HAT Recent Interview on Flashpoint Academy

HAT Interview

Geoff: Every time we meet, you've got a different title and a new project or two. The business card and stationary guys must really love you. I actually think that you’re just hard core unemployable and that you simply can’t hang on to a steady job. You should write the business names on your cards in pencil so you can erase them every week or two.

HAT: Well, I do love starting new businesses, but it's really more a reflection of the accelerating rate of change in today’s world. Sometimes, I hardly know where to look next. You feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony - so many opportunities - so little time. My mother used to say that she wasn't sure that one life was enough for everything I had in mind and that’s probably right. But, it does keep you moving and every day is more interesting than the day before. I’m not much interested in looking backwards and, when people ask me which business I’m proudest of, I always say “the next one”.



Geoff: Well, are you at least having fun? I know you work all the time. I saw your sign that says: “If I'm awake, I'm working" and I've heard you say that one of your secrets is to “sleep fast”, but come on. There's more to life than just making a living.

HAT: I couldn't agree more. The fact is that it’s easy to make a buck. It’s hard to make a difference. And we’re totally focused in our businesses on making a difference. But, as to your work having to be “fun”, I think the confusion that people sometimes have is not about work - it's about intensity. If you’re engaged and enthusiastic, just from the force of habit, the level of intensity with which you approach each activity carries over into everything else you do. Whether you (and sometimes the people around you) like it that way or not and, even if you wish from time to time that it just wasn’t so, the fact is that it’s a way of life. So when people tell me that I’ll never retire because I love working too much, I think they don’t understand that I’d be happy to retire tomorrow, but it wouldn’t really change my pace.



Geoff: Yes, I know a little bit about that pace – having followed you around for a day or two. Sometimes, it just seems like a blur.

HAT: It’s not all that complicated. I try to do everything that I do with the same energy and passion. “All things with a vengeance" is my favorite saying. So it can be working to save thousands of cats and dogs with a great charity like PAWS; aggressively collecting paintings from artists working all across the country; keeping people up with what's going on in the Middle East (as if anyone really knows); exercising too much and too hard for a guy my age; or helping Mayor Daley make Chicago the greatest city around. With me, what you see and what you get are always the same. And everyone knows going in that it’s a package deal. I guess I’m just a throwback to the old pedal bikes - one speed, full speed ahead - all the time. And hope that the brakes are there when and if you need them.

I think that one of the funniest things that has happened recently is that I was negotiating to buy a chair from a friend who runs a great furniture business and he offered me an additional discount if I’d agree to just one thing. He was getting so many emails from me every day about political issues that it was driving him crazy. He said he’d give me another 10% off the price if I’d take him off my email list. I told him that the pleasure of tormenting him was worth far more to me than the additional 10% savings on the chair.



Geoff: But if you're not having a little fun every day, how do you keep going and keep your people excited and motivated?

HAT: Again there's a reason they call it “work” and not fun. I think a better description than “fun” is “satisfaction”. There isn't a day that goes by which I would trade with anyone else in terms of the emotional payback that I get from my own activities and from watching my people grow. I don’t think the purpose of life is to be “happy”. I think the purpose of life is to be useful and responsible. It’s to matter, to count, and to stand for something. It's about making a difference and making a contribution in what you do and being enthusiastic in the process. It’s not about money, comfort or luxury – it’s about waking up excited each morning – anxious to get to work – and about having the chance to do work that you love.



Geoff: And the people?

HAT: The people part is easy – you find great, dedicated and talented people – you give them amazing opportunities to change the world around them - you get out of their way - and you try to run interference for them so they can do their jobs and do their best. In an environment like that, anyone can be the boss.



Geoff: Yes, I’ve seen that sign on your desk too. It’s one of my favorites: “Don’t think of me as the boss, but as a friend who’s always right.”

HAT: And the corollary of course is: “Sometimes wrong, but never in doubt.” Actually, absorbing uncertainty and a lot of the anxiety associated with new businesses is a critical part of the leader’s job. And, as they say, it’s lonely at the top, but at least it’s not crowded.



Geoff: Well, it can't escape anyone's attention that you’ve been at the top in so many businesses in such different fields and had a pretty consistent record of success. The scope and diversity of your various businesses are really amazing. I'm sure our readers would love to know the secrets to your success.

HAT: Well, talking about “success" is almost as misleading as talking about “fun". Of course, everyone wants to be a success in whatever they do, but life's not fair and success is a very fickle and fleeting measurement. Success is tricky; it’s perishable; and it's often outside of your control. What I prefer to focus on is excellence. There's just no substitute for it and its particular appeal is that it's dependable; it's lasting; and, in fact, it's largely within our control.

Striving for excellence in what you do is a simple standard that's both stimulating and consistently rewarding. It turns out that there’s always a right way to do almost anything if you’re willing to take the time and put in the effort to do it right. And there're just no good excuses for settling for anything less.

And when I talk about excellence, I don’t mean striving for perfection because trying to achieve perfection in almost any business is both futile and neurotic. Here again, it's important not to confuse the two, but, as I said before, if you make excellence a habit and you focus on repeatedly doing the absolute best job that you can, there tends to be a reasonable prospect of some success.

But the ultimate and most important rewards and the real satisfaction that you’ll take away from the process are almost all internal and foremost among them is the knowledge that, whatever the outcome, you did your very best and you gave it all you had. In fact, these are the real messages that we’re trying to get through to the students in our new businesses.



Geoff: OK. So tell me about the latest and greatest. I’m pretty caught up with the Kendall College turnaround. It’s still a little hard to believe that you pulled that off and completely transformed the place in less than 2 years, but I understand that, now that Kendall out of the woods and thriving, you’ve got another new college on the drawing boards. And what’s the deal with the “city in the City”?

HAT: Well, the new College is Flashpoint Academy – The Academy of Media Arts and Sciences. The website is www.flashpointacademy.com. It opens right in downtown Chicago this coming September and it will initially be a high-end training center for the most important digital arts – film, sound, computer graphics/animation and game technology. It’s going to be tough, competitive and a very fast track because these industries are exploding and they’re dying for well-trained employees.

It’s a two-year program with an enormous hands-on component – maybe 5 or 10 times the amount of real-life experience and contact hours you’d have in a traditional college (if you could even find the courses there) and every student coming out of the program will have worked in the industry; developed a comprehensive portfolio of his or her own work; and be able to take full advantage of our national network of industry contacts, leaders and employers to jump right into the middle of things.



Geoff: So what’s with the name? Flashpoint?

HAT: Well, I’m sure there’s some very cool chemical definition and everyone at the College already has their own interpretation and explanation – but what it means to me is pretty simple. It means “in the moment, in a flash, and to the point – no muss, no fuss, no wasted time or effort – just results”. We’re looking for a limited number of special students and adult learners who, very frankly, know who they are and what they’re not. They know what they love and they’re in a hurry to get on with it. I’ve heard it over and over and they couldn’t be more direct:

“Give me the tools and the training. Give me some hands-on experience.

Do it now (and fast) and then get out of my way.

I want the rest of my life to be the best of my life.”

And, you know, it really is almost that simple. One of our new ads for the College says: “You know who you are. We know who you can be.” We’re focused on a highly-motivated and very directed portion of the college-bound (and college re-bound) population that the big guys, the traditional schools, and the “institutions” just can’t begin to serve. These people don’t have the luxury of spending four years getting ready for their careers – they’re ready now. And they’re in a hurry.



Geoff: Sounds a little bit like wishful thinking on their part. What do these kids really know about these industries?

HAT: Well, for starters, they know 10 times more about the technology and the video tools that are out there than we’ll ever know and the gap just keeps widening. But they also know – in their hearts of hearts – what they don’t know and that’s why they’re looking for a kind of school that promotes and builds on their interests and their passions instead of burying them in a bunch of course work that has nothing to do with their lives or anyone else’s for that matter and hasn’t for at least the last hundred years.

Marshall McLuhan said it a long time ago: “Anyone who thinks there’s a difference between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.” The job of educators today is clear, but not simple. We’ve got to make education relevant and exciting again in the lives of our students instead of a necessary evil or a boredom endurance contest. Education is not about filling an empty vessel; it’s about igniting a fire and a passion for learning that even our most bureaucratic systems can’t extinguish. That’s what Flashpoint Academy wants to do for its students.



Geoff: You and everyone else, I’m sure. But what’s different about your plans and program. I can already see that you’ve got the old passion cooking and I’m not about to throw my tired old body in the way of that particular juggernaut because I’ve seen you do it too many times before. But just for argument’s sake, what’s the “secret sauce”?

HAT: You’re exactly right by the way. I’ve already told the entire staff and faculty that working at Flashpoint is going to be like running a race right ahead of a giant steamroller. On any given day, you can beat it, but if you ever sit down or slow down, it’s gonna roll right over you.

Here’s how I see the key distinctions:

(1) Focus – 4 key areas of attention and expertise. You can’t be all things to all people and you can only do a few things really well. We’ve made our choices – our students will do the same. Ignorance of the realities of the serious time commitment and the amount of hard work required to succeed in these kinds of programs and other unmet (albeit unrealistic) expectations are the largest single causes of freshman attrition. We expect to virtually eliminate these concerns by careful screening, repeated clear and concise communications to students and parents, and independent verification processes before admitting prospective students to the College.

(2) People Skills Emphasis – All four of these industries are highly collaborative environments and we hear – over and over – from the industry that, while substantive skills are desirable, the real skill sets that matter to employers are the “people” skills: handling pressure, ambiguity and stress; working against deadlines and in tight time frames; working as a team and being a team player; communication and presentation skills; networking skills; problem solving and conflict resolution skills; and the importance of understanding that getting the right result is far more important than who gets the credit for it. Our approach and the teaming and workflow strategies put the highest premium on the successful early development of precisely these types of skills.

(3) Workflow Approach and Process – The entire learning process at Flashpoint is built around the basic industry infrastructure approach of consistent, disciplined workflow. Our students from the outset will be part of ongoing projects which will introduce them to precisely how the industry actually works and prepare them to take responsible positions and roles in the process as they participate as team members in the real business of moving each project from conception through development and execution and on to completion. The workflow structure, the multiple project emphasis, and the crucial need for all of the various disciplines at the College to collaborate and to integrate their respective skill sets into a finished product are the foundations on which all of the other training at Flashpoint will be based.

(4) Who We Are – If other schools aspire to turning out independent divas, auteurs and maestros, or at least in suggesting to their students and graduates that these are realistic and reasonable expectations, we see ourselves as creating secure, competent professionals able to land on their feet and hit the ground running in each of our target industries who will avoid mistaking even the clearest view (of where they’d like to end up) with a short distance. We create team players with proven valuable skills because our programs are built, organized and streamlined to give our students the necessary time and the substantive opportunities that they need to develop and demonstrate precisely those talents and abilities to the industry.

(5) Our Motto - There really are no shortcuts to any place you’d really like go. And there are painfully few “tricks of the trade”. The fact is that all the talent and creativity in the world won’t take you anywhere without an equal commitment to your craft and to hard, purposeful work.

Omnia labor vincit improbus.

(Hard work conquers everything.)

Geoff: OK. I got it. We’ll check back with you in September. Now, what’s this about building a mini-Chicago? Isn’t one Chicago enough for you?