Certain Uncertainty

11The WHY, WHAT, and HOW of Leadership

Paul R. Carlile

My last conversation with Clay Christensen was in his home in late October of 2019. I asked him about his health, and we talked about our families. Then he asked me what was new at work. I told him about the project I was leading to create a $24,000 low‐priced online MBA and spelled out our innovative approach. Each course (module) would be focused on business problems as they exist in the world and not as they do in academic departments. The curriculum would be created and taught by interdisciplinary teams of faculty. And our target audience would be business practitioners supported by technology to enhance both synchronous and asynchronous peer‐to‐peer engagement.

Clay, whose 2008 book, Disrupting Class¹ had thrown out a challenge to traditional education models, turned to me and said: “Finally, an incumbent, a top university like yours, is disrupting itself.”

The three years since that day have been very challenging as COVID hit just a few months later and creating this path‐breaking approach had to be done all virtually and under increasing financial and human capital constraints. But it has been very rewarding as we graduated our first class of over 300 students in the summer of 2022 and we currently have nearly 1800 active learners with over 300 students more who graduated in December 2022.

Given the challenges and the successes, I have learned three leadership lessons. First, we had to articulate a strong vision ...