely to his success in the campaign. That led him back to ASU to finish his degree and eventually to service in the ministry - a path, he says, that hinged on his involvement in the name-change campaign.
The campaign gave Ellenson the confidence to overcome painful childhood shyness and launch a successful business career.
"The campaign would never have succeeded without the students, and I think it changed everyone who worked on it," he said.
So in the end, it's hard to know who learned the most from this singular triumph of the grassroots activism - the students or the institution. Which is, after all, how education is supposed to work. Today’s entrepreneurially minded students can get help from a variety of campus-based mentoring and funding sources. But before 2000 or so, student-led business start-ups were basically self-funded, and many crashed due to a lack of real-world smarts.
Below are the stories of four successful business owners who got their start while still wearing gold and maroon backpacks.
Jamie Limber
Company: The Christmas Light Co. (formerly Custom Holiday Lights), Phoenix
Founder: Jamie Limber ’94 B.A.
Business description: develops and sells products used to put up, take down and store holiday decorations.
Back in the day…: Marketing meant going door to door on his bicycle, leafleting homes and businesses.
Made ends meet by: managing “mom patrol,” women who handed out free samples of General Mills’ Oatmeal Raisin Crisp cereal at campus sporting events; worked in a gym; car valet.
Why he made it: “I was adventurous and naïve – I didn’t know about failure, so I just went for it.”
How it all began: in 1989, Limber saw a CNN story about a company selling franchises for Christmas-light decorating services. He and a buddy borrowed $1,000 from family to buy their first lights. Post-graduation, he ran the company on the side, quitting his day job in 1996 to become his own boss. Recently, he sold the Christmas lighting service for seven figures, in order to concentrate on developing holiday-decorating products such as light reels, Christmas-tree bags, etc.
Randy Nelson
Company: Intrinsic Bioprobe, Inc., Tempe
Founder: Randy Nelson '90 Ph.D.
Business description: proteomics - the development and analysis of meaningful proteins related to disease testing and treatment.
Back in the day…: slept on a mattress on the floor of a tiny, bare apartment after working 18-hour days. Now he lives in a luxurious, 3,800-square-foot home on South Mountain.
Made ends meet by: working on campus
Why he made it: “I had a cascade of ideas that became lines of intellectual property…. If you have the entrepreneurial mindset, you know profit must come eventually.”
How it all began: in 1996, while a junior faculty member, founded Intrinsic Bioprobe as a way to sell technology he’d developed and licensed from ASU. The first year, despite landing an industrial client or two, he earned less from Intrinsic than he did from his ASU job.
Bill Fiduccia
Company: Tapino Kitchen & Wine Bar, Scottsdale
Founder: Bill Fiduccia ’97 B.S.
Business description: tapas restaurant/wine bar
Back in the day…: ran BizPlanIt, his first business, from a bedroom/office in an apartment shared with other students.
Made ends meet by: school loans, car valet
Why he made it: “most restaurateurs don’t know their break-even point, or know how to implement a marketing plan. But I do, and by applying basic financial controls in this high-growth environment, if I’m lucky, it will be profitable.”
How it all began: turned his honors thesis into a company called BizPlanIt, a consulting firm that writes business plans. After eight years, he got restless, handed BizPlanIt operations off to a partner. He and James Porter, a college buddy, opened Tapino in 2005.
Tim and George Vasquez
Company: Someburros!, Tempe
Founder: Tim Vasquez ’98 B.A. is president, father George Vasquez ’74 B.A.E. founded the first restaurant
Business description: chain of three “fast-casual” Mexican restaurants.
Back in the day…: Tim dressed up in a burro costume and waved the cars in from the sidewalk.
Made ends meet by: Bussing tables at Poncho’s, his parents’ first restaurant
Why he made it: “I like feeling in control of my life. The harder I work, and the decisions I make, determines whether or not I will be rewarded.’”
How it all began: his grandparents, aided by sons George and Ralph, opened Poncho’s Mexican Food in 1972, converting a small south Phoenix house into a takeout place that grew into a full-size restaurant.
In 1986, when Tim was in junior high, George opened the first Someburros! in Tempe. Tim, who came on full-time after graduation, pushed for the additional stores, certain that the first Someburros! success was “not magic, just hard work and a good concept that could be copied.”
By Kerri S. Smith, a freelance writer based in Gilbert, Ariz.
Some 99 percent of all independent businesses in the United States employ fewer than 500 people, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. More than half of U.S. workers – 52 percent – pick up their paychecks at these smaller concerns. In fact, nearly 20 million Americans work for companies that have fewer than 20 employees.
Clearly, entrepreneurial ventures sustain the U.S. economy. But, such ventures don’t proliferate without entrepreneurs, and that is a primary reason ASU strives to provide entrepreneurship education and support.
Such backing is part of ASU’s “University as Entrepreneur” focus, a university-wide drive to support creative risk-taking that spurs economic competitiveness and social development, says Kimberly Loui, executive director for the Office of University Initiatives.
In December 2006, the Kansas City-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a national leader in the advancement of entrepreneurship education, recognized ASU’s commitment to this purpose with a $5 million grant.
This money will go a long way toward extending opportunity-generating programs and curricula, which already are abundant around campus. In fact, such programs are one reason ASU earned the Kauffman grant in the first place. Long before the grant was awarded, ASU had spread the spirit of enterprise throughout the university.
Do Your Own Thing 101
What makes ASU’s programs so extraordinary is the scope of them, Loui notes. For many universities, entrepreneurial education starts and stops with some kind of center and a few classes in the business school. “At ASU, our programs are certainly at the business school, but also in the engineering school, journalism, theater and film, design, law, arts and sciences, human services and non-profit management. We’re trying to give students from any major access to entrepreneurial support and education,” she says.
To this end, one program at ASU originated in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. Called the Entrepreneurial Programs Office, it was implemented in 2004 and quickly began offering a curriculum for wanna-be business starters.
“We have a course on intellectual property, which is very important for technology ventures,” explains Thomas Duening, who is director of the program, a faculty member and a successful entrepreneur in his own right. In fact, he started his first business in graduate school.
In the curriculum he developed, students learn how to meet the practical challenges of launching and operating a technology-based venture.Courses are offered on intellectual property development and management, a key issue for keeping businesses of this type innovative.
There is also a class addressing what to do when “your worst fears come true, and your business is now running,” which covers human resources, financial planning and other issues. In addition to the coursework, the office has established an angel investor group, the Arizona Technology Investor Forum, to close the funding gap for high potential seed and early-stage ventures.
Beginning this fall, undergraduate students will be able to earn a certificate in technology entrepreneurship. This credential, which will appear on a student’s transcript, represents 15 credit hours of scholarship and a hands-on practicum designed to hone skills in all the elements of starting and steering a successful technology business.
At bottom, entrepreneurship education in this and other ASU schools aims to impart skills. “You try to teach people to become the best entrepreneurs that they can be,” Duening says. “You help them understand that entrepreneurship is an option for everybody at various times in their lives.”
Not surprisingly, since entrepreneurship education is occurring all over campus, often it takes place in cross-disciplinary settings.
For instance, students at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law can join with graduate and honors undergrads from business and engineering schools to participate in the Technology Ventures Clinic. It’s a for-credit course and teaching laboratory where students learn the ins and outs of patent investigation, market assessment and other skills that come in handy when you’re turning inventions and intellectual property into products or services you can sell.
Or, in the College of Nursing and Healthcare Innovation, students now may earn a Master of Healthcare Innovation degree. This program is open to a wide variety of professionals – nurses, physicians, even architects interested in designing healthcare facilities. Its goal: encouraging students to develop innovative problem-solving skills to meet today’s healthcare challenges.
InnovationSpace is another cross-disciplinary program. Drawing on faculty from ASU’s College of Design, Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering and W. P. Carey School of Business, this two-semester course for upper-division undergraduates guides participants in the design and development of socially responsible and environmentally sustainable products.
“New product development is a complex undertaking, and you need a lot of different perspectives, talents and backgrounds” to get a new product launched, notes Heidi Fischer, InnovationSpace program coordinator. She adds that occasionally schools pair design students with business majors or fledgling engineers, but she can’t think of any others that bring together all the disciplines InnovationSpace unites.
In the university’s version of a corporate cross-functional work group, InnovationSpace teams students from industrial design, visual communication design, business and engineering to work on product development. Here, students who come from different disciplines don’t “go off into their own silos,” Fischer says. “They work in tandem right from the start. Our corporate sponsors point out that this is how their employees interact in the workplace.”
Jump-starting start-ups
Business, engineering and design are disciplines where you might expect to find entrepreneurial souls. But, what about something a little more creative, such as theater or film production?
“To be an artist, you have to be an entrepreneur,” says Linda Essig, director of the Herberger College of the Arts School of Theatre and Film and its Performing Arts Venture Experience — known as p.a.v.e. — which is a door-opening enterprise for students from across ASU interested in arts entrepreneurship.
“I don’t think artists often see themselves as entrepreneurs,” she says. “The arts and business don’t traditionally go hand-in-hand. But, for people to make their way in the world as a theater artist or filmmaker, they have to create their own opportunities.”
Curriculum at the school certainly supports entrepreneurship. For example, independent film production is taught, which is inherently business related, Essig notes. Unless you’re working for a studio, “Every time you produce a film, you’re starting a business,” she says.
Her organization also is working toward starting a company that will provide experiential learning opportunities both on and off campus for student filmmakers. “When students shoot a film, they take on tremendous liability unless they’re shooting on campus.” Having an umbrella production company will give students more freedom in choosing filming locations.
In addition, p.a.v.e. invests in students’ visions. For example, two graduate students now are applying for grants to help them launch a “fringe” theater festival to spotlight the work of “alternative” theater artists.
Essig’s arts-investment program is modeled on ASU’s Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative, which is one of the broadest entrepreneurship programs in the country, according to Julia Rosen ’95 M.B.A., assistant vice president for ASU’s Office of Economic Affairs. The initiative is a place where students can get seed-money for their business ideas; the three-year-old center already has backed a variety of undertakings.
According to Rosen, grant recipients have pursued a variety of businesses, including ones involved in advertising, wound healing, water purification, non-profit agency work and peddling a device for “cooking turkeys faster.”
She notes that the initiative does not merely provide financial support for students to launch their new ventures. Students also have access to a state-of-the-art, fully staffed office complex, as well as practical entrepreneurial training and mentors with experience specific to their business area.
Learning vs. Teaching
It’s clear entrepreneurship can be learned. But can a university teach it? Rosen thinks it can, and research from the University of Arizona backs her up.
A survey conducted by the university in 2000 found that five years after graduation, students who had focused on entrepreneurship education fared better than their business-school peers. Overall, average income for the entrepreneurial students was 27 percent higher, and those enterprising types were three times more likely to start their own businesses than basic B-school grads. Even those who worked for established companies had higher earnings: an average of $23,500 per year over the salaries of those who didn’t take entrepreneurial courses.
As Rosen notes, “An entrepreneurial mindset can make a teacher more creative in the classroom or help a nurse invent a new way to deliver patient care. We view entrepreneurship as a series of skills, beliefs and talents that collectively help each student make a bigger mark on the world.”
By Betsy Loeff, a freelance business writer based in Golden, Colo.
Without the $10,000 Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative development grant that revived an offbeat project – making hats lined with tiny “cooling crystals” - ASU junior Kevin Pringles, 20, and his 50-year-old mom, Linda Cook wouldn’t be the proud co-owners of Hydro Headwear, a new Tempe firm now doing business as the Chill Factor Clothing Company.
In December 2005, when the mom and son duo landed a grant from the initiative, they also scored access to the initiative’s 24-hour office space, which is equipped with business basics such as PCs, phones and faxes. Edson grant recipients, all promising students with great ideas, also get business start-up training, says Patrick Duran, Edson manager.
“This is a learning experience, so not all of these students will come out with a full-fledged business as proposed. Some of them might move forward with another business, and will apply knowledge gained from this experience somewhere down the road,” Duran explains.
Cook created the first Hydro hat after buying a headband with cooling crystals at a swap meet in 1993. When the hat is soaked in water for 30 minutes, the softened crystals form a chilly gel designed to keep the wearer’s head cool for hours.
But the project was shelved until Pringles revived it in 2005. Inspired, Cook is studying finance and management at ASU West, while Pringles works towards his degree in Interdisciplinary Studies at the Tempe campus.
During the school year, Pringles worked diligently with many projects lasting to the wee-hours at the Edson. In true entrepreneur fashion, as he Googled and dialed, toured shops and thrashed out trade-secret protection issues, Pringles had another idea: why not make a huge clothing company centered around cooling and sun protective hats and apparel? Pringles is expanding his product line to over 12 cooling hat styles and they will be adding dozens of other hats and apparel items in the near future.
Chill Factor Clothing Company completely redesigned its product line and they are preparing for a full market launch in July 2007. The launch will start with the beginning of a two-year direct response TV commercial campaign, PR campaign, and a national sales system.
“The first time around, my mom designed the hat and a partner tried to sell it as a trendy, fun item. It was a bad marketing approach that failed,” Pringles recalls. “This time, we’re marketing the hats as a performance enhancing and safety-related product.”
This ability to learn from a misstep is characteristic of entrepreneurs. Take Will Andreason, 31, founder of Off-Road Direct, a new company that sells truck-suspension conversion kits to weekend warriors.
While finishing up his business degree in 2005, Andreason made a classic error – he used cut-rate manufacturers to produce the first solid-axle kits. Lesson learned: he designed a step-by-step process on qualifying potential manufacturers in future.
Tinkering with his truck gave Andreason the idea for Off-Road Direct, and he knew from the beginning that he’d start it as an online business. “I kept thinking, ‘someone needs to build this,’ so I did,” he notes.
Then an information technology manager for a manufacturing company – and attending ASU part-time – he began researching competitors’ products and studying the market.
“I knew I wanted to open my own small business, so I went back to school. Anyone can start a business but only the savvy survive – and I didn’t want to learn that the hard way,” he says. In addition to a bachelor’s degree, he earned an entrepreneurial certificate.
Like Pringles, he applied to the Edson for start-up funds, landing a $10,000 grant, then another $7,500 award. He plunged another $9,000 from his I.T. income into everything from marketing to buying raw materials.
Across campus Tilak Jain, 26, recently wrapped up his doctorate in bio-engineering. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in his native India before moving to the U.S. for graduate school.
As founder of Flowchips, a Tempe company that designs custom bio-engineering chips and bio-arrays and hosts a suite of life science services, Jain used to split 14-hour days between school and a 1,000-square-foot lab leased from another business. Asked how he was able to keep up such a break-neck pace, he says, simply, “it was fun.”
Jain heard about the Entrepreneurial Programs Office (EPO) soon after enrolling in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering. “I had some ideas that grew out of my studies in the field of biotechnology. I wanted to commercialize these ideas, and thought perhaps it was time to start a company, but didn’t know how to do it,” he explains.
He lucked out. Fulton is the only engineering school in the nation with an on-campus, entrepreneurial program for its students, says Thomas Duening, EPO director. In 2004, campus leaders “saw the need to be more competitive due to globalization and outsourcing. In India and China, for instance, the graduation rates for science and engineering majors is increasing, which pushes down salaries. The EPO curriculum teaches engineers how to regard that threat as an opportunity by, for example, putting the lower-wage engineers in India and china to work for them,” he continues.
One of Duening’s goals is to teach engineering students how to protect intellectual property and negotiate profit-sharing arrangements on technology they develop for companies.
Since 2004, Jain has won several grants from EPO and the Edson initiative, and used the money and expert mentoring to start Flowchips in January, 2005. Despite the award money, he was forced during his school years to live humbly, sharing an apartment, driving “barely a car” and scraping by on his $1,400 monthly salary as an ASU research assistant.
“I needed to spend $200,000 for equipment, but I didn’t have nearly that much money. But when you’re really pushed to the wall, you get creative. I got that equipment for around $20,000,” he says.
If he strikes it rich, Jain says he’ll fund entrepreneurial competitions and mentoring programs for students who intend to start companies in his adopted homeland.
While some entrepreneurs stress the importance of getting a basic business education, Jain disagrees. “Business majors are groomed to be managers of corporations. In the technology field, you need to know how to do a tech push, not a business push; you can hire the appropriate business-trained people for your team when the time is right,” he explains.
Jain may find it harder to score big bucks simply because he is an idea-driven entrepreneur, as opposed to an entrepreneur who wants to run a business. “The first type has an idea that they want to take to market…my sense is that the latter type is more successful, because they are willing to develop their businesses as much as they are willing to develop their ideas or products,” says William Verdini, professor of supply chain management at the W.P. Carey School of Business and a consultant for Edson applicants.
Some business whizzes, like John Shufeldt, return to the classroom repeatedly, each time shedding their skin like a desert cicada. Shufeldt, 47, graduated from law school in December 2005. A self-defined “serial entrepreneur,” he plans to practice law part-time.
He went to law school “for the intellectual stimulation. I like to learn, and am fascinated with the thought process behind the study of law,” he says. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Shufelt, J.D., is also Shufeldt, M.D., a physician who moved to the Valley in 1990, as well as Shufeldt, M.B.A., a 1995 graduate of ASU’s business school.
He started out as a doctor. While working in hospital emergency rooms, Shufeldt noticed that as many as 70 percent of his patients didn’t need high-level trauma care. They had more mundane ailments – a sprained back, the flu, a sliced-open finger- that could be attended to in a lower acuity setting, at a lower cost. So in 1993, he founded Mesa-based NextCare Urgent Care, a company that has since grown into a chain of 27 urgent care centers in four states, with 450 employees.
Shufeldt enrolled in business school to learn how to better run NextCare, and went to law school so he could guide the company through the growing maze of regulatory change.
Along with NextCare, he owns other businesses: Professional Assessment Services and Solutions, a sort of life-coaching/counseling program for troubled doctors; FindUrgentCare.com, an online directory; Desert Cosmetic Centers, a skin-care center/spa and two radiology companies, one that supplies equipment, the other a provider of digital imaging interpretation services.
Asked how he accomplishes so much, Shufeldt says, simply, “Entrepreneurs have the ability to look at common problems and issues in an uncommon way. We end up seeing things that other people may not, and identify solutions to problems,” he adds.
That’s why Mary Lou Bessette loved her job as director of the Spirit of Enterprise Center, part of the W.P. Carey School of Business, which she described as “an intellectual clearinghouse on creating knowledge that changes lives.” The center provides a variety of programs for small- and mid-sized businesses, with a focus on identifying, building and capitalizing on business opportunities.
Bessette, now executive director of strategic initiatives for the business school, says student entrepreneurs “want to direct their own future. They have a keen understanding of and an enthusiasm for their work.” But too often, that same enthusiasm leads some entrepreneurs to focus solely on work, leaving little time for personal relationships and non-work activities.
She tells students that finding the right balance means they will wake up every morning eager to start the day, and fall into bed at midnight, satisfied with what they’ve experienced and accomplished.
By Kerri S. Smith, a Gilbert-based freelance writer.
As Sun Devil fans celebrate the first game of the football season, Head Coach Dennis Erickson is approaching his challenges with optimism and drive.
Erickson has arguably the most impressive view in Tempe, an office that sits high in the sky and looks out over Sun Devil Stadium through enormous bay windows. As he discusses the great things he hopes to bring to Arizona State’s football program, Erickson calls the view “inspiring.”
But that view can be potentially disquieting as well, a constant reminder of just how big college football is in so many ways, and how much is expected out of any head coach, especially one with Erickson’s remarkable accomplishments. At ASU, where the football program in recent years has fallen just short of major success, the expectations are specific and unambiguous: get the team to a championship level.
Staring down at the empty stadium, with its eye-catching mosaic of maroon and gold seats, Erickson muses over his plans for accomplishing this, as well as the potential for ASU to win back local fans in a big way.
“They have the NFL here, but to me [Tempe] is a college football town,” he says.
Erickson, who was named head football coach late last year in the wake of Dirk Koetter’s departure, is as equipped for this task as any current head coach in the nation. Among his achievements are nothing less than two national championships, as head coach of Miami in 1989 and 1991, and victories in three of the four BCS bowls.
Closer to home, Erickson has been Pac-10 Coach of the Year twice, at Washington State and Oregon State, programs at which he implemented immediate turnarounds. His accomplishment at Oregon State in particular is considered one of the most remarkable coaching feats in recent years. There, he took a team that had not had a winning season since 1970 and, in his second year, coached the team to an 11-1 record and a 49-10 drubbing of Notre Dame in the 2001 Fiesta Bowl.
Altogether, he has amassed 148 wins as a head coach at five different schools. He currently sits at number 11 on the NCAA active coaching victory list, and would almost certainly be in the top five if not for his two stints as a coach in the NFL. He says his personal goal is to reach at least 200 career wins.
But first things first: before that happens, he must take ASU’s program to the next level through savvy recruiting and the realization of a plan for success that has worked for Erickson and his staff for many years.
One key to that plan is bringing on board assistant coaches who have been a part of Erickson programs in the past. Amazingly, despite the fact that they were spread out across the country, Erickson had a relatively easy time convincing them to join him.
“The thing that I have with this coaching staff is a relationship that goes back many, many years,” says Erickson. “Everybody except Grady [Stretz, defensive line coach] has either played or coached for me . . . We have a philosophy that’s very similar, so it’s not like we have to sit down and get to know each other. We know what our goals are and what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Their philosophy starts with the idea that, whatever else football is, it is first and foremost a game, and that means having some fun on the field.
Stretz, one of only two coaches remaining from the Koetter regime, says the sense of fun has been immediately palpable. “[Erickson has] brought new energy and enthusiasm and excitement to the program and to the community as well,” he says.
A newcomer to Erickson’s methods, Stretz is in a good position to impartially observe their effects. He is impressed with the new coach’s overall philosophy and how it translates across the board—in upper management, on the field, and in recruiting. “He’s a great communicator,” says Stretz. “He’s very personable. He knows how to garner respect of his players. [They] believe in the plan, [in the] recipe for how to get things done.”
In terms of on-field strategies, Erickson says that the average fan won’t notice major differences. He does plan to step up the running game, a part of the offense some say was undernourished in recent years.
Erickson, who has never had a losing record in his tenure as head coach, is enthusiastic about the coming season. Looking out at the stadium again, he reminisces about his experiences here as a visiting coach, when the seats were heaving with fans and the place blazed with excitement. His eyes seem to settle on the field, a rectangle of lush green at the center of all that architecture, and it’s obvious he can’t wait to get back down there to do what he does best.
By Michael Green, a Tempe-based freelance writer.EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is reprinted from the August 2007 issue of ASU Magazine. For information about ASU Magazine, visit the ASU Alumni Association.
- Back when he was still collecting a paycheck from Pepsi-Cola, Craig Weatherup was known to start days at 5:30 a.m. in some company break room, having a cup of Joe with forklift drivers or vending-machine mechanics.
In those days, you might find Weatherup delivering cases of pepsi to a local supermarket, crawling around in slime under a nightclub bar to hook up a beverage dispenser or bouncing down the road in the cab of a Pepsi big rig.
These aren't exactly the type of duties one expects to be performed by a guy with a B.S. in accounting, which is what Weatherup earned at ASU in 1967.
"If you aren't in touch with people at the front line of your business, I don't think you will be very effective as a leader," Weatherup says.
This observation is one bit of advice he offered when ASU Magazine queried alumni executives for tips on reaching the tope of the corporate world and leading successfully. Below, you'll find three chief executive officers, a chief financial officer, the president of a major league baseball team, and an independent publisher all weighing in.
Talking to these people is like reading a primer in career management and business leadership. Regardless of company size or industry, recurrent themes emerge, and common steps to success prevail.
THE LUCKY FEW?
Among the refrains you will hear from people at the tope is this. "I've been very lucky."Doug Ducey, CEO of Cold Stone Creamery, says his first bit of luck was working for what he called the world's best Anheuser-Busch distributor while he studied for the finance B.S. he earned in 1986. The job he held gave him top-tier experience and confidence. "When you're selling beer in college, everybody says 'yes,' so you think you're good at sales," he jokes.
Ducey's next lucky break was landing a job from Proctor & Gamble, fresh off the ASU campus, and being charged with selling Folders-brand coffee to restaurateurs. At the same time, Folgers held a 51 percent market share for residential use. Placing the coffee in eateries, he says, was easy.
Ducey's first quarterly sales objective was 40 accounts. He sold 400. Somehow, "luck" doesn't quite explain such achievement.
Indeed, Ducey credits that job with giving him "a lot of responsibility at an early age. It was great training and preparation for what I would go through at Cold Stone"
Again and again, executives report that one of the keys to success is jumping in feet-first and getting as much experience as you possibly can, as early as you can.
MOVING AROUND BEFORE MOVING UP
Flo Eckstein earned two degrees: a B.A. in English from the University of Arisona, followed by a Master of Social Work at ASU. The latter degree she completed in 1976. Then, she spent 14 years working in social services before buying the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix from her parents and jumping into life as a newspaper publisher."I had no business background, and that has been my biggest single challenge" as a business owner, she says.
On the job and as the boss, Eckstein had to learn how a business functions financially, how to hire staff, woo advertisers, sell subscriptions, pay vendors and make payroll. "It's been an education," she says.
That would be a good thing in Weatherup's view. He considers "breadth" an essential for effective leadership, and he defines it in terms of both business experiences and "breadth of humanity - experiencing, friends, community, faith and organizations."
According to Weatherup, "breadth is central because it is the foundation for judgment, wisdom and intuition - all the things you have to draw on as CEO when there are no facts, or the facts are in conflict, or nobody wants to make the decision."
Mary Hentges, chief financial officer at PayPal, earned her ASU accounting degree in 1981 and, although she originally aimed for a partnership position in public accounting, she eventually moved into he corporate world. Why? "So that I not only would be viewed as a finance and accounting expert, but also as someone who could eat their own cooking," she quips.
Broad abilities, she says, are what companies look for in their leaders. She also encourages those reaching for the top to have peripheral vision focused ont he skills and needs of colleagues in other functional areas around the company. That way, "When you take on a C-level role, you can feel like you have a broad enough skill set to perform well," she notes.
HIGH HOPES
Along with jumping into projects and opportunities with gusto, most C_level types believe in goal setting.Take Aaron Matos, for instance. He earned his business-management degree from ASU's West campus in 1995, but he was already aspiring to the top job before he finished school. At age 19, Matos wrote down on a piece of paper that he wanted to be a CEO by age 35. He made it.
In fact, he founded and is now running Jobing.com, an online employee-recruitment service that has average more than 100 percent compound annual growth for the last six years. "The reason we could do that is, partly, because we set out to reach a big goal. I think most people and organizations strive to do too little," Matos says.
Derrick Hall, president of the Arizona Diamondbacks, a major-league baseball club, was much like Matos in his unflinching pursuit of his career objective.
Hall's '91 B.S. from ASU was in journalism and broadcasting. While he did work in that field for a while, his ultimate ambition was to work for a major league ball club and, preferably, the Dodgers, his childhood heroes. Hall, who also has a master's degree in sports administration from Ohio University, achieved this goal of working for the Dodgers before switching to the D-backs.
To those seeking to move up, Hall say,s "It seems so obvious,b ut it's true. Number one: Establish goals for yourself. They should be achievable and realistic."
Cold Stone Creamery's Ducey might disagree somewhat. He admires business authors Jim Collins and Jerry Portas, who advocate "big, hairy, audacious goals."
Such thinking not only helped Ducey rise to the top of his company, it also has impelled the company forward. In five years, Ducey grew his company from 74 stores to 1,000. His next brass ring? To have Cold Stone be the number-one ice cream brand in America by December 31, 2009.
Regardless of the size of the goal, leaders know they can't reach their objectives alone. Hence, rallying employee forces is one of the biggest, most important challenges business leaders face.
"BOTTOMS-UP" THINKING
Both Weatherup and Ducey laud "inverted-pyramid" organizational structures where leaders are at the bottom of the corporate structure, not the top.At Cold Stone Creamery, Ducey says ice-cream lovers are at the top of the pyramid, franchises come next, and headquarters staffers exist to serve those franchises and make them successful at serving ice-cream lovers.
For many of the years that Weatherup ran Pepsi-Cola, front-line workers - people who actually interfaced with customers - topped the inverted pyramid while Weatherup, the CEO, was at the bottom.
"I believe in 'servant leadership' to the nth degree," Weatherup says. You only generate loyalty "if you genuinely care about the people who work for you and with you," he adds.
PayPal's Hentges names a similar concept, authenticity as vital to leadership success. "If you're not authentic, if people don't see the consistency in you in terms of what you're saying and who you are more broadly in life, they won't believe or trust you," she says.
POWER POINTS
Asked for the top tip in running a successful business, both Hall and Hentges say that a key to leadership is leading with integrity and allegiance to your own values."When people are in a position where they are compromising themselves or their values, they'll never be satisfied even though, from an outsider's view, they may be at the top," Hentges says.
Hall's very visible decisions as the head of a baseball club make him particularly susceptible to public scrutiny and displeasure. He has experienced both.
One of the gutsy decisions he's made this year is changing the D-backs team colors. "The easy move would have been to stay with the status quo," he recalls. Fans wrote letters of concern. Some were downright irate that Hall dared to change the colors their ballplayers had worn when the D-backs won the World Series in 2001.
"We had purple and teal uniforms," Hall says. "Those were once popular colors, but they're trendy. We went with a color that will stand the test of time. It's a red."
As luck would have it, the fans may be seeing red, but they're OK with it. "Now that fans have seen the new uniforms, they agree with the move. They understand it.," Hall says. He adds: "You have to stick with your principles and what you think is right. You can't just go with the popular movement. In the long run, if you have a plan, it's going to work out."
Of course, you must be able to articulate your plan. This is something Eckstein, Hall, Matos and Ducey each said.
As Hall put it, "You have to be able to express your direction - your vision - in a way that motivates the staff to jump on board and follow suit."
Another must for business success: hiring the right people.
"Character is something that can't be taught," Eckstein notes. She looks for people who have the same work ethic she has and who are happy working in a team environment. "Not everyone is and, at a newspaper, everything calls for teamwork."
Matos - whose entire business is about helping other businesses connect with the right employees - says, "Hiring the right person is about more than a resume or what that person has done. We hire for attitude and train for skill."
LEARNING LEADERSHIP
Education and training are great but, like most people, leaders often learn their most valuable lessons the hard way.Weatherup, for instance, values failure because, "Failure is a fabulous way to build judgment, wisdom, instincts and intuition."
In fact, he remembers good-natured boardroom banter where Pepsi chiefs would poke fun at each other's flubs as a means of teaching co-workers to value the lessons learned from mistakes and, thereby, encourage risk-taking.
"I'm very much in the camp that you try not to fail anymore than you have to, and you try not to make the same mistake twice," Weatherup says. "But, taking risks is critically important to development as a leader. And you won't take risks unless you value failure."
Eckstein's transition from social worker to publisher was a risk in itself. She found that establishing a network of advisors and mentors was critical to her own development as a successful businesswoman. "I've really had to go out and seek them," she says. To her credit, she's joint businesswomen's networking groups, as well as sought help from other independent publishers around the country. Knowing when and who to ask for help is critical, she says. So is listening to the advice you receive.
Along with mentors, experiences is a great teacher. Ducey says he learned some of his most valued leadership lessons long before he was a manager, starting with his days as treasurer of his fraternity at ASU.
"There were certain things I had to achieve in the fraternity,b ut I didn't have any power over anyone, so I had to persuade them to do things that needed to get done," he recalls.
That sounds much like any manager's challenge, regardless of corporate rank or title.
"Leadership is an enormous privilege given to you by the people you lead," Weatherup concludes. "If you don't understand that, you probably won't make it. Even if you do make it, you'll be far less effective, and you'll enjoy it a lot less."
--Betsy Loeff is a freelance writer living in Golden, Colo.