“Leadership is in the institutional DNA at Yale,” is a comment that I have heard often during the course of my fieldwork.  Yet whenever I asked where I can locate a description of Yale’s approach to teaching leadership and course syllabi, the familiar refrain is “There is no formal written leadership manual nor are there any undergraduate courses on leadership.  It is something that just happens here.”  In examining the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship at Yale, my research will analyze the way leadership is structured, exercised, and experienced.

Recently I located a good description of how Yale cultivates leaders by Jeffrey Brenzel ’75, Master of Timothy Dwight College and former Dean of Yale College Admissions:

In undergraduate admissions, however, we must also keep before us Yale’s longstanding aspiration to cultivate responsible citizens and leaders, graduates who will achieve prominence in the founding or management of enterprises, in public service and public office, in the professions, or in the realms of religion, the arts, and education.  By “leaders” I do not mean individuals who succeed merely in achieving high status or high income.  To develop leaders means to nurture individuals with superb skills for collaboration, an orientation to service, high levels of creative energy, and the aspirations and character required to make substantive contributions to the common good.  Our mandate is to send talented, courageous, and far-sighted people into the global endeavors, organizations, and communities that sorely need them.

Leadership roles shape student’s consciousness in decisive ways.  Confidence is built because student leaders have to learn how to navigate the Yale bureaucracy to obtain funding or to obtain permission to use certain spaces on campus.  Student leaders also have to manage their groups to meet periodic deadlines.  And significantly, succession planning, and its implementation is one the biggest tasks a student leader faces: the Yale News, Yale Entrepreneur and Yale Entrepreneurial Society, for example, rotate their leadership roles annually in order to provide an opportunity for many students to experience a leadership role.  Among other things, a leadership role creates subtle measures of prestige and fosters an intense competition among group members to demonstrate commitment by working hard to fulfill the group’s or organization’s mission and purpose.  The hardest workers are usually rewarded with the role they desire.

I attended a leadership training session at Yale recently; I thought that I was merely attending a class segment about designing appropriate technologies for the developing world.  MENG 491 “Appropriate Technologies for the Developing World” is a collaboration between the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs (“Jackson Institute”). This course is being co-taught by Joe Zinter, Assistant Director of Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design (“CEID”) and Robert (Bo) Hopkins, Lecturer Jackson Institute.  The class exceeded my expectations because leadership training was embedded in the instructional process. Students ideate about the problem through developing the right questions, then design an appropriate solution through “building on the board,” a phrase coined by one of the professors.  This approach involves mapping the concepts by writing notes on post-its then physically placing them on CEID’s large white boards in the class room area.

In this session students in MENG 491 were taught how to formulate questions in what one of the professors calls “target rich spaces” to solve the challenge of delivering vaccines along a cold chain in developing countries.  This problem impacts 1.5 billion people.  The professors designed the big question: How can you deliver vaccines along a cold chain in developing countries?  But their approach is to allow the students to do research and discover the appropriate technology to solve the problem.  A prototype of the technology is the end of term capstone project.

The multi-disciplinary group of students (engineering, architecture business, public health, and econ) were admonished to seek opportunities that resonate with them.  This exhortation is in the spirit of Dean Brenzel’s characterization of leadership development at Yale when he stated that the university nurtures individuals to empower them to “make substantive contributions for the common good.”  Students in MENG 491 are honing their collaboration and team building skills in the context of tackling a real-world challenge of how to deliver vaccines in a manner that reduces spoilage and heightens the probability that persons in need of these vaccines will actually take them.

What if Yale produces leaders that are capable of tackling the 21st century domestic and global challenges through innovation and entrepreneurship?  Will Yale provide leadership training across all academic disciplines in order to scale the number of leaders produced each year?