Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, which is sponsored by the MIT Sloan School of Management. Physicists and others with STEM backgrounds are sought after in industry for their analytical skills. However, traditional training in STEM subjects is often lacking when it comes to nurturing the soft skills that are needed to succeed in managerial and leadership positions. Our guest this week is Peter Hurst, who is senior associate dean, executive education at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He explains how MIT Sloan works with executives to ensure that they efficiently and effectively acquire the skills and knowledge needed to be effective leaders. Peter is coming up in conversation with Physics World's Michael Banks. But first, a word from our sponsor. Businesses in every industry are navigating the choppy waters of exponential change. Continuous learning and upskilling are more essential than ever. From artificial intelligence to analytics to the business opportunities of outer space, short courses at MIT Sloan Executive Education are constantly evolving to present cutting edge insights on critical topics at the intersection of management and technology. Whether you're seeking sustainable improvement efforts for knowledge work, or want to use systems thinking to diagnose issues in the laboratory, MIT Sloan Executive Education provides hands on learning and frameworks that can be applied immediately at work. Experience the MIT Edge with short courses, flexible certificates, and custom programs for your organization. Learn more at executive.mit dot edu. Well, hi, Peter. Thanks for joining us on the Physics World Podcast. Glad to be here. So we all know that scientists are focused on developing new theories or the next experimental breakthrough. But you believe that it's also important that they consider equipping themselves with management training and similar skills to help maximize the output of their research teams. But before we get onto that, perhaps, first of all, you could tell us a little bit about yourself. You have a physics background. Why did you get interested in physics and your career to date? Sure. Great to be here, and happy to talk about this, the subject. I'm very passionate about it. So, you know, as long as I can remember, I've been interested in science and then really physics. And I think it was probably, you know, always that sort of very childlike question of of wanting to understand why. And, you know, pretty early on, I think I translated that into feeling that actually understanding how was really what would lead you to understanding why. And I think physics, I wouldn't say that physics has all the answers, or even any of the answers, but it was always to me the most kind of fundamental way of understanding, you know, how things work in the world, in the universe, and it's always just been fascinating and thrilling for me to sort of discover those kinds of insights. And I had the ability to kind of do the mathematics behind the physics as well. And so I would say I'm lucky that it always came relatively naturally to me to be able to explore physics and to have a successful sort of academic career and be able to go on to A levels, university, and a PhD, and just following that interest and that passion all that time. So what happened then after your, after you kind of, you know, after you did your PhD, for example? Yeah, yeah. You know, I have to be a little bit careful how I explain this, only because I don't want to sort of insult anybody. But truly, you know, when I was young and perhaps a bit brasher, I honestly, when I was a hard scientist, a physicist, probably didn't even think that biology was a real science. Let me hasten to add that that's no longer my belief, but really what happened in my journey was that while I was working as a physicist, my PhD and postdoc work was funded active by the UK Ministry of Defense in large part. And because of that, I started getting asked by some colleagues really in the social sciences, who were interested in sort of science and technology policy as it affected, in that case, some issues around terrorism and international conflict. And they were looking for expertise in the science, and if you like some of the engineering kind of aspects of the science to help them understand what they were looking at. So I started doing some collaborative work with these social scientists, and really found a lot of respect actually for not only the importance and relevance of that work, but actually the rigorous process that goes into it as well. And so that was, in a way, my entree into perhaps realizing that there was something beyond just the lab based and theoretical physics that I was doing that was really important, you know, about how this actually is relevant in the world, and how our skills and expertise scientists, and, you know, in particular my case as a physicist, could have that impact as well. And so by one of those many coincidences that sort of guide us through our lives, well my research funding happened to come to a sort of an impasse at one point. And when I was thinking about or looking around what to do next, I came across an opportunity to go and work in the parliamentary office of science and technology in the UK's parliament, back in the sort of mid to late nineties. The, people might be familiar with with that organization, but essentially it helps parliamentarians sort of understand and analyze what are the really key issues in science and technology. And I was the advisor for this wide range of things, physical sciences, IT, telecoms, defense, kind of everything in that sphere. And so that really was I mean, I think that was working very closely with now not only physicists, but scientists from, you know, a lot of different engineers, a lot of different disciplines, but in the realm of what are the, what pull the policy kind of impacts, and what's the policy support that science needs to, to to to to really, you know, be successful. So that was, also very eye opening. And from there, I, that my journey sort of took another jump, and based on that kind of interesting two different things that I'd been doing, I was approached by the London School of Economics of all places, to help them to set up essentially a consulting operation that used the expertise of LSE faculty, or of course, all social scientists and economists and the like, to apply that for business and industry. And so I helped the LSE set up that kind of operation. So that was in the space between industry, government, and academia, really based on the proposition that all of this work that we do as scientists and as experts in our fields, actually can be tremendously valuable out in the world of practice if we can make that connection. And so that's kind of really how I suppose I completed my journey from being a hard scientist into being in the social sciences. And then a few years later I got to move to the United States, and not long after that was given a chance to join the Sloan School at MIT. And, you know, for someone with a with a background that I have, perhaps you can imagine this is kind of Nirvana, you know, getting to be my total geek's health, but also be very much in the space of how do we really help connect all the incredible expertise that we have in academia, and in this case, in business schools in particular, but throughout MIT as well, you know, to the world of practice and really making a difference in how individuals and organizations, can be, you know, as successful as they possibly can. Right. Yeah. So now now, of course, you you lead the executive program, education program at MIT's Sloan School of Management. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what that role entails? Sure, so my responsibilities within MIT Sloan School, everyone listening to this I'm sure knows a lot about MIT. Maybe not everyone would realize that MIT for decades has had a school of management. And what you might wonder why that would be, well, actually part of the story we tell about that is that we're not just any old school of management here at The Sloan School, we're MIT's school of management. And so we have all of the programs that you would expect a business school or management school to have in terms of MBAs, and a variety of other graduate and undergraduate degree programs. But what we also have done over the last several decades is built up this executive education set of programs. And what that is are essentially short non degree courses that are aimed at working professionals. We say executives, but really it's management, managers, leaders, executives, but also scientists, and professionals, and technologists, and engineers, who really can benefit from building up their skills, as well as in tandem with their experience, around core topics in management and business. And what that looks like, because we're doing it at MIT, of course, is it's everything that you might expect if you think about a business school and what what we would do in the business school around really sort of financial acumen and and and managing people and designing and managing organizations. And I'm sure we can talk later about why I believe that's as well as relevant to people doing what I was doing 30 years ago as a as a working scientist as it is to somebody running a business. But we also do a lot of work helping people with those backgrounds, but also people from traditional business backgrounds to really understand what one needs to understand about what's going on in science and technology and engineering, and what the business implications and applications of all those are, and how to really design organizations and run organizations from startups to huge global corporations, to really be, you know, as effective and competitive as they need to be to not only survive, but really thrive. And that's, I would say, equally weighted between thinking about the organization and and and how organizations can be successful, but also very much thinking about, you know, the individuals, you know, how how you in in your own work, in your own career, can really, by understanding, actually that organizations being systems of people and processes are very much like sort of engineering objects, that we can, you know, that we can apply our our scientific mindset and our scientific processes for doing experiments and understanding, how complicated systems work, and really get back, you know, better outcomes and even outcomes that we we wouldn't have imagined were were were were possible. So we have this, I I would say, dual mission to help individuals, to be more successful in their work and in their careers, and to help new organizations, you know, in many cases businesses, but other kinds of organizations as well, to be successful in a very, you know, dynamic and competitive, and fast moving kind of environment that the world is today. And these courses that you mentioned, are they predominantly online or is it a mixture of kind of online in person? Also, can you say something a little bit about how long like kind of typical length of the courses as well? Sure. So so in executive education at the Sloan School, these days, we have pretty much every available format. You know, in the past, it was all the case if you had to come to campus and you'd spend anywhere from 2 days to 5 weeks on campus immersed in these courses. We still do that, we have thousands of people a year who do come to MIT from all over the world to have that kind of experience. And that is fantastic, again, you can imagine how excited I am about being at MIT, given just all of the science engineering and technology that happens here. And We see many people who just, it's sort of like a live stream to be able to come and spend some time on campus and do that, but many people don't have the option of making that physical trip. So we really started, like so many people, using, in our case Zoom, for doing live online versions of classes during COVID. And first of all, our faculty really became very successful, it's not true of everyone's experience, but in ours, really we created some very engaging and valuable experiences that and we heard from a lot of the participants that are coming through the program is, you know, please don't stop doing that even when campus becomes an option, because frankly, you know, coming to MIT for 2 days or a week or a few weeks is a big imposition, and we're really keen to get this learning whenever we can, as soon as we can, and so that mode has continued. Before COVID, we had also been a pioneer in figuring out how do you do these kinds of really sort of experiential management, development and training courses, in kind of pre recorded asynchronous online formats. So we've really built that up as well. So we have about 100 different course titles, and they're about equally sort of balanced between opportunities to come to campus, opportunities to come to campus virtually, you know, it might be the middle of the night for some people at that time, of course, or to do what we call kind of these self paced programs. And there's a variety of different formats of that, that usually it's several weeks, very much prerecorded material, but a lot of hands on activities that you engage with, not just yourself, but sort of team based learning that you do with sort of folks that tends to be all over the world, all going through these sort of cohorts together. The topics are, you know, as I touched on earlier, everything from, you know, sort of building your sort of knowledge about how the financial operations of an organization or a business might work, all the perhaps sort of mundane but important aspects of running businesses and organizations, up to much more kind of technology and science driven sort of topics like, obviously currently at the moment, a lot of interest in not only kind of what are these AI tools, but how much do I need to know about how they work and what are their applications, and, you know, thinking very much about not only their benefits, but really in a practical way, how can you take things that you learn in these courses and start applying them in your work right away? That's very much a fundamental thing for us. Being part of MIT, again, you know, a science driven organization, it's all about not theoretical learning, but learning by doing as a learning mode, but then also always a focus on, and what's the application? So what, we're all busy people, I'm learning about this, then what can I do, you know, right away? And that contrast, I think, executive education from what a lot of folks that had, like me, a kind of a traditional academic sort of journey, where you're doing a lot of just in case learning, really. You know, you're going through right degree programs, lab PhDs, and all those things. You know, the the the skills that we're acquiring hopefully could be useful one day. In our executive education programs, everything is really designed for, yep, that's that long term value, but also, how are we adding sort of capabilities and skills that you can use in your work literally immediately. I mean, when just thinking about in terms of, you know, you mentioned the individual scientists. I mean, there might be some people kind of listening to this thinking, oh, you know, I don't need management training. Isn't that something, say, I could just learn on the job? I mean, what do you kind of say to that? I think learning on the job, I mean, there's lots of research that shows this, is really one of the most important and effective ways of learning, absolutely. I mean, that's why in fact, the way we design executive education programs is also very much sort of within that philosophy, because people are still working, and we design programs that people can learn from while still doing their work and be applying it to their work. But I think what I hear from people who come through, who I've seen coming through these programs, and it's really been my personal experience as well, is first of all, I would say is a lot of us might be doing jobs and having roles that we might not think of ourselves as, you know, as being managers or as being parts of organizations, but but actually, you know, for many for many scientists and engineers, and I think particularly working people working with physics backgrounds, this is true. We may well be working sort of as a sole sort of lone person sitting in a room wishing on a theoretical physics problem. But oftentimes, we're we're part of large and complex teams of human beings. And, you know, as a as a physicist, I, you know, certainly started my professional life thinking very much that organizations are basically machines. And if you just decide if you just design it right, then, you know, you turn the handle and you get the output. But I think what we all learn in life is that, you know, it doesn't work that way. And one of the reasons it doesn't work that way is that these systems are really complex, and and and having sort of analytical tools that, you know, help us understand these very complex systems and be able to design them better so that they're more likely to produce outcomes. But they're also not just machines. They inevitably involve human beings as well. And even in with all the discussion that we have about artificial intelligence these days, sort of the human factors is still an incredibly important facet of that. And you can certainly hope to learn through experience and repetition what works and what doesn't. But few of us would apply that approach to how we kind of build our expertise and capabilities as scientists. We all leverage all of the work and learning that have gone before us. And I would just advocate for applying that same philosophy to how can we most efficiently and most effectively acquire the skills, knowledge that will help us work with other people, lead teams, which oftentimes are quite large teams and that are international, and that have people with a lot of different motivations and approaches and different kinds of cultural norms and expectations. Now all those things which actually, we know from this kind of like the business school setting is bread and butter to folks who think of themselves as managers primarily in organizations. So much of that is really in my experience also relevant to people, even if they don't see themselves as having a sort of a management or leadership position in a science based organization. Having said that, the reality is there's also a lot of people, and we see them coming through our programs, who actually do have leadership and management positions in science based organizations, you know, whether you're in business or industry or whether you're in academia. You know, what what it takes to be a successful head of department isn't only being, you know, a a a world class physicist. Sure helpful and important to have that. But anyone who's in those roles, I'm sure will tell you that actually, you know, thinking about and understanding how to get the most out of the organization and how to manage and lead in a way that enables the people that you've got responsibility for to be as successful as they can be, and understanding what are their goals as an individual, how their goals fit in with the work of your department, or your lab, or your R and D function if you're in a business setting. There are many more people, it turns out, that, like me, started out as physicists and scientists, but if you actually look at what they're doing in their work, they would still identify as being a physicist or a scientist, but they're spending much of their time managing people and organization and operations. And for anyone for whom that's true, if you weren't aware that there's a lot of help that you can get from learning from these kinds of programs, whether it's at MIT or elsewhere, then I hope by listening to this conversation that you'll get another tool for your kit that will be helpful to you. And I guess that's particularly the case for, you know, the advent of, like, big science facilities. You know, you've got like CERN, you know, ESA, a lot of kind of facilities that have huge, you know, very complex operations, loads of people, for example. And I guess that is a case where, you know, they may, as you say, they may identify as a scientist, but actually, they, you know, a lot of the kind of role entails a lot of management. And I guess those courses that you, you know, could, you have could, you know, aid those quite significantly. Absolutely. And let let me also say that, I would be at the front of the queue of people who would have been quite skeptical about some of what I'm saying right now as to, kind of isn't this management stuff all just sort of a bunch of voodoo? You kind of, you know, it's not rigorous, is it? It's not, you know, it's not how we think about the world. But let me tell you, at least at places like MIT, actually, these management and business topics can be studied in every bit as rigorous a way as any of the kind of physics or science that I've ever been involved in, or done. And I would say I actually, my experience has been that because the Sloan School is at MIT, we have a lot of people who are, you know, who are, who they do identify as and are still scientists and engineers, and I think have that kind of healthy skepticism as well. But to have an open mind, they come to MIT with an open mind because, hey, if this is going on at MIT, there must be something, some validity here. And without, I think without exception, what what I hear from people, even if they came in without skepticism, was I really you know, this opened my eyes. I you know, typical sort of response would be, yeah, I've encountered these kinds of challenges in my work. I didn't even really think of them as being as being sort of this kind of challenge. But now I've got a new lens to look at this through, can understand, you know, why things were happening in my organization or in my lab, that, you know, weren't going the way that I wanted them to. And I can you know, I've got some tools to to really help me, plan and manage, myself and my team and my organization, you know, much more effectively. So, you know, for for me, that's always, again, given my personal journey to that's really a wonderful thing to get to sort of see people experiencing, that that that it's a kind of, we talk about it as almost like a transformation for individuals that they can really see how we can have so much more impact ourselves than our work if we can be that much more effective in how we not only work with others, but recognize the important, I would say the vital leadership role that there is for folks that have the science and engineering, and my particular passion physics background, physics is kinda like the the the universal intellectual training. I find physicists in so many roles at MIT, many other departments and disciplines, in businesses and health organizations. I mean, they they perhaps don't talk about themselves as the background in in physics, but we really are everywhere. And that's great. I mean, do you have, you know, kind of any examples of where, you know, this kind of, you know, training on the courses, the leadership kind of courses can, you know, can have an impact in everyday life? Sure, so one actually I've liked talking about in the last few years, that it's actually not in the physics domain, but it's certainly very much in the sort of the science domain, but it's an organization where a number a lot of physicists work, and that's the Broad Institute, which is a kind of a spin out from from from MIT and Harvard that essentially is a large lab, thousands of scientists working there. And and really what they were doing up until COVID was sort of genetic analysis with very sort of cutting edge equipment, very expensive. And they were doing all of the gene sequencing for a lot of the research going on around around the world. And so that's a lot of scientific instrumentation. So, you know, a lot of people with sort of physics and engineering working alongside, sort of the biologists and geneticists and data scientists because a lot of that is data and computing, as well. So I have a perfect place to be a physicist, I guess, in many ways. And so they ran like a lab would run, even though this was trying to be, was providing a service to scientists and companies that needed that work to be done. And, one of their senior leaders, who was herself a scientist, actually came to, first of all, an executive education course at the Sloan School, and then actually was so taken by what she learned in that that she, became a came back and just sort of did the full executive MBA as well, over over 2 years, and applied what, what what she learned in, in those courses, about really, learning from what companies like Toyota had done, and really, understanding how manufacturing and production processes work, where they go, you know, where they go wrong, where you get delays and how, when actually most of those are not technology or engineering delays, they're management decisions that get made, and really set up a different management decision making system in that organization around a concept in this case that was, that we typically call sort of visual management. It's about how do you visualize the work throughout the whole process, so that you can really see where the optimal optimization are. And they went from a process as a result of doing all of that, where if you were a scientist, and you'd sent in your sample to get gene sequenced to this lab, it might take weeks or months for you to get the results back, to getting it back in days or maybe a week. But just a huge transformation in in kind of the throughput by applying these management principles to how we do the science in in in this context. One of the reasons I like telling this story is that it really came into its own because when we were all grappling with what do we you know, with the COVID crisis, MIT was one of the institutions that was able to really more or less stay open and keep teaching us many of our students on campus. The only reason we could do that is we had this, massive, ability to do a lot of testing, for COVID. And we were able to do that because the Broad Institute switched its entire operation for a period, over from doing that sort of genomic sequencing work to doing rapid PCR, gene testing for COVID testing. So like very accurate, fast, you know, 2 day turnaround, high quality, very, very high volume testing. And so I just think that's a wonderful story about kind of the benefits coming full circle. Like, we got to be the beneficiaries in many ways of of the improvements that that organization made. But it had a huge impact in the world as well because that rapid that ability to do that rapid PCR testing, you know, that that came from the combination of all the amazing science, definitely like the physics engineering, computation, and data science, and everything else. So we went into it together with the realization that we could design this system so much better, we can run it so much more effectively, we can enable our people to be much more efficient by applying these really quite simple management techniques. That's really, that's really fascinating. So, I guess for those people who might be interested then in, you know, in following that up and potentially, you know, doing a course, I mean, how do they go about finding more? Sure. Well, this is kind of quite dynamic. We're always adding new courses as well. So we always produce brochures in a very sort of old fashioned printed way. But really the best thing to do, you know, if you're interested in what we do at MIT and at the Sloan School, come and check out our website, executive. Mit.edu. It's a bit of a blatant commercial for our own programs. But let me say, really the reason I'm doing this interview is, you know, there's a there are a lot of these kinds of courses out there, and a quick search on your favorite search engine, or perhaps using your favorite AI tool now that you use for discovering new things, you know, we'll we'll very quickly give you sort of lists of places that are offering these kinds of courses. If you want somewhere that's near to where you are physically, then, you know, there are programs like this, you know, offered in great academic institutions and other kinds of institutions all around the world. But again, I think for physicists, there's something really great about MIT, and inspiring about it. So please do check out our website. We have a lot of tools on there to help you sort of see what courses we have. We have something that we've done here at the Sloan School in Executive Education that I don't think anybody even has ever sort of emulated yet, that we also have completely unedited, you know, sort of verbatim, sort of comments and reviews and ratings from people like yourselves who have been through these courses and what their experiences was and were with the courses. And I think a lot of people find that very helpful because, you know, you can not only see what we say about them, but you can get sort of input and advice as it were from others that have been through, the the the courses as well. We have a lot of free material on our website as well that can give you a sense, because you might, like I used to be, be a little skeptical. But we have, you know, free a lot of free sort of pre webinars that we've sort of recorded and kept on the website, so there's no flood of content that gives you a sense of the kind of ideas that you can learn in these programs. And there is a big difference, I should say. You can learn a lot by watching a video or watching a presentation, But where these learning experiences really come into their own is exactly that because they're experiences, because you don't only get to hear the content from a faculty member or from an industry sort of practitioner as you're going through the program, you really get to roll your sleeves up and work with it, and work with your peers in the class, whatever the format is. And hopefully, we give a really good sense on the website of what that experience is and, you know, definitely start there. If, you know, if if you've got questions and frankly, you know, any any physicist, who's interested has a special place in my heart, my contact details are are right there on the website as well. And I, you know, we've got a team of people, myself included, who would just be thrilled to talk to anyone who would like to learn more about these programs. Well, that was really fascinating and certainly a lot of things to consider for someone who may be potentially interested in doing one of these courses. Well, that was great. Thanks for joining us, Peter, to describe both MIT Sloan School of Management. Thanks so much. Great pleasure. Thank you very much. I'm afraid that's all the time we have for this week's podcast, which is sponsored by the MIT Sloan School of Management. Thanks to Peter Hurst and Michael Banks for a fascinating discussion. And also thanks to our producer, Fred Iles. We'll be back again next week. See you then. Businesses in every industry are navigating the choppy waters of exponential change. Continuous learning and upskilling are more essential than ever. From artificial intelligence to analytics to the business opportunities of outer space, short courses at MIT Sloan Executive Education are constantly evolving to present cutting edge insights on critical topics at the intersection of management and technology. Whether you're seeking sustainable improvement efforts for knowledge work, or want to use systems thinking to diagnose issues in the laboratory, MIT Sloan Executive Education provides hands on learning and frameworks that can be applied immediately at work. Experience the MIT Edge with short courses, flexible certificates, and custom programs for your organization. Learn more at executive. Mit.edu.