Mark Brand, best known for his ownership of B.C. businesses like Save-On Meats and Persephone Brewing, is adding “teacher” to his portfolio.
Beginning in the coming weeks, Brand will be teaching business graduate students at the University of Southern California. He’ll be in Los Angeles to meet directly with students fairly often, but much of the course will also be online.
“It’s a tremendous opportunity,” Brand said Monday while taking a break from helping his team prep food at Save On Meats in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
“It shows how forward-thinking USC is.”
Brand’s enthusiasm for his new project is obvious.
“For the last three years I’ve been working on getting a deeper understanding of systems design,” he said. He credited the Amsterdam-based THNK School of Creative Leadership, which has a Vancouver branch, with getting him started.
He took courses there that look “to make CEOs more rounded in their thinking.”
“I got really excited about all the vernacular I never had in terms of being an entrepreneur.”
He gained a new language to help understand his successes and challenges better, he said. He’s big on self-reflection, he said, when you learn about what drives you and what doesn’t and perhaps more.
“It’s often many things you’re already doing, but maybe you realize not very well.”
“When you start to do this, you have to do self-work on things that worked. ‘Why did I do that thing, why did I push so hard on that thing that was next to impossible.’”
The path to USC started with him meeting “some folks” at Stanford University’s d.school, which focuses on “design thinking” — in other words, how do creative, positive connections happen in a community and what makes them effective.
Vancouver social entrepreneur Mark Brand is headed to the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business to teach …read more
Source:: Vancouver Sun
