Hello, and welcome to this episode of the
Physics World Weekly podcast,
which is sponsored
by the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Physicists and others with STEM backgrounds
are sought after in industry for their analytical
skills.
However, traditional training in STEM subjects
is often lacking when it comes to nurturing
the soft skills that are needed to succeed
in managerial
and leadership positions.
Our guest this week is Peter Hurst, who
is senior
associate dean,
executive
education
at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
He explains how MIT Sloan
works with executives
to ensure that they efficiently
and effectively
acquire the skills and knowledge
needed to be effective leaders.
Peter is coming up in conversation
with Physics World's Michael Banks.
But first, a word from our sponsor.
Businesses in every industry are navigating the choppy
waters of exponential change.
Continuous learning and upskilling
are more essential than ever.
From artificial intelligence to analytics
to the business opportunities of outer space,
short courses at MIT Sloan
Executive Education
are constantly evolving to present cutting edge insights
on critical topics
at the intersection
of management and technology.
Whether you're seeking sustainable
improvement efforts for knowledge work,
or want to use systems thinking
to diagnose issues in the laboratory,
MIT Sloan
Executive Education
provides hands on learning and frameworks
that can be applied immediately
at work.
Experience the MIT Edge with short courses,
flexible certificates,
and custom programs for your organization.
Learn more at executive.mit
dot
edu. Well, hi, Peter. Thanks for joining us
on the Physics World Podcast.
Glad to be here. So we all know
that scientists
are focused on developing new theories
or the next experimental breakthrough.
But you believe that it's also important that
they consider equipping themselves with management training and
similar skills
to help maximize the output of their research
teams.
But before we get onto that, perhaps, first
of all, you could tell us a little
bit about yourself. You have a physics background.
Why did you get interested in physics and
your career to date?
Sure. Great to be here, and happy to
talk about this, the subject. I'm very passionate
about it. So, you know, as long as
I can remember, I've been interested in science
and then really physics. And I think it
was probably,
you know, always that sort of very childlike
question of of wanting to understand why.
And, you know, pretty early on, I think
I translated that into
feeling that actually understanding how
was really what would lead you to understanding
why. And I think physics, I wouldn't say
that physics has all the answers, or even
any of the answers, but it was always
to me the most kind of fundamental
way of understanding, you know, how things
work in the world, in the universe, and
it's always just been fascinating and thrilling for
me to sort of discover
those kinds of insights. And I had the
ability to kind of do
the mathematics behind the physics as well.
And so I would say I'm lucky that
it always came
relatively naturally to me to be able to
explore physics and to have a successful sort
of academic career and be able to go
on to A levels, university,
and a PhD, and just following that interest
and that passion all that time. So what
happened then after your, after you kind of,
you know, after you did your PhD, for
example? Yeah, yeah. You know, I have to
be a little bit careful
how I explain this, only because I don't
want to sort of insult anybody.
But truly, you know, when I was young
and perhaps a bit brasher, I honestly, when
I was a hard scientist, a physicist,
probably didn't even think that biology was a
real science.
Let me hasten to add that that's no
longer
my belief, but really what happened in my
journey was that while I was working as
a physicist,
my PhD and postdoc work
was
funded active by the UK Ministry of Defense
in large part. And because of that, I
started getting asked by some colleagues really in
the social sciences,
who were interested in
sort of science and technology policy
as it affected, in that case,
some issues around terrorism
and international conflict.
And they were looking for expertise in the
science,
and if you like some of the engineering
kind of aspects of the science to help
them understand what they were looking at. So
I started doing some collaborative work with these
social scientists,
and really found
a lot of respect actually for
not only the importance and relevance of that
work, but actually the rigorous process that goes
into it as well.
And so that was,
in a way, my entree into perhaps realizing
that there was something beyond just the lab
based and theoretical physics that I was
doing that was really important, you know, about
how this actually
is relevant in the world, and how our
skills and expertise
scientists, and, you know, in particular my case
as a physicist, could have that impact as
well. And so by one of those many
coincidences
that sort of guide us through our lives,
well my research funding happened to come to
a sort of an impasse at one point.
And when I was thinking about or looking
around what to do next,
I came across an opportunity to go and
work in the parliamentary office of science and
technology in the UK's parliament,
back in the sort of mid to late
nineties.
The,
people might be familiar with
with that organization, but essentially
it helps parliamentarians sort of understand and analyze
what are the really key issues in science
and technology. And I was the advisor for
this wide range of things, physical sciences, IT,
telecoms, defense, kind of everything
in that sphere.
And
so that really was I mean, I think
that was working very closely with now not
only physicists, but scientists from, you know, a
lot of different engineers, a lot of different
disciplines,
but in the realm of
what are the, what pull the policy kind
of impacts,
and what's the policy support that science needs
to,
to to to to really, you know, be
successful.
So that was,
also very eye opening. And from there, I,
that my journey sort of took another jump,
and based on that kind of interesting two
different things that I'd been doing, I was
approached by the London School of Economics of
all places,
to help them to set up essentially a
consulting
operation that used the expertise of LSE faculty,
or of course, all social scientists and economists
and the like,
to apply that for business and industry.
And so I helped the LSE set up
that kind of operation. So that was in
the space between
industry, government, and academia,
really based on the proposition that
all of this
work that we do as scientists and as
experts in our fields,
actually
can be tremendously valuable out in the world
of practice
if we can make that connection.
And so that's kind of really how I
suppose I completed my
journey from being a hard scientist into
being in the social sciences. And then a
few years later I got to move to
the United States, and not long after that
was
given a chance to join the Sloan School
at MIT. And, you know, for someone with
a with a background that I have, perhaps
you can imagine this is kind of Nirvana,
you know, getting to be my total geek's
health,
but also be very much in the space
of how do we
really help connect
all the incredible expertise that we have in
academia, and in this case, in business schools
in particular, but throughout MIT as well, you
know, to the world of practice and really
making a difference in how individuals and organizations,
can be, you know, as successful as they
possibly can.
Right. Yeah. So now now, of course, you
you lead the executive program, education program at
MIT's
Sloan School of Management. So maybe you could
tell us a little bit about what that
role entails?
Sure, so my responsibilities within MIT Sloan School,
everyone listening to this I'm sure knows a
lot about MIT. Maybe not everyone would realize
that MIT
for decades has had a school of management.
And what you might wonder why that would
be, well, actually part of the story we
tell about that is that we're not just
any old school of management here at The
Sloan School, we're MIT's school of management. And
so
we have all of the
programs that you would expect a business school
or management school to have in terms of
MBAs, and a variety of other graduate and
undergraduate degree programs.
But what we
also have done over the last several decades
is built up this
executive education set of programs. And what that
is are essentially short non degree courses that
are aimed at working professionals.
We say executives,
but really it's
management, managers, leaders, executives,
but also scientists, and professionals, and technologists, and
engineers,
who
really
can benefit from
building up their skills, as well as in
tandem with their experience,
around core topics
in
management
and business.
And what that looks like, because we're doing
it at MIT, of course, is it's everything
that you might expect if you think about
a business school and what what we would
do in the business school around really sort
of financial acumen and and and managing people
and designing and managing
organizations. And I'm sure we can talk later
about why I believe that's as well as
relevant to people doing what I was doing
30 years ago as a as a working
scientist as it is to somebody running a
business.
But we also do a lot of work
helping
people with those backgrounds, but also people from
traditional business backgrounds
to really understand
what
one needs to understand about what's going on
in science and technology and engineering, and what
the business implications and applications of all those
are, and how
to really
design organizations and run organizations
from startups to huge global corporations,
to really be, you know, as effective and
competitive as they need to be to not
only survive, but really thrive. And
that's, I would say,
equally weighted between thinking about the organization
and and and how
organizations can be successful, but also very much
thinking about, you know, the individuals, you know,
how how you in in your
own work, in your own career,
can really, by understanding,
actually that organizations
being systems of people and processes
are very much like sort of engineering
objects,
that we can, you know, that we can
apply our our scientific mindset and our scientific
processes for doing experiments and understanding,
how complicated systems work,
and really get back, you know,
better outcomes and even outcomes that we we
wouldn't have imagined were were were were possible.
So we have this, I I would say,
dual
mission to help individuals,
to be more successful in their work and
in their careers,
and to help new organizations,
you know,
in many cases businesses, but other kinds of
organizations as well,
to be
successful in a very, you know, dynamic and
competitive,
and fast moving kind of environment that the
world is today.
And these courses that you mentioned, are they
predominantly online or is it a mixture of
kind of online in person? Also, can you
say something a little bit about how long
like kind of typical length of the courses
as well? Sure. So so in executive education
at the Sloan School,
these days, we have pretty much every available
format. You know, in the past, it was
all the case if you had to come
to campus and you'd spend anywhere from 2
days to 5 weeks on campus immersed in
these courses.
We still do that, we have thousands of
people a year who do come to MIT
from all over the world to have that
kind of experience. And that is fantastic, again,
you can imagine how excited I am
about being at MIT, given just all of
the science engineering and technology that happens here.
And We see many people who just, it's
sort of like a live stream to be
able to come and spend some time on
campus and do that, but many people don't
have the option of making that physical trip.
So we really started, like so many people,
using,
in our case Zoom,
for doing live online versions of classes during
COVID.
And first of all, our faculty really became
very successful,
it's not true of everyone's experience, but in
ours,
really we created some very engaging and valuable
experiences that and we heard from a lot
of the participants that are coming through the
program is, you know, please don't stop doing
that even when campus becomes an option,
because frankly, you know, coming to MIT for
2 days or a week or a few
weeks
is a big imposition,
and
we're really keen to get this learning
whenever we can, as soon as we can,
and so that mode has continued.
Before
COVID, we had also been a pioneer in
figuring out how do you do these kinds
of really sort of
experiential management,
development and training courses, in kind of pre
recorded asynchronous online formats.
So we've really built that up as well.
So we have about 100 different course titles,
and
they're about equally
sort of balanced between opportunities to come to
campus,
opportunities to come to campus virtually, you know,
it might be the middle of the night
for some people at that time, of course,
or to do what we call kind of
these self paced programs. And there's a variety
of different formats of that, that usually it's
several weeks, very much prerecorded material, but a
lot of hands on activities that you engage
with, not just yourself,
but sort of team based learning
that you do with sort of folks
that tends to be all over the world,
all going through these sort of cohorts
together. The topics
are, you know, as I touched on earlier,
everything from, you know,
sort of building your
sort of knowledge about how the financial operations
of an organization or a business might work,
all the perhaps sort of mundane but important
aspects of running businesses and organizations,
up to much more kind of
technology and science driven
sort of topics like, obviously currently at the
moment, a lot of interest in not only
kind of what are these
AI tools, but how much do I need
to know about how they work and what
are their applications, and, you know, thinking very
much about
not only their benefits, but
really in a practical way,
how can you take things that you learn
in these courses and start applying them in
your work right away? That's very much a
fundamental thing for us. Being part of MIT,
again,
you know, a science driven organization, it's all
about
not theoretical
learning, but
learning by doing
as a learning mode,
but then also
always a focus on, and what's the application?
So what, we're all busy people, I'm learning
about this, then what can I do, you
know, right away? And that contrast, I think,
executive education
from what a lot of folks that had,
like me, a kind of a traditional academic
sort of journey,
where you're doing a lot of just in
case learning, really.
You know, you're going through right degree programs,
lab PhDs,
and all those things. You know,
the the the skills that we're acquiring hopefully
could be useful one day.
In our executive education programs, everything is really
designed for, yep, that's that long term value,
but also,
how are we adding
sort
of capabilities and skills that you can use
in your work
literally
immediately.
I mean, when just thinking about in terms
of, you know, you mentioned the individual scientists.
I mean, there might be some people
kind of listening to this thinking, oh, you
know, I don't need
management training.
Isn't that something, say, I could just learn
on the job? I mean, what do you
kind of say to that?
I think learning on the job, I mean,
there's lots of research that shows this,
is really one of the most important and
effective ways
of learning, absolutely. I mean, that's why in
fact, the way we design executive education programs
is also very much sort of within that
philosophy, because people are still working, and we
design programs that people can
learn from while still doing their work and
be applying it to their work.
But I think what I hear from people
who come through, who I've seen coming through
these programs, and it's really been my personal
experience
as well,
is first of all, I would say is
a lot of us might be doing
jobs
and having roles
that we might not think of ourselves as,
you know,
as being managers
or as being parts of organizations,
but but actually, you know, for many for
many scientists and engineers, and I think particularly
working people working
with physics backgrounds, this is true.
We may well be working sort of as
a sole sort of lone person sitting in
a room
wishing on a theoretical physics problem. But oftentimes,
we're we're part of large and complex teams
of human beings.
And, you know, as a as a physicist,
I, you
know, certainly started my professional life thinking very
much
that organizations are basically machines. And if you
just decide if you just design it right,
then, you know, you turn the handle and
you get the output. But I think what
we all learn in life is that, you
know, it doesn't work that way. And one
of the reasons it doesn't work that way
is that these
systems are really complex,
and and and having sort of analytical tools
that, you know, help us understand these very
complex systems and be able to design them
better so that they're more likely to produce
outcomes. But they're also not just machines.
They inevitably involve human beings as well. And
even in with all the discussion that we
have about artificial intelligence these days, sort of
the human factors is still an incredibly
important
facet of that. And you can certainly
hope to learn through experience and repetition what
works
and what doesn't.
But few of us would apply that approach
to how we kind of build our expertise
and capabilities
as scientists. We
all leverage all of the work and learning
that have gone before us. And I would
just advocate for applying that same philosophy to
how can we
most efficiently
and most effectively acquire the skills, knowledge that
will help us
work with other people,
lead teams,
which oftentimes are quite large teams and that
are international, and that have people with a
lot of different
motivations
and approaches and different kinds of cultural
norms and expectations.
Now all those things which actually,
we know from this kind of like the
business school setting
is bread and butter to folks who think
of themselves as managers
primarily
in organizations.
So much of that is really in my
experience
also relevant to people,
even if they don't
see themselves as having a sort of a
management or leadership position in a science based
organization.
Having said that, the reality is there's also
a lot of people, and we see them
coming through our programs, who actually do have
leadership and management positions in
science based organizations, you know, whether you're in
business or industry or whether you're
in academia.
You know, what what it takes to be
a successful head of department isn't only being,
you know,
a a a world class physicist.
Sure helpful
and important to have that.
But anyone who's in those roles, I'm sure
will tell you that actually, you know, thinking
about and understanding how to get the most
out of the organization and how to
manage and lead in a way that enables
the people that you've got responsibility
for
to be as successful as they can be,
and understanding
what are their goals as an individual,
how their goals fit in with the work
of your department, or your lab, or
your R and D function if you're in
a business setting.
There are many more people, it turns out,
that, like me, started out as physicists and
scientists, but if you actually look at what
they're doing
in their work, they would still identify as
being a physicist or a scientist, but they're
spending much of their time
managing people and organization and operations. And for
anyone for whom that's true,
if you weren't aware that there's a lot
of help
that you can get from learning from these
kinds of programs, whether it's at MIT or
elsewhere, then I hope by listening to this
conversation that you'll get another tool for your
kit that will be helpful to you.
And I guess that's particularly the case for,
you know, the advent of, like, big science
facilities. You know, you've got like CERN, you
know, ESA, a lot of kind of facilities
that have huge, you know, very complex operations,
loads of people, for example. And I guess
that is a case where,
you know, they may, as you say, they
may identify as a scientist, but actually, they,
you know, a lot of the kind of
role entails a lot of management.
And I guess those courses that you, you
know, could, you have could, you know, aid
those quite significantly.
Absolutely. And let let me also say that,
I would be at the front of the
queue of people who
would have been quite skeptical about some of
what I'm saying right now
as to,
kind of isn't this management stuff all just
sort of
a bunch of voodoo? You kind of,
you know, it's not rigorous, is it? It's
not, you know, it's not how we think
about the world. But let me tell you,
at least at places like MIT,
actually,
these management and business topics
can be studied
in every bit as rigorous a way
as any of the kind of physics or
science that I've ever been involved in,
or done. And I would say I actually,
my experience has been that because the Sloan
School is at MIT,
we have a lot of people who are,
you know, who are, who they do identify
as and are still scientists and engineers,
and I think have that kind of healthy
skepticism as well.
But to have an open mind, they come
to MIT with an open mind because, hey,
if this is going on at
MIT,
there must be something,
some validity here.
And without, I think without exception, what what
I hear from people, even if they came
in without skepticism, was
I really you know, this opened my eyes.
I you know,
typical sort of response would be,
yeah, I've encountered these kinds of challenges in
my work. I didn't even really think of
them as being
as being sort of this kind of challenge.
But now I've got a new lens to
look at this through,
can understand,
you know, why things were happening in my
organization or in my lab,
that, you know, weren't going the way that
I wanted them to. And I can you
know, I've got some tools to to really
help me,
plan and manage,
myself
and my team and my organization,
you know, much more effectively. So, you know,
for for me, that's always, again, given my
personal journey
to that's really
a wonderful thing to get to sort of
see people experiencing,
that that that
it's a kind of, we talk about it
as almost like a transformation
for individuals
that they can really see how
we can have so much more impact
ourselves than our work if we can be
that much more effective in how we
not only work with others, but recognize
the important,
I would say the vital leadership role that
there is
for folks that have the science and engineering,
and my particular passion physics background,
physics is kinda like the the the universal
intellectual training.
I find physicists
in so many roles
at MIT, many other departments and disciplines,
in businesses and health organizations. I mean, they
they perhaps don't talk about themselves as the
background in in physics, but we really are
everywhere.
And that's great. I mean, do you have,
you know, kind of any examples
of where, you know, this kind of, you
know, training on the courses, the leadership kind
of courses can, you know, can have an
impact
in everyday life?
Sure, so
one actually
I've liked talking about in the last few
years,
that it's actually not in the physics domain,
but it's certainly very much in the sort
of the science domain, but
it's an organization where a number a lot
of physicists
work, and that's the Broad Institute,
which is
a kind of a spin out from from
from MIT and
Harvard that
essentially is a large lab,
thousands of scientists working there.
And and really what they were doing up
until COVID
was
sort of genetic analysis
with very sort of cutting edge equipment, very
expensive.
And they were doing all of the
gene sequencing
for a lot of the research going on
around around the world. And so that's a
lot of scientific instrumentation. So, you know, a
lot of people with sort of physics and
engineering
working alongside,
sort of the biologists and geneticists and data
scientists because a lot of that is data
and computing, as well. So I have a
perfect place to be a physicist, I guess,
in many ways.
And so
they ran
like a lab would run, even though this
was trying to be, was providing a service
to scientists and companies
that needed that work to be done.
And,
one of their senior
leaders, who was herself a scientist,
actually came
to, first of all, an
executive education
course at the Sloan School, and then actually
was so taken by what she learned in
that that she, became a came back and
just sort of did the full executive MBA
as well,
over over 2 years,
and applied what,
what what she learned in,
in those courses,
about
really,
learning from what companies like Toyota had done,
and really,
understanding
how
manufacturing
and production processes
work, where they go, you know, where they
go wrong,
where you get delays and how, when actually
most of those are not technology or engineering
delays, they're management
decisions
that get made, and really set up a
different
management
decision making system in that organization
around a concept in this case that was,
that we typically call sort of visual management.
It's about how do you visualize
the work throughout the whole process, so that
you can really see where the optimal optimization
are.
And they went from a process as a
result of doing all of that, where if
you were a scientist, and you'd sent in
your sample to get gene sequenced to this
lab, it might take
weeks or months for you to get
the results back,
to getting it back in days or maybe
a week. But just a huge transformation
in in kind of the throughput
by applying these management principles to how we
do the science
in in in this context.
One of the reasons I like telling this
story is that it really came into its
own because when we were all grappling with
what do we you know, with the COVID
crisis,
MIT was one of the institutions that was
able to really more or less stay open
and keep teaching us many of our students
on campus.
The only reason we could do that is
we had this,
massive,
ability to do a lot of testing,
for COVID. And we were able to do
that because the Broad Institute
switched its entire operation for a period,
over
from doing that sort of genomic sequencing
work to doing
rapid PCR,
gene testing for COVID testing. So like very
accurate, fast, you know, 2 day turnaround, high
quality,
very, very high volume
testing. And so I just think that's a
wonderful story about kind
of the benefits coming full circle. Like, we
got to be the beneficiaries in many ways
of of the improvements that that organization made.
But it had a huge impact in the
world as well because that rapid
that ability to do that rapid PCR testing,
you know,
that that came from the combination of all
the amazing science, definitely like the physics engineering,
computation, and data science, and everything else. So
we went into it
together with the realization that
we could design this system so much better,
we can run it so much more effectively,
we can enable our people to be much
more efficient
by applying these really quite simple management
techniques.
That's really, that's really fascinating. So,
I guess for those people who might be
interested then in, you know,
in following that up and potentially, you know,
doing a course, I mean, how do they
go about finding more?
Sure. Well, this is kind of quite dynamic.
We're always adding new courses as well. So
we always produce brochures in a very sort
of old fashioned printed way. But really the
best thing to do,
you know, if you're interested in what we
do at MIT and at the Sloan School,
come and check out our website, executive. Mit.edu.
It's a bit of a blatant commercial for
our own programs. But let me say, really
the reason I'm doing this
interview is, you know, there's a there are
a lot of these kinds of courses out
there, and
a quick search on your favorite search engine,
or perhaps using
your favorite AI tool now that you use
for discovering
new things,
you know, we'll we'll very quickly give you
sort of lists of places that are offering
these kinds of courses. If you want somewhere
that's near to where you are physically,
then, you know,
there are programs like this, you know, offered
in great academic institutions
and other kinds of institutions all around the
world. But again, I think for physicists, there's
something really great about
MIT,
and inspiring about it. So please do check
out our website. We have a lot of
tools on there to help you sort of
see what courses we have. We have something
that we've done here at the Sloan School
in Executive Education that I don't think anybody
even has ever sort of
emulated yet, that we also have
completely unedited,
you know, sort of verbatim,
sort of comments and reviews and ratings from
people like yourselves who have been through these
courses and what their experiences was
and were with the courses. And
I think a lot of people find that
very helpful because, you know, you can not
only see what we say about them,
but you can get sort of input and
advice as it were from others that have
been through,
the the the courses
as well. We have a lot of free
material on our website as well that can
give you a sense,
because you might, like I used to be,
be a little skeptical.
But
we have,
you know, free a lot of free sort
of pre webinars that we've sort of recorded
and
kept on the website, so there's no flood
of content that gives you a sense of
the kind of ideas
that you can learn in these programs.
And there is a big difference, I should
say. You can learn a lot
by watching a video or watching a presentation,
But where
these learning experiences really come into their own
is exactly that because they're experiences, because you
don't only get to hear
the content
from a faculty member or from an industry
sort of practitioner
as you're going through the program, you really
get to roll your sleeves up and work
with it, and work with your peers in
the class, whatever the format is. And hopefully,
we give a really good sense on the
website of what that experience is and, you
know, definitely start there.
If, you know, if if you've got
questions and frankly, you know, any any physicist,
who's interested has a special place in my
heart,
my contact details are
are right there on the website as well.
And I, you know, we've got a team
of people, myself included, who would just be
thrilled to talk to anyone who would like
to learn more about these programs.
Well, that was really
fascinating and certainly a lot of things to
consider for someone who may be potentially interested
in doing one of these courses. Well, that
was great.
Thanks for joining us, Peter, to describe both
MIT Sloan
School of Management. Thanks so much. Great pleasure.
Thank you very much.
I'm afraid that's all the time we have
for this week's podcast, which is sponsored by
the MIT
Sloan School of Management.
Thanks to Peter Hurst and Michael Banks for
a fascinating discussion.
And also thanks to our producer,
Fred Iles.
We'll be back again next week. See you
then.
Businesses in every industry are navigating the choppy
waters of exponential change.
Continuous learning and upskilling
are more essential
than ever.
From artificial intelligence to analytics
to the business opportunities of outer space,
short courses at MIT Sloan
Executive Education
are constantly evolving
to present cutting edge insights
on critical topics
at the intersection
of management and technology.
Whether you're seeking sustainable
improvement efforts
for knowledge work, or want to use systems
thinking
to diagnose issues in the laboratory,
MIT Sloan
Executive Education
provides hands on learning and frameworks
that can be applied
immediately
at work.
Experience the MIT Edge with short courses,
flexible certificates,
and custom programs for your organization.
Learn more at executive.
Mit.edu.