MASSIVE EARLY INTEREST
“Marshall sat me down one day with a group of other specialized masters programs and said ‘You need to have a minimum of 25 students to open,’” Wertman remembers. “And then they turned to me and said, ‘Well, Adlai, you can have 15. Because we know what you do is important to the school and it’s part of our philosophy. But we don’t really expect people to pay to go to school for this, Adlai, so you can do 15, because it’s important to Marshall.’ And I got really angry at the meeting and one of the other people said, ‘Why don’t you read this as they’re being supportive as opposed to them thinking you’re going to fail.’”
Wertman, who reads every application and interviews every applicant, and his team were inundated with applications. Out of the 51 students they accepted, 48 enrolled that year. And two deferred. The next year they enrolled 49. And the class profile Wertman and his team have put together is exactly what you’d expect. Nonprofits and business were the two highest industries of experience made up by the entering 2015 cohort. The median age is 27 and the majority majored in business, social sciences or humanities. They are also very international, with more than a quarter being from outside the United States.
DIVERSE BACKGROUNDS AND DIVERSE SOCIAL ISSUES BEING SOLVED
Back in the Popovich Hall classroom, El-Haddad settles the students. It’s the course’s finale and teams are presenting their business plans. One-by-one, teams of students walk to the front of the room and present a social challenge first and how a sustainable business model might solve it. There’s an Angolan trash collecting service that converts trash into polyester for clothing manufacturers. There’s a hot water heating system aimed towards conserving water. There’s even an app looking at how to connect the elderly with one another to relieve senior citizen isolation.
Wertman sits in the back, often muttering words of awe at the ingenuity and ideas being presented. He’s also the first to ask the hard questions, although it doesn’t take much emotional intelligence to see the tough queries come from a place of genuine interest in each student and idea.
“These students are leaving my class with a business plan they want to implement,” El-Haddad says, noting each of the five teams had at least one member who planned on starting the venture upon graduation. “It’s not just a project at the end of the course that they put on a shelf. It’s something they actually plan to implement. The point of this course is to enable students to form high performing and high impact social enterprises.”
NOT AN MBA-LITE PROGRAM FOR THE SOCIALLY-MINDED
And this is no MBA-lite. The course floats between lectures, case study discussions and exercises. El-Haddad teaches it like a strategy capstone course in the MBA program. “Social enterprises face a lot of competition,” she explains. “They compete for financial resources like grants and donations. They compete for the best board members, the best staff and best volunteers. And they compete for the best programs to serve their clients. They want the best programs for the poor or the hungry.”
Indeed, the students might love one another, just as Wertman pointe out. But El-Haddad is training them like competitive business people vying for limited resources. “In every industry you have companies that are leading, some that are in the middle and some that are trailing,” she insists. “And it’s often the strategy used at the top by CEOs that change where the organizations are.”
El-Haddad says some of the theories and frameworks she teaches are exactly the same in MBA courses. Others are altered slightly for a social enterprise focus. An example El-Haddad gives is the Five Forces model of strategy created by Harvard Business School superstar Michael Porter. “It talks about customers and suppliers but it doesn’t include the users,” she explains, noting there have been changes and adaptions to the framework but not yet for social enterprises. “Sometimes the people funding the enterprise are different from the users. The poor and the sick are not included in Porter’s Five Forces model.”
And that’s where El-Haddad sees the most room for research and growth in the area. “If you look at Harvard or other business schools, it’s (social enterprise) getting a lot of interest, but there is a need for much more research. Some of the tools can be better adapted to the social sector.”
A FOCUS ON FIRST GENERATION COLLEGE STUDENTS
As the class concludes and students begin to disperse, it’s clear while there are similarities, there really are no exact shared qualities of people Wertman and his team look for. They know they want to use a business education to make some lasting change to a current status quo.
“I’ve had students come to my desk in tears and explain to me that what they want to do is not what their parents want them to do,” Wertman says with sadness and compassion. “Their parents want them to make money and be happy but their paradigm for happiness and money is different.”
They come from immigrant families, suburbs, poverty, wealth and single parents. Wertman has made it a point to admit first generation college students. Currently, 30% are the first in their families to have an undergraduate degree. And now they’re getting a graduate degree from one of the best business schools in the United States. “And we’re going to keep focusing on that,” Wertman insists.
AN UNLIKELY PATH FOR ONE STUDENT
One of those first generation students is Alfonso Trujillo. Trujillo was born and and spent nearly the entire first decade of his life in the projects of the Boyle Heights neighborhood in East Los Angeles. The neighborhood is made up of working-class Mexican Americans. In the 2010 census, only 5% of the roughly 100,000 residents had four-year college degrees. When Trujillo was 10, his family moved 40 miles east to Pomona, California, but the living environment was much the same. Trujillo grew up in poverty around high gang activity.
College was never a discussion in Trujillo’s family. The expectation was for him to graduate high school and get a good paying job. “It was very tough for me growing up,” says Trujillo, 39, noting his parents only spoke Spanish. “When I went to school, English was my second language. It was difficult for me to get help with homework, so I was always struggling when it came to after-school lessons and homework.”
A LIFE-CHANGING FIRST READ
Trujillo spent elementary school with teachers pinning his homework to his back to make sure it made it home. “I used to pretend I was Superman,” Trujillo laughs. He spent middle school getting in trouble and being picked on in English classes as a second language student. During his senior year of high school, he got his girlfriend pregnant. “I obviously was not ready to be a father,” Trujillo admits. “Women mature much faster than men. But we were just kids.”
Trujillo spent much of his young adult life bouncing around from minimum wage job to minimum wage job. And then he read his first book. “I actually read the Bible,” an emotional Trujillo says. “And it was an awakening moment for me. At that point, I started to realize what life meant to me. I changed my life from that moment on.”
Trujillo’s daughter became his best friend. Education became valuable to him. And at 25 years of age, Trujillo enrolled himself in community college. He performed so well he was able to be accepted into USC for undergrad. Unfortunately, the USC schedule was not conducive for a full-time employee. And Trujillo could not give up his job. So he settled for California State Polytechnic University in Pomona. “That was really sad for me,” Trujillo says. “But I said hopefully I can come back to USC for a masters. This was definitely my dream school.”
Trujillo began his career in commercial real estate but lost his job during the crash in 2008. He found the Cesar Chavez Foundation, which at the time was the National Farm Workers Service. And they had an ideal role for him. He applied to be the foundation’s director of property management where he’d manage 32 properties totaling about 4,200 units. Six years into it, Trujillo was ready to expand his business prowess and fulfill his now more than a decade-old dream of attending USC.
So he applied to the MBA and EMBA programs at Marshall and MBA programs at nearby UCLA and Pepperdine. He was accepted to all of them. When trying to decide which program to enroll in, he spoke with an admissions staffer at Marshall. Trujillo told her his goal of converting the Cesar Chavez Foundation into an entrepreneurial mindset. She told him about Adlai Wertman and the MSSE.
“As soon as the word ‘social’ came out of her mouth, I said I’m sorry, but I really want an MBA.” But she insisted. So Trujillo obliged and met with Wertman. “I learned it was a finance first, impact second type of program,” he recalls of the meeting.
THE BUSINESS OF SOCIAL PROBLEM SOLVING
And that’s exactly what Wertman wants his tribe of do-gooders to practice. “I’m saying I need you to take some accounting and finance and then go and take on hunger,” a fired-up Wertman exclaims. “Any heterogeneous group is going to make better decisions than a homogenous group. If you take a bunch of electrical engineers and put them in a room, add one mechanical engineer and you’re going to start coming up with solutions that the electrical engineers aren’t going to think of. And take a bunch of white men and put them in a room and you’re going to come up with less creative decisions than if you put some women and people of color in the room.”
Likewise, Wertman has made it his academic mission to merge programs and schools. He’s been doing everything he can to get involved with other departments at USC and inviting them to his social enterprise lab. “Philosophically speaking you’ve got hunger, and homelessness, and education, and they’ve all been segmented,” Wertman explains. “So who focuses on education problems? People coming out of the education school. Who focuses on poverty? People coming out of the policy school. And it’s all these little things. And my attitude is, let’s just throw a business person on that team, and we’re going to come up with new solutions. That’s all. I don’t want a group of just business people sitting alone doing it.”
So far, Wertman says the few graduates of the program have been doing just that. They’re working for watershed conservation organizations. They’re leading sustainability for clothing companies. They’re creating pharmaceutical and affordable housing startups. And in Trujillo’s case, he’s simply making sure education is a topic of conversation at dinner tables like his when he was growing up.
“I just know education is the antidote for alleviating poverty and crime,” Trujillo says, alluding to his own life as much as anyone else’s as he sits about five miles due west of the Boyle Heights affordable housing he once called home. “It is. It really is.”
