TWO FACES OF GENiUS

According to David W. Galenson, professor of economics at the University of Chicago, when it comes to expressing genius, there are “sprinters” and then there are “marathoners.” In his book Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Galenson describes two types of innovators (or geniuses), that is, those “whose work changes the practices of their successors.”

Those in the first group are what he calls “conceptual innovators,” people who burst onto the scene with an important contribution early in their careers or at a fairly young age—wunderkinds like Picasso, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, and Mozart. In the second group are the “experimental innovators” whose “greatest successes are the result of long periods of gradual improvement of their skills and accumulation of expertise.” These are the people who, while they may be successful throughout their careers, generally make their greatest contributions when they’re older. As Galenson explains, “The long periods of trial and error often required for important experimental innovations means that they will tend to occur late in an artist’s career.”

If exceptions to this breakdown are jumping into your head, Galenson is careful to note that it’s not “a binary categorization,” but “a quantitative difference.” He explains that “there is a continuum, with extreme practitioners of either type at the far ends, and moderate practitioners of the two categories arrayed along the intermediate positions of the scale.”

GENiUS  iN THE REAL WORLD

“This is all very well,” you might be thinking, “but what do the different types of creative genius have to do with me?” Well, first of all, while his book focuses primarily on artists, Galenson says, “the analysis can be applied much more broadly, to other intellectual activities.” Thus, successful people in many professions will probably fall into one of these two camps. This is because, Galenson explains, “in most cases important scholarly and artistic innovations come from perceiving a previously unrecognized problem, or formulating a previously recognized problem in a novel way, before creating a solution to it.” Which is, essentially, the project of Walden’s doctoral programs (see “Making Your Mark With a Walden Ph.D.”).

While few would call themselves “geniuses,” many successful Walden doctoral students could be classified as “experimental innovators” who have drawn from years of experience in one or more fields to make an innovative contribution—often at a later age—through the process of earning a Ph.D. In other words, for working professionals, a Walden Ph.D. can be the pathway to the expression of their own particular genius.

A PATHWAY TO iNNOVATiON

Dr. James Stahley, the recently retired faculty administrator and associate dean of Walden’s School of Management, says his observations during his seven years at Walden support this concept “very strongly.” “Our students come to us either after a long career or in the middle of a career,” Stahley explains. In the School of Management, “the average age of our doctoral students is 46, so they’re older and more experienced than you’d see in a traditional academic setting. They’re highly motivated, and they’re very dedicated. And almost all of them have a very strong passion for solving a problem in a particular area.”

Because Walden doctoral students are generally also working full time for a corporation, a nonprofit, or some other organization, “they have access that allows them to do the research” for their dissertation, says Stahley. “And the company gets an immediate benefit because they have access to the research the student is doing. What Walden offers is the academic discipline and the scholarship the students lack to solve the problem they bring, and to use that discipline to go forward. They may already have the answer. But we tell them that they need to start with the problem.” Galenson’s experimental innovator framework also matches Stahley’s personal experience. “I got two degrees in electrical engineering, and I had every engineering job you could have in a company, and then had every management job you could have up to vice president,” he says. “But, after 40 years of being very successful, I certainly wanted to give back to society.” For Stahley, the best way to share what he’d learned was by teaching. Not only did he make his mark by launching Walden’s M.B.A. program, but, as associate dean, he was able to draw on his work experience to provide guidance for School of Management doctoral students.

iNNOVATiON iN COMMUNIC ATiON

Stahley cites Dr. Debbie Mealy as a good example of a student he’s seen use a Ph.D. to turn her career experience into an important contribution. Mealy had been with the Thurston County (Washington) Sheriff ’s Office for a number of years, working her way up from deputy to lieutenant, when she decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences with a specialization in Knowledge Management at Walden.

“Law enforcement is very good at hoarding knowledge,” Mealy explains. “I knew I needed tools to communicate with the squad, the people I supervise, in a way that hadn’t been done in law enforcement, to make a difference within the law enforcement community.”

In her dissertation, Self-Perceived Communication Strategies by the Female Police Chiefs in the State of Washington, Mealy explored the differences between male and female communication strategies. “Law enforcement is typically a very ‘I tell you what to do’ type of military structure,” she says. “Female leaders have the ability to make hard [executive] decisions, but they also understand that there are other ways to communicate when there’s time available.”

Through the doctoral process, Mealy learned it was important to educate those in her squad that her own communication style of gaining feedback from them was “not a weakness.” Most importantly, she learned how to get the best out of those she supervised, showing them “that each one of them has so much to teach everyone around them.”

Mealy completed her Ph.D. in 2004 at the age of 38, and is now “on contract” with the state, serving as assistant commander at the Basic Law Enforcement Academy at the Criminal Justice Training Commission in Burien, Wash., where she is part of a team developing a new training curriculum. She believes the Ph.D. “made a difference not only in my being chosen for the position—it brings credibility—but in my ability to do the job.”

Essentially, Mealy’s doctorate has helped her to take her own experience and formulate a new paradigm in law enforcement knowledge-sharing. “I thought I’d be impacting my squad of 15 people, but it got much bigger than that,” she says. “Now I’m impacting thousands and thousands of people. The new curriculum has huge implications. When we train new officers in classroom instruction as well as hands-on tactics, not only do you affect all those officers, you make a difference in each community they go back to.” Like the innovators Galenson describes, Mealy is now able to do work that will have an impact on her professional successors.

SUCCESSFUL SELF-DiRECTED LEARNiNG

Unfortunately, not everyone is able to draw on years of career experience to achieve success or make an impact in mid- or late life, as Ronald Paige observed while working on his dissertation for his Walden Ph.D.

Paige, who received Walden’s 2007 Harold L. Hodgkinson Award at age 60 for his dissertation, The Relationship Between Self-Directed Informal Learning and the Career Development Process, found while doing his research that self-directed, informal (day-to-day) learning is a hit-or-miss affair. “It’s the rare person who can successfully utilize informal learning. Most of the people who were in the older cohort that I interviewed were unable to do that,” he explains. The problem, he says, is that “they were never given the skills to direct their own informal learning in the first place.”

Perhaps the hallmark of experimental innovators is their ability to direct their own informal learning, including seeking out guidance when necessary. Paige found that those self-directed, informal learners who were successful had a teacher or mentor who could help them employ the most appropriate learning strategies to their particular situations. Paige, director of instructional technology at Cleveland State Community College in Cleveland, Tenn., was inspired to choose his dissertation topic based on his own experiences: Over the course of 30 years, he was successful in a number of fields, including running a one-hour photo lab (the first in his region) and publishing a regional magazine (with little formal training). He wondered what skills had enabled him to successfully direct his own informal learning.

When Paige decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Education at Walden, he didn’t have to look far when it came to his dissertation topic. A friend’s comment made him realize he’d been informally studying the stories of self-learners for years. The dissertation process allowed him to “compare and contrast and evaluate” all those stories he’d collected throughout his career.

Paige explains that Roger Schank, in the book Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, “suggests that geniuses are the people with a better command of stories.” In Paige’s own case, the dissertation process gave him “a critical lens to better understand the storying process” and make his mark in a new way. Now working as a consultant on self-learning to businesses, he says, “I have a much better command of all these stories I’ve accumulated over the years. Now I can talk to people intelligently about my topic, and they can respond, and I can respond to the responses. The Walden dissertation process dramatically helped me to do those things.”

iT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO REiNVENT YOURSELF

Sometimes the “trial-and-error” aspect of experimental innovation results in switching to a new career when you realize the old one just doesn’t fit. Dr. Nancy Carritte, who earned her Ph.D. in Psychology from Walden in 2000 at the age of 46, used her doctorate to switch from a long career in corporate human resources to a private practice of executive coaching and motivational speaking.

Carritte was a single mother working as a vice president of human resources at Baskin-Robbins while also completing her bachelor’s degree at night at the University of Redlands, in California. During Carritte’s last class, which happened to be on her 40th birthday, the professor said, “I hope some of you go on for your master’s degree, and one of you in particular needs to go on for her doctorate.”

Carritte knew she was the one to whom the professor was referring, and although she hadn’t thought of graduate work, “it was one of those goose bump moments,” and she knew that’s what she would do. After working toward a master’s in human behavior at National University in California, she “opened up the Wall Street Journal and found an article about Walden’s program in organizational psychology.”

“I was excited to find a degree that could capitalize on my 15 years of executive corporate work and my lifelong interest in psychology,” Carritte says. “Many of my colleagues didn’t understand why I’d bother with a Ph.D., because it wasn’t required for business. But it was a personal goal. One of the things that became particularly enticing was the opportunity to climb over the corporate wall. But at the beginning it was just the inspiration of personal growth, lifelong learning.”

Shortly after beginning the program, Carritte took a one-year consulting contract to do executive coaching. At about the same time, she left Baskin-Robbins and was offered a new human resources position at a company willing to fund the remainder of her degree program. She refused the offer.

“It was really hard to turn [the job] down, but I was afraid if I stepped back into a corporate gig, I would never know how I would have done as an entrepreneur,” she says of her decision to strike out on her own. “Of course now I still have to pay off my student loan. But I never would have gotten to this point of self-actualization if I had taken that job.”

Seven years after earning her doctorate, Carritte’s process of self-actualization has led her to “reinvent” herself. She is earning a six-figure income as a management trainer, executive coach, and motivational speaker on subjects such as life balance and dealing with stress. Her latest focus is presenting workshops on the midlife experience for executive women. She has also written three books.

“I never dreamed the title ‘Dr.’ would be so beneficial,” she says. “I’ve had a number of client opportunities in which I later learned they chose me because I had a Ph.D. Many executives prefer to work with a Ph.D.” Best of all, says Carritte, the doctorate “was a jumpingoff point to self-actualization, which is being the best you can be with the gifts you’ve been given.”

“GREATNESS AT ANY AGE”

By his own count, Robert Levasseur is on his fifth—or is it sixth?—successful career, and he feels the “experimental innovator” label fits. “I started as an engineer,” he says, “then I became a management scientist, manager, consultant, and now a teacher.” He also recently founded his own Internet publishing house, MindFire Press, “to provide resources for lifelong learning,” and has written and published three books.

A master’s from MIT’s Sloan School of Management in the 1970s launched the first phase of Levasseur’s career. But after many rewarding years in business, he began to wonder, “What do I do for an encore?”

“As I went through times of self-reflection in my life, the words that kept coming up were, ‘I need to do more with what I’ve been given,’” Levasseur says. “There was always a part of me that said that someday the knowledge I had gained over the years in diverse fields of study would come together.” After recovering from a serious illness, Levasseur attended his nephew’s high school graduation, where inspiration struck.

“The keynote speaker cited the fact that H.G. Wells had earned his Ph.D. at the age of 78 as evidence for his claim that ‘you can achieve greatness at any age.’ By the end of his presentation, he had rekindled my dream of earning a Ph.D.,” says Levasseur. “A few months later, a mailing from Walden University came to my attention, and I knew I had found my doctoral program. I enrolled in the School of Management a few months later.”

Pursuing his Ph.D. in Applied Management and Decision Sciences, Levasseur found the KAM process “incredibly valuable.” He explains, “It allowed me to build on my experience base by reading the original writings of scholars in my specialization of Leadership and Organizational Change and integrating their ideas and my real-world knowledge into new models and perspectives.” In addition, he says, “the Ph.D. put me in a different league. One way it has changed my life completely is that it has given me the credentials to teach at all levels of the educational system.” Before graduating, Levasseur began teaching part time in the Walden M.B.A. program. After he received his Ph.D. in 2004 at the age of 59, “by some miracle Walden opened up full-time teaching positions,” and hired him to fill a position on the doctoral faculty in the School of Management. “This was the job I had dreamed of when I started my quest for the doctorate,” he says. “I do the work I love with people I respect and care for deeply. As a result, I believe I am making a difference in people’s lives every day, and I feel the best is yet to come.”

Even more than leading to a particular job, the Walden Ph.D. “has given me the mechanism to create my own path,” Levasseur says. “I feel very credible now.” For example, he credits the Ph.D. for the confidence needed to write three books for doctoral students: “I might have been reluctant to write about those subjects before. Now I am confident that I will continue to have something to say on these and other topics of interest to lifelong learners.”

In addition, he says, the Walden doctorate gave him “the potential to influence the world, to effect positive social change at a local level and even at a higher level.” This benefit extends to all Walden students, Levasseur believes: “People come along with the raw talent, and we give them the opportunity and the tools to become unstoppable. As a result, they will make an even greater difference in the world. Walden allows working adults to continue the pursuit of their genius.”

Whether, like Levasseur, you’ve already achieved success and are wondering what to do for a second act, or you feel that you haven’t really made your mark yet, your best work might be right around the corner. Take a tip from these Walden Ph.D. grads: It’s never too late to pursue greatness.

Gain fresh insights into the learning experiences of Walden Ph.D. students by watching the Walden residency documentary. [Coming Soon] You can watch the video and learn about alumni tuition benefits at www.WaldenU.edu.

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