Reimagining Opportunity Through Higher Learning

Jon Clifton:
[0:08] I recently sat down with Chancellor J.B. Milliken, a distinguished leader in higher education. Currently leading the University of Texas system, Chancellor Milliken is known for championing student success and innovation and has significantly advanced the institutions he has led. The Wall Street Journal describes him as a visionary leader dedicated to enhancing higher education. Please join me as I welcome Chancellor J.B. Milliken to Leading with Strengths.

Chancellor Milliken, thanks for being here today. Can you just kind of start and talk about your experience with strengths and what did you think the first time you went through it?

James B. Milliken:
[0:44] So I'll probably be the only person you interview that has this story, but in the mid-90s when I was working at the University of Nebraska as Chief of Staff, we had a retreat for our senior leaders and we had a guest speaker named Don Clifton. And he talked about strengths then and that was and then he gave me a copy of Soar With Your Strengths autographed to JB. That was my introduction and he was mesmerizing to start with as you know, but I have been thinking about that event, the time spent with him, and strengths since that time.

Jon Clifton:
[1:26] When you first went through it, you saw that you had, of your top six, they're all thinking themes. What were your thoughts on that?

James B. Milliken:
[1:33] You know, when I first saw that and working through it with my teams, I've done this several times, different universities, different teams of leaders, and it's always an aha moment for them. It's not so much for me, but they all of a sudden now, aha, now I know why your door's closed. Or now I know why you'd rather read a book than have a meeting. Or now I know why you don't care how exactly I accomplished what you told me to, that you're, you're concerned about the idea. And basically, once you give it to me, you check the box. So, you know, it's, I have always known, and part of it is the, you know, the response from my teams. But I've always known that my strengths are, you know, intellectual, nothing to do with intellect, of course, unfortunately, there's probably not a great alignment between those two, between people like me want to spend their time thinking and reading, and how smart you are. But I've always known that I needed people around me who would actually get stuff done. You know, I needed the people who it was important to accomplish things and, you know, I have people on my staff who say, oh my God, do we have to keep thinking about this anymore? Can't we just do it? So anyway, it's great self-awareness, and I hope I have learned enough to complement whatever strengths I bring to the table.

Jon Clifton:
[3:06] So one of your top five is Learner, and it's one of the reasons that you're a voracious reader. But how is it that you manage running one of the largest universities in the world where you want to be consuming information virtually all the time?

James B. Milliken:
[3:24] Yeah. So, you know, when I talk to students about, you know, pursuing your purpose and what you want to do in life, and I tell them I'm an introvert, and they laugh. And I say, no, quite seriously, I mean, the phrase work the room was invented for me, because it's work. I mean, when I go in a room and go around and shake everyone's hand and spend the time with small talk, that's work. What I like to spend my time doing, as you suggest, is reading, is thinking about ways to do things. But I have to surround myself, and fortunately I've been lucky that this has happened, partly, just luck of the draw, but also purposefully finding people around me who have different strengths, who have complementary strengths. So, you know, if you line up my staff at any of the places I've been, if you put at one end, somebody like me, top six, all green, and then took me as one poll, and then looked at everybody else, you know, I'm definitely at one end of the spectrum from here. And, you know, it just works out that we get enough people. You know, we work well together. I've got a team around me right now that's about the best I've ever had. And it's because we're all good at different things.

Jon Clifton:
[4:54] What percent of the day do you think that you spend reading?

James B. Milliken:
[4:59] This reminds me of the question I got once in a public forum and somebody said, how much of your time as a university president do you spend raising money? And I said, 40%. And my wife burst out laughing. And she said, no, it's like 140%. So reading an enormous amount. I mean, I organize my day. And fortunately, you know, when you get to be the chancellor or the president or whatever, you have the great advantage of having the chance to structure things a little bit to reflect. I mean, I read how Jeff Bezos started his day and when he started meetings and when he went in. And so I have the luxury of doing that. So I get up pretty early. I have three newspapers delivered. I read those papers.

Jon Clifton:
[5:52] What's the newspapers?

James B. Milliken:
[5:53] Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Austin statesman, Austin American statesman. I always have the local plus those two others no matter where I am. And I take care, I write, I take care of other things before my first meeting. My office knows that unless there's some kind of emergency, you don't do meetings before X. I don't want to say what it is. My brain will think I don't work hard.

Jon Clifton:
[6:20] But how many hours would you say that you're reading a week?

James B. Milliken:
[6:24] A week?

Jon Clifton:
[6:25] Or a day?

James B. Milliken:
[6:26] I'd have to think about it. I would guess five hours a day.

Jon Clifton:
[6:33] How do you aim it? Learners can take an interest in virtually anything. How do you aim it so that you're learning the things that are most impactful to what it is that you're working on?

James B. Milliken:
[6:44] It would be really good if I could do that. I read the review section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal and I order two or three books every time just reading that section because I say, and last week it was Rebecca West's thousand plus page book from the 30s on the former Yugoslavia. So I can't wait to get into that. And it's, you know, yet to be seen how that'll relate to my daily life. But to me, as you know from my strengths, you know, I love history. It's a big part of how I think about the future, how I think about solving problems. And so I really don't think anything that I read right now is a waste of time.

Jon Clifton:
[7:32] Now, you mentioned Context is one of your top five themes. Can you talk about how you use Context in your leadership?

James B. Milliken:
[7:39] Well, when I read about it, you know, it occurred to me exactly right that you like to understand history and events and people in those events to help you figure out how you want to move forward. So, you know, I know there are some people who are not interested at all in history. They're very futuristic. They're, you know, they may be very successful leaders, contributors. It's anathema to me. I learn something from history all the time.

Jon Clifton:
[8:24] For those of us that have Context, I have it really high myself, sometimes we can get a bit stuck in the past. How do you prevent yourself from doing that?

James B. Milliken:
[8:34] Do I? We should ask around about that. Well, I mean, so the job of being a chancellor or president at a big university, there's incoming all the time. I mean, there's always stuff going on that you have to deal with. And so that's why I carve out time at the beginning of the day before things happen, because I know from experience that during the day, you know, I'm not going to be in complete command of my schedule. So on the natural, I am constantly, that schedule is disrupted. I'm constantly pulled out of it into events that have to be dealt with immediately.

Jon Clifton:
[9:24] Now, on that point where you're dealing with so many topical issues of the day, how do you use your thinking themes to tackle those, rip off a decision quickly?

James B. Milliken:
[9:36] Well, again, decision quickly may not fit those strengths, but obviously you have to do it. But I take great solace, great satisfaction from what I know about the history of a place, the histories of its institutions. I mean, I've probably read 25 books on the history of Texas and the University of Texas now, and probably 10 in the first few months I was there. I have, you know, I might be able to win a trivia contest. Actually, I did in another state win a trivia contest shortly after being there. But there are certain themes that you start to understand about a place and Texans deeply value their history and culture. And so everything I've learned about that from the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, has been part of, I think, preparing me to make decisions now.

Jon Clifton:
[10:46] Where has that been particularly useful? A speech, some sort of policy that you put together where you said, thank goodness that I went as deep as I did on the history. Do you have any examples like that?

James B. Milliken:
[10:58] You know, it's certainly speaking, speaking and writing for a public audience. The fact that, you know, if you're in the jobs that I'm in, in higher education, people tend to move around. And, you know, one way to connect yourself, to ground yourself in a new place is to understand as much as you can about the people that are there and their history, their culture. And I think they appreciate that, and it immediately puts you in a different place than if you're just an outsider who isn't sort of driven to understand the context of the place that you're in.

Jon Clifton:
[11:44] A lot of times people with Input, they have knowledge of kind of facts of everything. Can you talk more about what that was that you won?

James B. Milliken:
[11:52] Well, it's a kind of a silly thing, but it was an online trivia thing in North Carolina. And I had been there for a while, but I'd read a lot of the history that turned out to be relevant to this trivia contest. I got an official book from the Secretary of State of North Carolina assigned to me for this. So I still have it. It's sort of the, I don't know what it is, the handbook of the state. I don't spend a lot of time with it now, but this is an example my wife uses about cluttering my head with worthless trivia, I think.

Jon Clifton:
[12:31] How do you index all that information?

James B. Milliken:
[12:34] Well, that's a good question. I wish I were more facile with information technology and tools so that I could do it, but I'm sort of old-fashioned. I have folders. I read a book review. I say, I gotta read this book, tear it out. It goes in the books to read folder. I read something that is a great op-ed piece on a subject that I care deeply about, student debt, for instance, or access, or where students are getting jobs, any of those things, tear it out, goes in the folder. So I have it and except for people's birthdays, kids' names, and other things, I have a great, pretty good memory. So most of it is memory, but I would be much better if I were better at using computer tools to organize.

Jon Clifton:
[13:33] Input is kind of the Leonardo da Vinci theme, where everything is maybe kept in a notebook, kept in folders, but are those folders indexed in a certain way, or is there a little bit of madness into the collection?

James B. Milliken:
[13:45] Yeah. Again, indexed, my family would find that amusing. You know, one of the things that I think comes with somebody with the strengths or quirks that I have is accumulating things. You know, somebody said that Larry McMurtry was, they told him he was a book collector and, you know, he spent his whole life and he's having this huge bookstore in addition to writing. He said, I'm not a book collector, I'm a book accumulator. And a collector would connote that you had some kind of purpose in mind, but I just want every book. And that's kind of my organizational method, at least in my home library.

Jon Clifton:
[14:28] How many books do you have?

James B. Milliken:
[14:32] Many thousands.

Jon Clifton:
[14:34] Many thousands? How many, when you're reading a book, do you ever have moments where you go, I can't finish this one, or you read the first 10 pages, or what percent of them have ...

James B. Milliken:
[14:46] I do. And you know, that's a horrible feeling for somebody like me that you're going to make a decision to give up on a book. So usually I don't give up. They just go in a pile of ones that are to be continued later. But there are some times when it happens more with nonfiction than fiction, where I think, and I read much more nonfiction, but it happens more with that, where I just say, you know, I may have gotten enough out of this, or it really isn't as compelling as I thought it was going to be, so I'm not going to read the last 150 pages or something. It happens. But it does make me feel a little bit guilty.

Jon Clifton:
[15:20] Intellection is your number one, and people with Intellection are often trying to ask themselves the world's hardest questions, questions that are kind of unanswerable. What are those questions that you're asking yourself right now?

James B. Milliken:
[15:40] Well, you know, I'm laughing because some of these are personal questions, I guess, about one's life and one's purpose. But, you know, the questions that I'm asking myself on a daily basis have to do with the work that I do. And on the sort of broadest scale, something that I discovered early on, I probably didn't start with this idea, was the idea that higher education allows you to have an incredibly massive impact. The reason is that talent is universally distributed and opportunity's not. And the thing that connects talent with opportunity is mostly education and higher education, engine of mobility. So these are tough questions about how you expand access tremendously, how you reduce cost, how you increase success, how you help people launch careers. And they're particularly difficult in a place like Texas where it's growing so rapidly. You know, it's outpacing things like education and healthcare. And there's a lot we need to do to keep up with that. And so that, I mean, those are the questions I'm asking, and it helps me to understand, you know, what they did in California years ago when they when it was booming and they created, you know, a system of universities and higher education there and what happened in other places around the country, including Texas.

Jon Clifton:
[17:24] You know, The Economist had an article, I think it was in last week's issue, and it said the title was The Hardest Job in the World, and it was talking about a university president. Do you agree with that?

James B. Milliken:
[17:37] Well, it seems like, you know, it might be a little bit self-aggrandizing to say that for me to say it's the hardest job in the world. I do think it's a hard job. I think there are a lot of hard jobs. And it's hard, but as I just described, the benefits, the sense of purpose are so enormous that I think it's a job very much worth doing and why people still want to do it. But it's difficult. And today, I have a friend who's been president of the same prestigious university for a couple of decades, told me the last six months was hardest in his career. I do think it is getting tougher in some ways, but it reflects, I think, a lot of what you all tell us about trust in institutions and what's happening in society at large. And we are one of those institutions and it is having an impact and it makes the job more difficult.

Jon Clifton:
[18:51] Now, Strategic is in your top five. Oftentimes, when there's a plan to get from A to B, those with Strategic can come up with about 60 different ways to get there. How does that play out in your leadership?

James B. Milliken:
[19:05] Well, you're right. Sitting around the table with a leadership team, I probably generate kind of more ideas about how to get to someplace. Some of them they knock down immediately because they're the people who actually have to get stuff done. So, I think it's probably, it works for me, I hope, and I like to think it's an advantage that we start broadly, that we start by it with as many inputs as possible, that we try to think creatively about how to resolve something, but continually pushing that through discipline and through teammates with a lot of discipline to a conclusion.

Jon Clifton:
[19:52] Thinking strategically, you just mentioned about higher ed's path to regaining the confidence of Americans. What is the best path that higher ed can take in order to do that?

James B. Milliken:
[20:03] Well, I think I stunned people at a conference, I don't know, half a dozen years ago when people were talking about, we need to tell our story better, that we do so much good, we need to tell our story better. And I don't disagree, probably better ways to tell a story. But I said, it's not that we need to tell our story better. We need to do our job better. We need to do a better job of meeting people's expectations. And we clearly are not doing everything we can to do that. We're seen as hidebound. We are not adapting with new technology as quickly as possible. We're not reaching out in ways that we can to students where they are. There are a whole lot of things that we could do until, I don't know, the last decade or so, we didn't spend a lot of time thinking about that next step, which is after you graduate, then your career.

We sort of stopped at access and affordability and then success. Now we've moved on to include launching great careers and what we need to do. And frankly, it's now we have to do this throughout your life. It's one of the reasons that at the University of Texas system, we're now the leader with Google and Coursera on offering micro-credentials, on finding skills-based credentials to help even liberal arts majors like me get a job when they get out, get that first job. I think a liberal arts background is a tremendous background for life. And I'd like to think it prepared me very well. But we know from a lot of research right now that the combination of a degree plus a bolted on credential in some area, whether it's project management or coding or cybersecurity or something, makes a student more marketable when they're getting out of school. So these are the kinds of things I think that we need. And there are some people who think I'm undercutting our business model in higher education, but not everybody needs or is going to get a four-year degree. And even if they do, I think the kinds of things that we're doing by looking at skills-based learning are really important for a whole lot of reasons.

Jon Clifton:
[22:14] You've been the leader now of three very prominent universities. Did how you use your strengths change in each of those institutions?

James B. Milliken:
[22:21] You know, I think probably it has less to do with the institution itself, its character, anything else about it, than it does my aging, my experience in the role. And I'm probably more comfortable today. I'm probably not Jeff Bezos, but I'm probably more comfortable today in saying, here's how I'm gonna organize my day, because it allows me to use what I'm good at to the maximum degree and to cut out what is painful for me and I'm not good at and other people do so much better than I do. There's no hierarchy of value here. I think I have enormous respect for the people who are great at things that I'm not. And so the best way that I can help get the most out of our organization is by having each of us do what we're best at. And for me it's best not to be in multi-hour meetings with people, to spend all my time in groups, you know that there are people who thrive on that but I don't.

Jon Clifton:
[23:39] A lot of times organizations that thrive do so because they increase their learning velocity oftentimes through experimentation. We're trying to do that. Is there anything that you've experienced, learned where you are able to increase your learning velocity or where recording various things that you learn and sharing that with the entire organization. Do you have any mechanisms or anything like that?

James B. Milliken:
[24:01] For me personally, I'm not sure my velocity is increasing. I'd have to check that out. Well, I do, I'll take the second part of this because it's easier. I do try to share things that I think are of value. So they're inputs that other people might not come across or in their daily work. So I've created this, first of all, I have a small group of senior team members, and then I've created a group of about 45 people, sort of the next concentric circle out of leadership, and try to bring to them and make sure they're a part of the a whole leadership organization, things that they might not get on a daily basis.

A great talent from Gallup, Stephanie Marken, came and spent time with that group. That was terrific. I bring the state demographer in occasionally. I love listening to everything he has to say about the history and the future of every demographic element of Texas. So I bring him in to share with that group. I've started interviewing each of my 14 presidents of UT institutions for all of my employees at the system office because what they do every day is serve the 256,000 students, the millions of patients through that organization, but they're in a single building in Austin. And how do I help them to be connected with the outcomes that they are partly responsible for? So any way I can do that helps, I think, build this really compelling case and sense of purpose for the employees at every level in my organization. So when I have the president of MD Anderson come in and talk about the work they are doing with cancer patients and research every day, I have to think that the employees in my building who are a few hours away from MD Anderson get a renewed sense of how important the work that we're all doing within the university system is.

Jon Clifton:
[26:24] Now, when you and your team went through strengths together, what was that experience like and what was kind of the biggest lesson that you had in that process?

James B. Milliken:
[26:34] Well, as I mentioned, I've done this several times with teams, but it's probably always somewhat similar. I mean, I kind of know what the punchline is on my own. And I must say people kind of don't believe it until they see it, because they're all sort of better rounded than I am. But one of the things that I think is always kind of reassuring about it, and you know, probably by total accident, but makes it seem like I'm a better manager than I am, is the complementarity of strengths of the key folks in my leadership team. We complement each other. And that becomes quite clear. And when you move to different parts of the room with the bigger group of 40-some and see who's where they are, you realize, you know, it's the strength of all of these people that are making this organization successful. And that's, I mean, bringing that next concentric circle in to do our strengths work with, I think has been really a positive thing for the organization. Now it has spread. We have our own coaches. We have our own, you know, we're trying to have everybody in the organization do it. And one more important step, I had my family do it with me.

Jon Clifton:
[28:00] And?

James B. Milliken:
[28:02] Well, you know, my daughter looks at it and says, well, we all knew this, dad doesn't really like people. So, no, it was great. And, you know, with your kids, your spouse, there aren't a lot of surprises. And so I think they saw, to some of them, it was their first experience. To others, they'd had it in their workplace.

Jon Clifton:
[28:26] Were there similarities, differences? What did that look like? How similar were you to your kids?

James B. Milliken:
[28:32] I think I'm the outlier. Yeah. But they could, you know, you could tell I have a son who is, you know, uber competitive. And so that came through in the strengths and very forward looking, very, very competitively driven.

Jon Clifton:
[28:49] Are there any notes for parents with kids that have Competition in their top five?

James B. Milliken:
[28:54] Maybe do it early on. Start to understand it.

Jon Clifton:
[28:57] Interesting.

James B. Milliken:
[28:58] I mean, I do think back about that if there are way, and you think about very different ways of having children educated and becoming familiar with the world. You know, if we had better, a better sense of how they learned and how they thought early on, I think it's very helpful. As I started thinking about this and how I was thinking about Bezos, thinking about myself and how I get to organize my day, the thing that kept coming through to me was Warren Buffett and how he organizes his day. There's 14 people in his organization. All he does all day is read financial statements and maybe talk on the phone occasionally. He was asked at a meeting, you know, what do you think about meetings in your office? And he said, we tried one once, we didn't like it. I mean, you know, he's my hero in that regard. And so I don't know if he's done his strengths, but my guess is they're pretty much all green.

Jon Clifton:
[30:07] Well, he has not. And I would do anything if we could study what his top five are.

James B. Milliken:
[30:17] I think they're close to mine. Not because I'm Warren Buffett, but just think about how, you know, what he's talked about in terms of how he organized. I mean, he said that his kids thought he was, when they were growing up, they thought he was a book with legs. Or maybe that was Charlie Munger who said he was a book with legs. I can't remember which one. But they're similar in that respect. But his kids said all he did was read all day, all the time. So, got to be.

Jon Clifton:
[30:53] 80% of the day, apparently. Yeah. He said he spent 80% of his ... That's why I was wondering where you stood on that.

James B. Milliken:
[31:00] Well, if I could, I probably would.

Jon Clifton:
[31:05] How do you stay focused for that long?

James B. Milliken:
[31:07] But I can't.

Jon Clifton:
[31:08] You can't stay ... No, I mean, obviously with the job, but how do you stay focused for, if you could read for 80% of the day, how could you stay focused that long? Or would it be easy?

James B. Milliken:
[31:20] What's the problem?

Jon Clifton:
[31:22] Because I don't burn with Learner. Maybe I have clinically diagnosed ...

James B. Milliken:
[31:28] My wife understands this, and I told somebody else this once they thought I was out of my mind. She understands that what I want to do when I retire is do nothing but read. I have libraries in different places, and I seriously would, that's what I will do. There's a famous story, although I'm not sure how famous, but it's a story. This guy was given a year to live, and he was not a young man. And so he said, well, there's so little time I have to spend every minute reading. And so what he did for the time he had left was read. And if you have a different kind of an outlook, you think, well, to what end? I mean, what could you be preparing for? Why? You read because you need to know information. But I think I completely understand it.

Jon Clifton:
[32:34] J.B., thank you so much for sharing your story about strengths. And also thanks for everything that you do for the University of Texas and for the country.

James B. Milliken:
[32:42] Thank you.

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