Lessons in Change Leadership from Ren Parikh
Written By: Christian Talbot, President & CEO, MSA
Some leaders impress you with their intelligence. They seem to have mastered every angle of their work.
Other leaders impress you with their emotional intelligence. They make sure people feel seen and known and cared for.
And then there is a leader like Ren Parikh, the founder of Ideal Institute of Technology (“Ideal”). He’s more like a force of nature.
After my colleague Amber Berry met him, she told me, “You need to hear his story.”
I was skeptical, but I shouldn’t have been. Ren combines intelligence and charisma with a total and complete commitment to his school’s mission. Just as he was transformed through education, so too is he transforming the lives of his students—and now the wider community.
I hope you’ll take the time to listen to his interview about change leadership. In the meantime, here are three of my big takeaways from Ren:
1 | Change leaders deeply understand the problem.
Ren came to America with a few dollars to his name and no job prospects. For years he lived in poverty and worked two jobs, often totaling more than 100 hours a week. When it came to the problem of breaking the cycle of poverty, Ren had come to understand the problem deeply—because he had lived it. The problem wasn’t just about education—plenty of expensive schooling led to underemployment. The problem also wasn’t just about working hard—you could only work so many hours in a day. To break the cycle of poverty, education and employment were necessary, but insufficient, ingredients.
What was the missing ingredient? As Ren told me, “The only way to attack poverty and social barriers is through education, employment, and entrepreneurship.”
But not just the typical approach to entrepreneurship…
2 | Change leaders demonstrate the courage to think—and act—differently.
Unlike schools that teach entrepreneurship as an academic discipline in the hopes of preparing students to become entrepreneurs, Ren has designed his school to do the opposite: Ideal students create businesses from scratch and act as entrepreneurs as a way of learning entrepreneurship. At Ideal, you don’t sign up for Entrepreneurship 101, buy your textbook, and sit in a classroom while a professor lectures. You literally start a business because Ren’s point of view—borne from his lived experience—is that entrepreneurship is a practice and a mindset.
Ren has also led change at Ideal by thinking differently about another sacred idea: instead of doing your education as a precursor to earning money, Ideal pays students to attend school, which eliminates financial risk for students. As Ren told me, “Coming to Ideal is not you coming to ‘school’, it’s you coming to a job.”
Another way that Ren thinks differently? Most people think that colleges and career and technical schools live in two separate categories, and “never the twain shall meet.” But Ren saw that Ideal could add immediate value to college undergraduates through work-based learning. Conversely, Ren saw that his students could and should earn college credit for their work-based learning. So he partnered with Centenary University. Ideal “students are going to be able to earn college credit and they have an ability to pursue a full degree whenever they are ready,” Ren said. Likewise, Centenary students can engage in the same work-based learning experiences that Ideal students enjoy, and earn industry certifications along the way.
3 | Change leaders “explore and exploit.”
When something outside of your control is creating a disruptive environment, what do you do? Like all great change leaders, Ren employs an “explore and exploit” strategy. Ideal’s adoption of artificial intelligence is a perfect illustration. While it’s too early to tell whether AI can become a central part of their offering, they are exploring—that is, experimenting with—offerings. For example, Ideal students have created AI chatbots that can answer questions about a Veterans Affairs document that is over a million web pages long! They’ve also created a chatbot about the Bible for a church. When something works, they exploit it by replicating and scaling it. And when something doesn’t work, they sunset it.
Whether we like it or not, every school leader is a change leader. What are your go-to insights on change leadership?
