Waverly Deutsch
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
That's a great question, and you're 100% right. I'm seeing that in the market right now. Right now in this country, we're going through a very strange time when the markets are at an all-time high. The public markets are at an all-time high, and yet the tech companies are announcing layoffs constantly and everything. Valuations for privately held tech companies have fallen off tremendously.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
It's a very strange economy and you're 100% right that economic situations make a huge difference in the landscape for entrepreneurs of all kinds. And I think I can't answer this question without acknowledging the incredible privilege that I've had in my life. People hear about the struggles I've gone through and the hard work I've put in, and I honor that. But I was born white,
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
to a middle class household where I got excellent education and excellent opportunities. And I've been very fortunate to have the kind of career, 22 years at a university where I've been able to accumulate a retirement nest egg. I am still able to get health insurance through the university. albeit I have to pay for it. I am incredibly fortunate and my privilege has been part of my journey.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
And I think it's really important to acknowledge that a lot of entrepreneurs come from very different places and they don't have that. And so when I look at
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
folks of my generation who do not have nest eggs for the future who are being subject to layoffs why because when you're when you are senior in your career you're more expensive so if i lay off someone who is making two hundred thousand dollars as a director in marketing i could take that two hundred thousand dollars and hire three young people out of college um
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
Age is a factor in these decisions. Seniority is a factor in these decisions. And now you have these incredibly talented, experienced people in their 50s, in their 60s who want to keep working, who have a lot to add, but who are also now pretty expensive people for a full-time job. And they're saying, what do I do? What do I do with all of this experience? What do I do with all of this energy?
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
I don't want to take a job. that is a $75,000 a year job because I'm forced to it. I want to do something different and people have different levels of choice at different times. So one of the things that I'm noticing in that community and one of the things that I'm talking with that community about is you have been exited from these companies
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
because they need to reduce costs, because you're expensive, and yet they still see the value of your wisdom and experience. Many of these people are being hired by companies like the companies they came from as consultants. There is generational knowledge capture that is lost. when people are laid off without a lot to transition plans. And I think a lot of companies have made that mistake.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
So I see a friend of mine who is a financial expert laid off from her CFO job, now consulting as an interim CFO for various companies in the industry that she came out of. Same thing with sales executives being brought in. What I would say to those people is you may have to do work that you outgrew in your career.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
You may, as a CFO, have to go back to work you did as an accountant or a controller to establish your value to a young company that's growing, that needs financial knowledge. You may not be able to be a strategic CFO. You may have to actually go back to some of the work that got you to where you are.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
If you want to consult in building a go-to-market or a sales organization, you might have to write marketing collateral. You might have to get on sales calls. You might have to do the kind of work you did when you were coming up to establish your value as someone that now charges consulting rates instead of full-time salary rates. If you're able to do that, there's a lot of room out there
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
to find consulting work, to find engagements that could lead you to your next job. But your dream of, I'm going to go from my $200,000 job to a bigger, better $250,000 job when you're in your 60s in this market, that's a difficult one. You may have to let go of that.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
Absolutely. You mentioned reskilling and upskilling. I can't tell you how many people I know who are signing up on Coursera for a prompt engineering class to learn how to better leverage generative AI. People are going to need to use the contemporary tools to deliver the value that they bring as experienced professionals.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
definitely engage with the newer technologies because you can't walk into a growth company populated by a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings and not understand the impact of generative AI or not understand the impact of social media marketing or not know what TikTok is. You have to be able to communicate
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
in the language of today's companies if you want to build a new career after your corporate career.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
I just want to say I love how this conversation ranged from career and heart and head into AI, continuing with the heart and head metaphor, because AI is all head, so you've got to bring the heart, to diversity issues, which are very much heart and head. Diversity is not only the right thing to do, but there's a lot of evidence out there that it creates better business results.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
that focusing on diversity actually improves your business results. So I think I love the wide-ranging conversational topics that you brought up, Mintz. Today, it was a really excellent conversation. Oh, I almost forgot.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
So I'm working with a great agency on the book, and I was creating the LLC as a place to put revenues from the book, consulting revenues, things like that. And I was working on what to name it. And I, of course, being very head oriented, was thinking of things like. sepentia, which is Latin for wisdom. And the agency was like, no, nobody knows what that means. They both know what you're doing.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
It makes no sense. And I'm like, okay, so I want to think about wisdom because I had, I am in the latter portions of my life and I have gained a lot of wisdom over my years. And I think that's one of the things I bring in. And they said, you know what? You talk about tough love because what you're bringing is also the love that And that's where the combination Wiseheart came in.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
And you commented earlier that I spell it with a Y. The reason for that is quite simple. I could get the URL. I could be wiseheart.com. If you spell it with an I, you can't get the URL. I wanted the URL.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
It's been my sincere pleasure.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
Awesome. I think that... The best pitches talk a little bit about momentum and traction and a little bit about the reason for the existence of the business. As a wise heart advisor, I am an operating partner with OCA Ventures, a venture capitalist in Chicago. I'm an advisor to Pace Healthcare Ventures, a venture capitalist in Chicago.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
I'm working with anywhere from half a dozen to a dozen entrepreneurs actively in the everything from building their business strategies and processes to raising money. That's what I'm doing with Wiseheart. Wiseheart was started not because I wanted to build a scalable company and sell it for $100 million. Wiseheart was started because I was retiring.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
And what that means to me, what retirement means to me is that you no longer have to work in order to cover your basic necessities, to keep your benefits, to have a steady paycheck, but the work you do because you want to do it. And some of that work might be remunerated, paid for, and some of that work might be volunteer, and some of it might be purely recreational.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
And your job in retirement is to figure out the balance that you're looking for across those three dimensions. So that's my definition of retirement. I knew I was going to continue to support entrepreneurs. I knew I was going to continue to work with venture capitalists. I'm passionate about that work. I love it. Highly personally rewarding.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
And though I feel like I may be working more hours than I worked as a professor at Booth, particularly when I was focused on the EMBA program where the work came in spurts, right? You know, as you know, their classes are very intensive for short periods of time. and I'm making a tiny fraction of what I was making as a fully employed professor, I'm having more fun than I've ever had.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
So Wiseheart was a place to put all of that work, an LLC for tax purposes where I could get paid. It was never intended to be a business that makes me millions of dollars. Why Wiseheart? Because I love working with entrepreneurs. I love working with innovators. I love working with investors. Who is my target customer?
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
My target customer is entrepreneurs who have a really great business who are struggling to bring it to market. That means that I might have a session with you and turn you down as a client because I don't think that either the business or you or the market is compelling. And as an independent consultant, I have the ability to do that, to say no to customers. And I have done that.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
I said, this is not a business that I think I can add value to because I don't believe in it. Wiseheart is for early stage companies. and investors who invest in early stage companies. Not interested in taking on corporate innovation clients, not interested in helping a very large growth company get their series D. That is not my skillset. That is not my passion.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
But my passion is to help entrepreneurs who have really great business concepts and really great business capabilities bring their products and services to market in the best way possible. I also want Wiseheart to be more accessible to entrepreneurs for whom the rest of the ecosystem is less accessible. So let's talk for a minute about women entrepreneurs.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
There's a big statistic that everybody likes to use that women entrepreneurs get 2% of VC dollars. And that's a little bit misleading because the truth of the matter is that Women-only teams of entrepreneurs get 2% of venture capital dollars. Mixed-gendered teams get another anywhere from, depending on the year, 13% to 18% of venture capital dollars.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
But that still means that 80% to 85% of venture capital dollars are going to all-male teams. All male founding teams. So there's a lot of room there for improving the way the venture capital world sees opportunity with female entrepreneurs and funds opportunity with female entrepreneurs. I would like to spend more of my time with female entrepreneurs, and I do.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
At Booth, I spent more of my time with male entrepreneurs simply because the population of Booth is more male than it is female. Now I can choose. I can spend more of my time with female entrepreneurs than male entrepreneurs. By the way, guys, if you're listening, I have lots of male clients. I do not turn down male clients, but I can make myself available to women, men.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
Minorities, minority entrepreneurs, people of color, people from rural areas, people who come from less affluent backgrounds. These are all people who struggle more in the process of building relationships. Businesses that require outside funding. I would like Wiseheart to serve more of those kinds of entrepreneurs.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
So I am talking with venture funds that focus on women entrepreneurs, that focus on people of color. I am working with... one of the biggest entrepreneurship, not-for-profit organizations supporting LGBTQ plus entrepreneurs. I want, in Wiseheart, to be able to dedicate my time to the people who don't always have access to someone like me.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
If I teach again, it will likely be at a community college where those people are unlikely to ever experience a professor like me. I want Wiseheart to be part of Renumerative and part giving back. And that's the goal of Wiseheart. And by the way, my tagline is tough love for entrepreneurs. So I'm not pulling my punches here.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
I'm giving the same kind of coaching to the entrepreneurs that I work with as an independent that I always did to you and your colleagues at Boots.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
Yes. In fact, I just accepted a speaking engagement to talk a little bit about funding. LGBTQ entrepreneurs in today's world with the Association for Enterprise Opportunity. They're doing an event for Pride Month. I am hoping to work with StartOut to refresh the report that we did in 2016 on the state of LGBTQ entrepreneurship in the US because I think that data is now almost 10 years old.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
And one of the biggest challenges in thinking about the availability of resources to LGBTQ entrepreneurs is that nobody collects the data. That's something where you have to self-identify. You don't find it in the census.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
You can't use AI to screen for names that indicate being a member of the LGBTQ community the way you do for gender research or even BIPOC research where you can triangulate and create a data set that is likely to be made up of people with non-Caucasian heritage. You can't do that. This is a community that has to self-identify.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
So you can't say to venture capitalists, how many LGBTQ entrepreneurs do you have in among your portfolio companies? Because they say, how would we know? Unless that entrepreneur has had a direct conversation with them, unless they have self-identified with their investor. It's very difficult to get data.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
There's a wonderful group out of Chicago called Blend that is working on diversity in the venture capital community in Chicago. And when they were doing their research, I said, why aren't you asking about LGBTQ entrepreneurs? They said, isn't that intrusive? So we think it's not intrusive to ask about gender.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
We think it's not intrusive to ask someone about their marital status or if they have kids, but we think it's intrusive to ask if they identify as LGBTQ. Why? Because there's still a risk in identifying that way. So I said, rather than asking, are you an LGBTQ plus founder? You can ask, Do you choose to publicly identify as an LGBTQ plus founder, right?
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
You can ask your venture capitalists, how many self-identified LGBTQ capital entrepreneurs have you funded in your portfolio? We have to rely on self-identification to even collect data in that space. that makes it much harder to know what's happening with their access to resources, with their support, with their outcomes.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
It's just a very difficult community to support for that reason, because in the US and in many cultures around the world, it's still a risk to come out as LGBTQ. We've seen a huge rise of anti-LGBTQ backlash in this country. Cargit, which has annually done a beautiful collection of products for Pride, gave in to the protests about recognizing Pride Month and pulled that line of products.
Chief Change Officer
#225 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Three
So there are ramifications in this country to being LGBTQ and in many places around the world. So it's a difficult group of entrepreneurs to support. So you're right. In Pride Month, we should acknowledge that's an area of my personal passion and interest. And I hope that WiseHeart can make a tiny difference with some of the individuals in that community.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
grocery store shelves and maybe there is bigger distribution and maybe with a few hundred thousand dollars she can expand the number of SKUs or number of products she's offering so she pitches that at the second round and she gets selected to go into the finals and by the finals she's really thinking about a seed round of six hundred thousand dollars guess what Temple Mills is a
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Billion-dollar valuation company. It is in every grocery store you can imagine in the United States. They've gone from baking mixes to snacks, cookies, crackers, all gluten-free. Caitlin is still the CEO of that company. It is remarkable what she's accomplished. And that was really a... Heart, let's work on the fear of the challenge of big. Let's work on what we really want to do with this.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
And head, what's possible? What's your model? How would you do it? And by opening up just the completely low-risk experiment of just pitch it in the NVC as a big business, it enabled her to bring her heart and head together around a very different business than the one she had imagined coming into the process.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Great question. I think that Having had 22 years of experience with the incredibly diverse populations of the best and brightest high school kids that I worked with in a summer program, the kids that choose the University of Chicago. undergrad, folks who come for MBAs or executive MBAs. I've been exposed not only to the diversity of age groups and education levels.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Also, I've been exposed to business models from all over the world and new ventures from all over the world because the executive MBA program is taught in Chicago, in London, in Hong Kong, and draws from all over the world. The University of Chicago is a well known for having a very large international cohort of students. So our undergrad, I believe, is close to a third international.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Our graduate programs are very international. This foundation of exposure to people in business models from all walks of life really feeds into what I do now. I think the biggest gap in my experience is the fact that every single person that I've dealt with through the University of Chicago has been incredibly bright, right?
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
We're talking about top tier intelligence, the high school students that were chosen for the program, the people who get accepted into the University of Chicago, the people who get accepted into the Booth School of Business. We're talking about exceptionally bright people. So the basic level of intelligence is very high.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
So coaching entrepreneurs in the real world, outside of this world of exceptional levels of intelligence, has to bring into play a different set of challenges for me personally. One of the things that you have to be able to do as a teacher is explain things in a
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
You have to be able to teach things at different levels and you have to be able to adapt what you're doing for the capabilities of the person that you're doing it for. I am now coaching people with different backgrounds, different education, different levels. And I have worked with, particularly through the Polsky Exchange, small business owners in Hyde Park.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
who have very different backgrounds and very different education. And in my coaching, I would say that's a gap for me. If I were to take on a lot of small business clients in WiseHeart Advisory, I would have to become attuned to the limitations that they face, the reality of their situation. Fortunately, the process of entrepreneurship is the same. You have to identify the opportunity.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
You have to marshal the resources. You have to serve the customer. You have to do it in a way that generates enough economic return that you can sustain the business. So it's a matter of being careful about my business. vocabulary, my expectation that they have a grounding in things like accounting or business strategy or social media.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I have to find out where they are and match them and meet them where they are. I think that the biggest skill that I've developed over my career that works for me in this setting is that I am a very active listener. That I hear what someone is saying. I make sure that I repeat back to them so that I'm understanding what they're presenting to me.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
That's how I will learn the language of different entrepreneurs of the kind that I have not encountered extensively in my career at Booth. I think that's what I will do.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
That's
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Yeah, it's funny that you say that because that's what I do for people, right? So when I'm helping them tell their story, I listen to their story and then I tell it back to them in a way that's more concise, powerful and compelling. And they're like, can you just pitch it for me? I often joke with them that one of my strongest talents is translating English to English.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I don't know any other languages. Unlike you, Vince, I am not multilingual, but I am a really good English to English translator.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I think that's a fantastic question. I am super glad that i got out of teaching at the time when generative ai is emerging on the market i think teaching is going to have to change dramatically the written assignment i remember when i was growing up we memorized the multiplication tables when we get to high school They say, okay, now you don't have to do your long division.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Now you don't have to do it all on pencil and paper. You can finally use a calculator. We needed you to learn how to do it so that your brain would actually understand what the calculator was doing for you. Right? But you can now use a calculator. And then you get into college. particularly nowadays, where you can now build an Excel spreadsheet.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
So what has happened to math and teaching math and the role of memorizing the multiplication tables is what's now happening with English, right? What's happening with language. Not just English, but any language. And that is, I can prompt a chat GPT to write a paper on Moby Dick without even reading the book.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
If I don't read the book and write the paper, my brain is not actually growing into the pathways that... Reading and thinking and doing your own analysis allows it to do. And then every kid's paper about Moby Dick says exactly the same thing. How the world is going to deal with this is completely beyond me, but I'm really glad it's not my problem to solve.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
So let me go to the question that you asked. How do I think it relates to the coaching? Ultimately, building a business is a human to human engagement. You have to acquire customers. You have to take care of those customers. You have to have stakeholders who believe in you, who help you build your business.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
You have to have investors that you report to, and you have to have a deep understanding of your business to succeed in all of those things. So let's imagine that you create a brilliant pitch deck using AI, and it gets you a meeting with an investor. What's that conversation look like? I'm convinced that we're in a world now, particularly around HR where AI is gonna write my resume.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I'm just gonna answer questions about what I've done in my life. And then AI is gonna write my resume and I'm gonna ship it off to a company where an AI is gonna evaluate my resume. And when it rejects my resume, I'm gonna feed my resume through an AI that understands why resumes are accepted or rejected. And I'm gonna submit a different AI written resume that's gonna pass the AI standards
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I'm gonna find myself in an interview with the hiring manager I'm not going to have the slightest idea what my resume says, how it was positioning me, how it was presenting me. What's going to happen? What's the interview going to look like? That's where entrepreneurs are. AI can absolutely help them write a polished business plan that appears to answer all the questions.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
But if they haven't done the research, if they haven't figured out what the analogs tell them, if they haven't interviewed the customers, if they haven't attempted the... exercises, experiments in social media marketing that will help them figure out what their customer acquisition cost is going to be. If they haven't done the work, the meeting with the investor is going to be a disaster.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I'm actually writing a book right now. It's called Picture Pitch, an Entrepreneur's Guide to Winning Coffee Dates with Investors. And I use the dating analogy, the dating metaphor throughout the book to say, You're not creating a pitch deck. You're not creating a 10 minute presentation. You're not creating a story.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Because someone's going to hear your 10-minute pitch deck and write a check for you. You're writing this pitch deck. You're creating this story. You're creating this messaging in order to intrigue somebody to want to know more, to have a conversation with you. You can think of the new venture challenge, 10 minutes to pitch, 15 minutes to answer Q&A, like a half an hour coffee date.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
You've got to get the dinner date. You've got to get invited to that one hour meeting with the partners. And you don't get invested in after the dinner date. There's a courtship. Are you right for me? Am I right for you? Do the economics make sense? Does the market make sense? Does our partnership make sense? A term sheet is just an engagement ring.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
We still haven't decided to consummate the relationship. That's when the contracts are signed and the checks in the bank. And guess what? You are now married to that investor. They now have a say in your business the way your spouse has a say in your life, right? If marriage is till death do us part, an investment is till exit do us part.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
AI is never going to be able to build those kinds of human relationships. AI is never going to substitute for the homework you have to do to tell a good story that begins that conversation, that begins that relationship. It might help you improve the writing of that story. It might help you clean up your deck, but it's never going to build that story for you.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I think the smart people in AI are starting to talk about AI-human partnership. How does our job evolve to use AI to make us better The human brain, we've already talked about this, is firing off billions of neurons. There's no computer that's doing the magnitude of what the human brain is doing.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Quantum computing maybe has the potential to deliver some of that, but for the foreseeable future, generative AI needs to be a human partner, not a human replacement.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
That's a great question. I think that the cohorts and the individuals all face some similarity of challenge and some difference of challenge. So I'll give you an example. The undergraduate population is hugely innovative because they haven't gone out into the work world yet to see the obstacles that are put in the path of creativity. Right. So we all think about innovation in a large corporation.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Have you done your homework? What's the market analysis? Do we have the resources for this? And, oh, by the way, we have to get approval from 17 layers of corporate to even have a conversation about this or create a working group about this. And eventually, the person with the idea is, never mind. There's a lot of process that's layered on top of things in the corporate world that...
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
sets up obstacles to innovation. I think that every corporation is aware of and battles as they want to become more innovative, but also that people become aware of as they progress in the work world. So that being said, the undergraduates don't know what's possible. They don't know what's impossible. They don't have the foundation for a lot of that logic.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
And so the challenge with them is to give them a process and I believe entrepreneurship is a process. It's a process of taking an idea or identifying an opportunity and turning it into an organization, a company, a not-for-profit that brings a specific type of value to a specific community. in a sustainable way, right?
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
So either profitability or fundability in the nonprofit world, it's a process, right? It's a process of evaluating opportunities. It's a process of testing solutions. It's a process. So with undergrads, what you're really doing is you're giving them the process by which they can learn to add the logic, the data, the research to their passions.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
It's almost exactly the opposite with, say, the executive MBAs. The ideas often... Lack innovation and lack creativity are incremental to the way things are being done because they are so aware of the barriers to innovation, the challenges of getting new things through. But then you say, why does the world need a company?
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
a tiny bit incrementally better than the way you've seen things done in the past, right? So it's really hard to break through brand loyalty, comfort without having something that's really innovative, right? How do you overcome the liability of newness? So you're right that a balance
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
that you have to use between managing a person's tendency to go with their heart versus their tendency to go with their head to help them bring those two things together in the set of complimentary qualities that an entrepreneur has to have. which is both the vision and the execution, right?
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
You have to see the potential for the future, but also be able to figure out the tiny step-by-step that's going to allow you to build the foundation of a company that can reach that vision. It is different across different cohorts, different people, whether they're in school or they're entrepreneurs in the world, but certainly at Booth,
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
dealing with a range of students from, I taught high school students through boots for a while, all the way to very senior, seasoned executives, it is your job as a teacher, as a coach, as a mentor, to figure out where the strengths and weaknesses are and bring techniques, tools, and advice that balances the strengths and weaknesses for that particular individual.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Let me start with some examples from the executive level MBA program. Very often, because they've been in the corporate world, they don't want to present anything that isn't absolutely doable, low risk. And so they say, if you give us $5 million to build out this software, we can generate $7 million in five years.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I feel pretty comfortable that if you built out this software, you could get to $7 million in five years. By the way, most companies never get to a million dollars in revenues. That's a pretty interesting company. But it doesn't create a return on investment for a $5 million investment.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
So it's a mismatch of the resources you'll need to get there and the outcome that you're telling the investors you're going to be able to create for them. So that's a very common story with the executive MPAs. We don't want to say that we can be a $50 million company because we don't know if we can be a $50 million company.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
If you, the entrepreneur, don't believe that you can be a $50 million company, if you, the entrepreneur, don't believe that this is a powerful, disruptive, high-value add to your customers in such a way that if you're given this kind of capital, $5 million plus, that you can't bring it to market in a way that in five years gets you to $50 million, what's the investor going to think about the business?
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Yep. Right? Yep. Then you have at the other end of the spectrum... The young entrepreneurs who are so excited about their product and they've showed it to their friends and their friends are so excited about their product. And they're like, if you give me $200,000 to put this product into the market, I will be a billion dollar company in five years. This is going to go viral.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Everybody's going to want it. It's going to just catch fire. And you say, okay, how does that happen? Can you show me an example where for so little money, somebody has been able to get so big, so fast because the product was so exciting and they'll say Groupon got to a billion dollars in a year. And I said, yeah, Groupon had tens of millions of dollars of venture backing.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
They got there that fast by acquiring a lot of companies that took a lot of money. So what makes you think for a very small amount of money, you're going to be able to do it? That's a case where you're bringing the logic into it. In the case of, we are only going to get to $7 million, you've got to bring the emotion into it, the excitement, the thrill, the FOMO, as it's called in Silicon Valley.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
Fear of missing out. With the... A younger entrepreneur, you've got to bring the logic back into it. What's the step-by-step? Has anybody else done it? Is there a path that you can follow, a playbook you can follow? You're definitely bringing different things in. With the full-time and part-time MBAs, it can be a little bit of both.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I'll give you an example that I've used many times, and Caitlin, forgive me if I'm getting this wrong, but I'm going to talk to you about the conversation that I had with the founder of Simple Mills, Caitlin Smith. Thank you. Caitlin came to Booth because she was working on a startup. She was working on making gluten-free baking mixes for people who suffer with celiac and gluten issues.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
And she had created... using nut flour instead of many of the other gluten substitutes. A really fabulous muffin mix. I mean, it was delicious, and I hate gluten-free baked goods, but I really liked her muffins. She came and pitched in the New Venture Challenge class, and she said, here's what I've done. Here's how I did it. I'm in about... 13 health food stores in North Carolina.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
I've got another 14 signed up, so we'll be in 27 healthcare stores and healthy stores in North Carolina area. Thank you very much." And everybody paused and said, What do you want from us? I'm not sure I want anything from you. I'm not sure I want to raise money for this. I'm not sure that I need anything from you. So the judges for the New Venture Challenge are angel investors, venture investors.
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
They're thinking, okay, good luck to you with your nice little lifestyle business, but there's not much we can help you with. So Caitlin and her New Venture Challenge team and I were sitting in a conference room and I was saying to her, Caitlin, I understand that you haven't thought about taking on money and scaling this business and that you're not even sure that's what you would want to do.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
But you'll get the most out of this learning process and you'll get the most out of the resources of the coaches and mentors and judges that we put in front of you. If just for the sake of this exercise, you imagine...
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
possibilities you think big what what could this look like if you did want to take on venture capital money if it was available to you what's the upside what's the biggest you can imagine because to me this shouldn't be just in health food stores or on gluten-free shelves this is a very delicious, healthy breakfast option for anybody who wants higher protein, higher fiber, good for you muffins.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
So to me, this should be on every grocery store shelf, what's the biggest independent baking goods company you can think of in the 20th century? And she immediately said, Betty Crocker. And I said to her, why shouldn't Simple Mills be the Betty Crocker of the 21st century? What if just for the sake of the new venture challenge, you modeled that out? What would that look like?
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#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
What capital would it require? What distribution channels would you use? And I could see her getting defensive. I could see her getting a little angry. I don't know if that's what I want to do. Why are you making me think about... I could imagine the things that are going on behind her eyes. Her team is literally like chewing their fingernails.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
They've tried to have this conversation with her, I can tell, and they're really nervous about her reaction. She comes back later and she says, you know what, I'm going to try that. Let's maybe think about raising a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Chief Change Officer
#224 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part Two
And for her second pitch in the class for the New Venture Challenge, she starts to talk about distribution at Whole Foods and she starts to have conversations with people at Whole Foods and she starts to think about the fact that gluten-free is coming on other
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Every job I was applying to was 200 to 400 applicants, many of whom had been tenure track faculty who had lost their jobs, right? And so they were applying for the few available jobs. At the same time, I was realizing that while I loved the teaching part and I had taught at Tufts University, where I got my PhD. I had taught as a graduate student. I loved that part of my job.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I did not love the research requirements of the theater history discipline. In the humanities, you have to publish on things that nobody has ever written about before, and you end up getting very esoteric. My dissertation is on the career of a woman named Laura Keane, who was a 19th century theater manager. She was the most successful woman to run a theater on Broadway in the 19th century.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
She had her own troupe. It was in fact her troupe that was playing Our American cousin in Ford's Theater the night Lincoln was shot, she was the person who identified John Wilkes Booth, and no one has ever heard of her. And you get into these very esoteric topics. What does it mean to have been a woman theater manager in the 19th century?
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
And what happened to women theater managers as theater changed in the 19th century? And I started to realize these are not really impactful issues in... our day-to-day lives. I wanted something that was more current, more contemporary. But when I couldn't get a job as a junior faculty member in theater, I said, I am not going to stay in the world of academia.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I am going to return to the world of technology, which is much more pressing, more relevant now, again, beloved logic. I love the theater. I love teaching. But I don't love academia. I don't love a career as a humanities academic. I will go back to technology. Now, this is the early 90s. This is 1991, 1992. So technology's in a boom. It's in the very early stages of the internet bubble.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
In fact, it's a little bit pre-bubble. It's as the internet is becoming part of our daily life, we're really using dial-up AOL or CompuServe. I'm having a conversation one night with a friend, and we're out to dinner with my partner and her husband, my friend's husband. We're having this conversation and she turns to her husband, she said, she'd be perfect for Forrester Research.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
And I said, all right, what's a Forrester Research? I had never been in the business world. I had never thought about careers in business. And turns out he was an analyst for Forrester. They were a tiny little boutique market research company that looked at the impact of technology change on big business. Their tagline was helping companies thrive on technology change.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
So why was this an unbelievably opportunistic moment? I call it luck, karma, fate, the world, just throwing open a door when you need one. If there's one thing a PhD proves that you can do, it's research. That is the fundamental thing that you do, right, as a PhD student. And I had a technology background. I knew how computers worked. I knew how to talk that language.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I could very quickly learn the modern technologies. And I joined Forrester as the first research associate that they had. Hired directly. The woman who preceded me had created the position. She had been an admin on the sales side. She created the position of research associate. I was the first person they hired into that job.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I went on to experience a growth company with the entrepreneur, founder, CEO still in place. We were less than $10 million in revenue. We were 20 people. I was employee number 27. There had been a little bit of modest churn and we went on our rocket ship. We had hired a new VP of sales out of IBM and he
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
revolutionized the approach to go to market and sales and the company took off and we were the first company to tell Fortune 1000 chief technology officers, chief information officers, you have to pay attention to the internet. And that was what put us on the map.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
We were working in the early days that I joined with their transition from big mainframe computing to client server computing and the PC and the role that the PC would play And we were establishing ourselves as a leader in technology market research, but it was really our call around the internet that took Forrester to the public company that it became and is today.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
The founder CEO, still the CEO, personal friend, lifelong relationship. But I got to work very closely with him, see his journey, see what it means to scale a company, see what it means to take a product idea and turn it into reality. And that's where I fell in love with the entrepreneurial process.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I love that question. And I think that it, for me, it changed very much over time. The moment in my life, I was 29 years old when I graduated with my PhD. The moment in my life where I had the opportunity to join Forrester, no analysis was involved. No examination of the job, the market size, the career potential, no analysis.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
It was a gut feeling that this was an entry back into the world of technology that I wanted to get into. And a real sense that I could learn a ton from the people I met in my interview process. I could learn about business. It's not that I hadn't been working. I had only been doing a PhD. I actually taught for Stanley Kaplan test prep for 15 years. Was it 15 years? Oh, my goodness.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
No, I guess it was about 15 years. From about 18 to about 29, so 11 years, teaching people to prepare for the GRE, the GMAT, the SAT exam. I had been working in the office at Stanley Kaplan. So I had been in the world of business education. But this was an entry back into technology. And there was no, is this the right job for me? Let me look at the market size, due diligence on the company.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
This was, I am so lucky to have this opportunity presenting itself to me. Fast forward... I leave Full Rooster in 1999 and I take a much more strategic approach, a much more logical, thoughtful approach to what I want to do next. I see a career coach, get some skills assessments done.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I evaluate some jobs and realize that I don't want any of them as full-time jobs, but I enjoy the people that are coming to me. So rather than take another full-time job after recovering from my stint at Forrester, and I say recovering because we were growing so fast. We were working 50, 60 hour weeks. It was very stressful. We had gone through an IPO.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
We had reached 200 million in sales and 400 people in the company all in the seven and a half years I was there. So I took a little break after I left Forrester.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Instead of joining any one company, I decided I would create a small consulting company and work with all of these companies, an independent consulting company, work with all of them at some level or other, large companies on their e-commerce strategy, internet companies on their go-to-market, technology companies on raising funding from venture capitalists. I did...
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
some consulting to see what kind of work I really liked and to see if there was a company that I wanted to throw in with full time. So I went from, as a 29 year old, leaving one field that I had deep experience in, the academic field, and getting into a new field and literally just taking the leap
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
based on a leap of faith that I had this opportunity to join this company that I really liked these people and knew I could learn a lot. Fast forward 10 years, almost 10 years, and I'm taking a very different approach to what I want to do next.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Wow. I want to tell you a story that I haven't actually told a lot of people about when I learned how to manage the conflict between heart and head. And the time at Forrester with the entrepreneurial CEO, George Colony, was fabulous. And I learned an enormous amount and I grew enormously. But it was also when I had to confront this heart-head challenge. Many of us hate confrontation.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
We hate having to deliver bad news or have a difficult conversation. We hate it. And when I get frustrated, when I have to face confrontation, I get teary. And I was having an incredibly hard conversation with George.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
about my role at Forrester and my future at Forrester and I started to cry and George didn't know what to do and he wanted to end the conversation and I literally said to the man George I can cry and think at the same time
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
we can have this conversation yes i am having tears because my emotions are involved in this incredibly important logical conversation we are human beings we have emotions and we have logic and i can think and cry at the same time and for me that was an extremely liberating moment Because in the past, I had always tried to get through the thinking situation and then go off and burst into tears.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
That had happened to me when I found out at Tufts that I had passed my exams, my PhD exams, and I was going to be awarded my PhD degree. The way that the head of the department presented it to me was hateful. He said, we expected much more of you than this. And if we could give you a pass minus, we would give you a pass minus.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
And had been taking care of a partner who was suffering from chronic fatigue. And I had been working a job at Stanley Kaplan and I had been studying for my exams and I was emotionally exhausted. And I said to him, did I pass? And he said, yes. And I said, thank you. And I ran downstairs into the bathroom and burst into tears.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
To be able to have the confrontation with George and to cry and to have logic and to have a successful outcome was an amazing moment for me in learning that both things can happen at the same time and both can come into play at the same time. And I think a lot of people... Especially women, our emotions tend to be a little bit more at the surface than a lot of men experience.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Although, believe me, I've known a lot of men have sat with me and cried. This gift of being able to say you can have your emotions and we can have this important logic-driven discussion at the same time was a really critical moment for me in my evolution as a professional and as a human being, to tell you the truth.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I think that just to comment on what you said, I think one of the biggest myths that we've created in the world of business is, hey, it's not personal. It's just business. Oh, yes. Businesses are made of people and people are human and they have emotion. And I also think we're learning that a lot of our emotional sense is tapping into some
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
subconscious knowledge that is actually leading us in a better direction than the purely analytical. So no entrepreneur has enough data to make a purely analytical decision. You have to go with your gut. The one time that I accepted a job based on the logic of it
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
The title, the career path, the money, the benefits, the moment in my life where I needed to establish myself in Chicago because I had moved from Boston. But there's this little red flag in my emotions saying... I don't know about these guys. There's this little tickle in my gut that I don't know about these guys. The one time I went with Head, it was a disaster. I lasted six months.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I parted ways with the company. My intuition about the guys was right. Ultimately, the VCs that backed the founder of the company had to remove him as CEO and claw back some of their money and allow the business model to change without him. And the one time that I actually made a career decision with my head rather than my heart, it was a disaster. And I think I learned a lot from that.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I think ultimately... The emotional side of you, the intuitive side of you, you know, what Malcolm Gladwell writes about in Blink, is accessing the fact that our brains are firing off billions of neurons. We can't keep up with it at a conscious level, but our gut can, and our gut is telling us things that are important to listen to.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
That's the thing that drives entrepreneurs is the need, the emotional need to do this business, to see if it will work, to bring this value, to improve the world within. service or an innovation or a technology. I am firmly in the camp of do all the logical analysis and don't do something that is clearly stupid.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
But when ultimately faced with that choice, if your gut is telling you, this is where I got to go. And if this gut is, if your gut is telling you this is a bad idea, listen to it.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I think you're 100% right that
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
our emotions and our heart are influenced by the people around us and in fact there's a lot of evidence that community is one of the primary sources of happiness in life so being able to find a community that supports you and that accepts you is one of the big challenges of people's lives and the way that community views you right being accepted by that community like you said by your peers in
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
graduate school or in the career world or, you know, that's an important part of life and happiness. I would argue that it doesn't just affect the heart, that it affects the head, that the very value systems that we're using to appraise things from a so-called logical standpoint standpoint, salary, title, right? Career potential, use of our talents.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
All of those are based on societal judgment factors that are all driven by society, peer, upbringing, community. So I 100% agree with you on the incredible importance of other people. Humans are a social animal. I might disagree with you on that it hits the heart and not the head. I think it defines a lot of both.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
That being said, for me, one of the things that I think gave me the kind of resilience that I've had in my career and my life is the fact that I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household. And I had to separate from my community, the community that I grew up with, the people that I grew up with.
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#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I had to accept myself as nonconforming with what I had been taught as a kid was right, normal, appropriate, normal. In fact, made into a life or death decision. And by doing that, by having as a very young person, a young teen and a teen, having to give up community, give up, even give up family for a while, it made me more resistant to... heavy influenced by outside community forces.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
It made me more able to listen to myself, my own values, my ethics system, my moral system. and be less judgmental about things like my career.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
To be able to leave a career in which I was experiencing some success and make a huge change where I had to go back to the beginning again, not something that was supported by my graduate school friends, the people who knew me as an academic and as a thought leader in a particular field. And I think that
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Having to lose a community and having to rebuild the community gave me a sense of not a complete inoculation to what other people think about what I'm doing, but much less strength in that particular pressure on me and my life.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Wow, what an interesting question to start with. I think a lot of people gravitate towards one or the other. And what I mean by that is we are taught that we have a right brain and a left brain and our right brain is rational and our left brain is emotional. But people have both sides of their brain and they're using both sides of their brain. So for me, the way this manifested as a child,
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I fell in love with theater. I fell in love with performance. I fell in love with acting. I fell in love with theater. My mother and I would go to the theater together. It was a very special time for us. But at the same time, I was good at math and logic puzzles. And people would say, were you good at computer science? You have to remember, I'm fairly old.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
We didn't have computers when I was growing up. As I was approaching my college years... And really thinking about what I wanted to do with college. I had done so much in high school with theater and so much in high school with many other subjects. Economics, psychology, math. I went to an excellent high school. And I was approaching my college years thinking I still want to do theater.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
But I recognize in myself that I... don't necessarily want to have the kind of career where you have a job and then you don't, and then you have a job and then you don't, that I wanted something that would create stability for me. So I approached college saying, I'm going to do a dual major in theater and business.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
And ultimately what happened was I had a conversation with a guidance counselor in my freshman year of college. He said, don't do an undergraduate business degree. Companies want MBAs and MBA programs want to teach you their methodology.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
do something, do a deep dive in something that's related to business that you can leverage in the business world, but would also be a good foundation for going to business school. So I said, okay, I will take the computer science class for computer science majors instead of the one for business majors, and I will check out computer science. And
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Again, being a child of the 70s and 80s, this is the very early 80s, I had not been exposed to computers before. And I fell in love with the logic of computers and how it was incumbent on a programmer to break something down into its fundamental elements to teach a computer how to do it. That's programming. I ended up with two majors, one in theater and one in computer science.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Computer science was starting to have an impact on theater. I had to learn how to program a lighting board, for example. But they were really very separate disciplines that I was bringing together in my own life and in my own mind.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
You're 100% right that in the early 80s, the late 70s, early 80s, I was one of three or four women in my computer science classes.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Anywhere from 20 to 35. Oh, okay. Yes. You're a hundred percent correct in thinking that it was very male dominated. I think today in college classes, in computer science, in STEM, you'll have a higher percentage of women, but it still won't exceed. It won't reach 50% in a lot of cases, but it was 5% at best when I was studying computer science.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I was very lucky in that the head of the computer science department at the University of Pittsburgh happened to be a woman. So I at least had visual role models because, of course, in computer science, most of my teachers were also men. So I did have a female role model to look to when I was a computer science student. I got along really well with the nerdy guys.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I've always had nerdy guys as friends. I have my nerdy side. I'm a science fiction fantasy fan. I cut school in high school to go see The Empire Strikes Back on its very first day in release with my friend Michael, who we called Zonar. I am a nerd, and I got along really well with my nerdy, computer science classmates, I also got along really well.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I have, I don't want to brag, but I have what I think is a fairly well-developed EQ from my mother. I got along really well in theater and I got along really well with my much more artsy feeling theater friends. They were two totally different worlds. They did not overlap at all.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
The question of gender, I think, is a really important one in the conversation that we're having because you're talking about love and logic. And very often, love gets attributed to the feminine and logic gets attributed to the masculine. And they have always been a blend in my life. And I fundamentally believe that they are a blend in humanity.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
that we artificially separate into, have to be honest, and maybe this is a little too much information for your podcast audience, but I do not comply with gender norms. I never have. I was a tomboy growing up. I am... tall for a woman. I wear my hair very short. I have a deep voice. I frequently get mistaken for a man. I identify 100% as a woman, as female. My pronouns are she, her.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
But I have always felt this blend of the masculine and feminine in my life. And it goes right to this question of love and logic. So as a woman who had tomboy characteristics, that's what they would have been called in that day.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Yes, and I love that you bring in Pride Month because I think one of the amazing things to watch over the last... several generations is how the younger generations have embraced this gender ambiguity, gender fluidity that when you and I were growing up was not really available to us. Nevertheless, let's go back to this conversation of how I did as a female in the computer science department.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I was accepted by my male colleagues and I thrived. I did very well. You asked a follow-up question, what then took you back to theater? Yep. So I loved computer science and I loved programming, but I'm not a solitary person. I'm a social person. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do after college, I was pursuing a couple of different tracks.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
I had the good fortune during college to be awarded twice the Provost Scholarship to teach. And one of the times I taught in the theater department and one of the times I taught in the computer science department. I knew that what I wanted to do was teach. That was truly my calling.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
And if you think about a marriage of love and logic, if you think about a marriage of theater and computer science, being able to structure a subject in a way to present it to people, but then to present it with a little bit of theatricality, a little bit of entertainment, a little bit of humor to make it more interesting, more intriguing, more engaging as a subject for learning.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
This is where these two things came together in me. So as a senior in college, I was applying for graduate degrees. I was applying for fellowships and I was applying for jobs. And I was offered jobs in the computer science department of ExxonMobil, in the leadership training program of what was then MetLife Insurance, in the computer science departments of Digital Equipment Corporation.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
But I won a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities to pursue my PhD so that I could teach. That's what took me back to theater. I really wanted to teach. And I thought that the way to be able to teach was to do a PhD. And I ended up doing a PhD in theater history.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
Yeah, my career is nothing but an example for twists and turns. It's an excellent question. How do I end up at Forrest? Graduating with my PhD, we were at the height of the late 80s, early 90s recession, and the Baby Boomers kids hadn't reached college age. College enrollments were plummeting. I was a theater historian. That's what my PhD was in, theater history.
Chief Change Officer
#223 Love, Logic, and a Reality Check: Waverly Deutsch on Changing for the Better – Part One
And colleges were cutting theater programs. You had to maintain your acting program. That's what... students came for, but you could shave down classes like theater history and allow the English department to teach Shakespeare. You could use the English department to cover some of the theater curriculum. And so there were no jobs.