Book notes

John Sperling is an amazing man. A true rags-to-riches entrepreneur, John created the largest for-profit university in the world, the University of Phoenix. Unfortunately, John is also a curmudgeon.

"One day, the miracle happened--my father died in his sleep. In the morning when my mother told me my father was dead, I could hardly contain my joy. I raced outside, rolled in the grass squealing with delight. There I lay looking up into a clear blue sky, and I realized that this was the happiest day of my life. It still is."

Later, "one afternoon while walking home from school on a day that I was to have a date with the girl, I decided thatt I would try to seduce her. I now had toface the facet that I turly believed that if I carried out my intension, I would be a lost sinner and go to hell. I also knwo that I was firm in my decision that I wouold try to seduce her. Not wanting to spend a lifetime waiting for hell, I stopped, looked up, and said, 'God, I am going to sin, if you have the power, strike me dead now.' When nothing happened, I looked up again and said, 'I reject you forever.' I walked on free from God and free from my fear of hell, an free from my mother's religion." I don't think John ever shared this story with the source of our funds at this point, the University of San Francisco (Jesuit) and the College of St. Mary's (Christian Brothers).

Happily, my name does not appear in the book. When we were laying out the subjects of the business curriculum, John questioned the sequence. I explained that we were layering the more complex subjects on top of a foundation of core material. John acquiesced, but only after offering his unique definition of what constituted mastery. In his view, mastery was sort of a Turing test. Instead of having a computer convince remote users it was human, our goal was to have students who could pass as business people. Talk the talk and you become a business person. This shouldn't take more than a few weeks of immersion but since the senior year of our program was forty weeks in duration, the curriculum was not really that important. I took a crash course in instructional design and set about developing cases and learning events to teach marketing, finance, accounting, organizational behavior, managerial economics, and leadership.