Before he ever studied innovation and business – prior to the teaching and mentorship that’s defined his career, and long before organizations from General Motors to NASA started asking for his services – Mike Lenox was an aspiring engineer.
He was 18 and a first-year student at the University of Virginia’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, just across Grounds from his future home in the Darden School of Business, where he now serves as University Professor and Tayloe Murphy Professor of Business.
“I chose engineering because I was good at math, and so people suggested I should do engineering,” he recalled recently of those early days on Grounds.
But it wasn’t a mismatch. The insights the field would require – the analytical frameworks it taught him, and the approach to problem-solving that engineering required – set the stage for a deep and varied career in business and higher education, where he has focused on innovation and disruption. And that might not have happened if he wasn’t an engineer first.
“I got attracted to systems engineering because it was the most big picture of all the engineering disciplines,” said Lenox, who has two degrees from UVA’s Engineering School. “As our faculty would say, civil engineers knew how to build bridges, systems engineers knew where to build them.”
After leaving UVA’s Engineering School with his master’s degree, Lenox went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a Ph.D. in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division through their Technology Management and Policy Program. Since then, he’s spent much of his career using engineering principles in the study and practice of business, serving as an important voice in his field and as a much-sought consultant by some of the country’s largest and most complex entities.
Recently, Lenox sat down for a few questions about his career, his views on how engineering training can pay off in the corporate and business worlds, and on his advice for students today who are interested in engineering but also want an entrepreneurial career in the private sector.
Q: When did you first think that you might have a career in business?
A: As a young man, I stayed a fifth year at UVA and received my master’s while my now-wife was finishing up with school. I did my thesis on extreme-but-rare events, such as a disaster at a chemical plant, that are unlikely to happen but can have big impact if they do.
What intrigued me about the work was that the risk factors were as much about management and economics as they were about technical issues within a chemical plant. And that really got me interested in thinking about the social systems side of it all.
I took a job in consulting, then decided to apply for a doctorate in management and policy at MIT. They wanted to take technically oriented students and prepare them to do work in public policy. I was interested in environmental policy, and environmental systems in general. As I pursued my studies, I got very interested in how businesses thought about environmental issues, which was really a fringe topic at the time. There was no such term then as “corporate sustainability.”
Q: Did your engineering training prepare you for incorporating economics in your models?
A: I was fortunate in what I studied. I don’t have an economics degree, but a lot of my training was in economics. It’s the most mathematical of the social sciences, and I was well prepared for that from my time at Engineering. I had all the calculus and stats; I could handle the math. But what was interesting was that my systems perspective created a certain amount of skepticism of traditional economic models.
Engineers adopt modeling approaches that you don’t always see in the social sciences. I joke that I’m on the heretical fringes of economics. The questions that most interest me are around technology, innovation, and market disruption, topics that don’t fit well in the equilibrium analyses common in much of economics. For example, during my doctoral studies, I spent a summer at the Santa Fe Institute studying complex systems and computational methods.
Q: Were there any faculty members at UVA who particularly helped you on this path?
Bill Scherer [current chair of the Department of Systems and Information at the Engineering School] was one of my professors, even though he was only 25 at the time. We learned things like complexity modeling, and I got a chance to start using complexity models to understand how markets work. And again, it’s not mainstream; this technique for assessing markets is very much on the heretical fringes. But it’s incredibly important for us to be able to understand innovation and the dynamism of markets and technology. My systems training was just invaluable. It changed my perspective.
For example, I have an appointment at the Miller Center as a senior fellow on a project on democracy and capitalism. We are very interdisciplinary. We have all these scholars asking the really big questions about the future of democracy and capitalism. My systems training makes me think of these things as one integrated system, instead of a bunch of separate closed systems. You can’t separate the economic from the political from the social.
Q: What would you say to an aspiring engineering student who wants to work in the private sector?
A: What I would say is: I’m an engineer at heart. I like to solve problems. And I think when it comes to entrepreneurs, that’s ultimately what they do. There’s been a lot of research about this. Entrepreneurs don’t look at the world and think how to make the most money. My guess is that Bill Gates probably said, “I want to create the world’s greatest software company,” or maybe “I want to make the best software.” And that solution mindset, that problem-fixing mindset, that’s part and parcel of what we do as engineers and what an entrepreneur does as well.
Q: You’re also part of a new pan-University entrepreneurship initiative at UVA that’s building bridges across the University. What are its goals?
A: There have been various great efforts to support entrepreneurship and innovation over the years at UVA, including within the Engineering School. However, I would argue that the whole has not been greater than the sum of our efforts. What we’re trying to do is to build a platform to support and catalyze offerings, including standing up some new efforts that support the entire university.
We’re trying to create those conditions where magic occurs. Especially having networks where people can support one another and building teams that really complement one another in terms of what they bring to the table. For example, we are launching a new student-focused center on the Corner, called the Foundry. It’s going to be a great resource for students of all academic backgrounds.