Presidential Perspective
America Online executive and sports investor Ted Leonsis
outlines success factors in today’s global marketplace
by James Gentile
President of Research Corporation
What today’s college graduates need to know and be able to do – a broad topic indeed – is the focus of a recent report from the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education & America’s Promise.
I had the opportunity to be a member of the Project Leap Leadership Committee, and my comment on it appears here.
In releasing the report at Georgetown University in January, the Association of American Colleges and Universities invited Theodore “Ted” J. Leonsis to speak. The choice was appropriate because Leonsis, a Georgetown graduate, has managed to achieve a great deal since leaving academia – and the LEAP report is aimed at helping college students obtain a more empowering liberal education in today’s highly competitive world.
Leonsis, 50, is a vice chairman of America Online and the majority owner of Lincoln Holdings LLC, which owns the National Hockey League’s Washington Capitals as well as the WNBA’s Washington Mystics and 44 percent of another company that owns the NBA’s Washington Wizards. Among his many honors, the Sporting News has named him one of the 20 most powerful people in sports.
I had a unique opportunity to talk with Leonsis over lunch and then to listen to the outstanding informal presentation he gave on higher education and the world as he sees it.
“We must all find a good third place,” Leonsis told the Georgetown audience. By that he meant that while family and work come first in most peoples’ lives, there has to be something more if life is to seem complete. That third place might include a religious affiliation, volunteerism, club activities or sports, he said.
In my opinion, Leonsis is correct in correlating the identification of a "third place" with a necessary component of the lives of learned individuals and leaders in general. A "third place" provides these individuals with a way of self-expression that will often bring their professional expertise and their love of family into a larger societal or community role.
While Project LEAP is attempting to transform America’s liberal education infrastructure for the global economy of the 21st century, Leonsis outlined some of the globalization factors already affecting the world in which those students will do their work.
He termed the students we now teach the “Web 2.0” generation, meaning, for example, that they’re accustomed to gaining virtually instantaneous information (a typical Google search provides results on complex questions in about 1.3 seconds). So the problem no longer is finding information, but in discerning fact from fiction, importance from unimportance and reasonable speculation from chaotic thinking.
He noted that Moore’s Law seems to apply to an increasing number of business activities. Formulated by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, the law originally stated that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months.
Judging by recent news out of Intel, http://www.physorg.com/news90477426.html, Moore’s law is going still going strong. But now that relentless, blistering pace of development has caught on elsewhere as well, so that the general rule of global entrepreneurship seems to be, “Make it better, faster and cheaper,” Leonsis said.
And if you’re doing that, you’re probably working in a network of some sort, he added.
“Connections to one another and connections among things are no longer luxuries, but now are mandatory for success,” he said. “Working in isolation is a dead-end industry.”
Related to networking is Leonsis’ concept of the atomization of resources. He said the new generation increasingly lives by the rules of “take what you want when you want it.”
By way of example he noted that to fulfill a high-school independent work assignment his son decided to map sports arenas around North America.
He was able to do so easily – and in 3D – using web-based services like Map Quest and Google Earth. Then he used additional web resources to add nearby restaurants, bars and points of interests around those stadiums.
Leonsis recalled that at dinner one night his son asked him how much it had cost to develop all those web-based tools. About $5 billion, Leonsis replied.
He said his son laughed and pointed out that he’d just used someone else’s billions to do his homework. He later discussed how one could imagine developing the project into a company to serve sports junkies. Leonsis, admittedly a proud father, estimates it would likely be worth “a million plus” from day one.
During another dinner conversation, he recalled, his son complained about how silly and boring his high-school chemistry class was, mainly because the instructor was teaching “way old stuff,” using the third edition of a textbook originally published in 1984. It just didn’t capture his imagination or foster in him an enthusiasm to learn.
Given the speed, networking and atomization of resources going on as the global economy continues to ramp up, Leonsis predicted that “moving at the interface of things” will be a major key to American success.
“We must move seamlessly through, between, around, over and under traditional boundaries (disciplines) to seek the answers to the cross-cutting questions of tomorrow,” he said. “We have to study the connective tissues between subject areas, even if that means we learn the subjects ‘along the way,’ rather than in a detailed ‘up-front’ mode.”
I came away from my time with Leonsis further convinced of the need to help students master the intersections of knowledge developing today, as well as those novel combinations (novel to those of us trained in traditional disciplines, anyway) that are yet to come. In fact the “students” already may be ahead of the “teachers” here, and there are many of us, including myself, who need to catch up with them.