Commitment as a Disruptor with Dr. Rob Ernst

10/03/24 • 29 min

What does it take to become the Anthony Fauci of the University of Michigan?

When COVID-19 hit, Dr. Rob Ernst was tapped to lead the school’s response. As the Chief Health Officer for the university, he prioritized maintaining core critical operations in order to provide healthcare for the whole region. For Dr. Ernst, commitment to caring for his community is key.

Dr. Ernst chats with Breaking Schemas co-host John Branch about how mentorship and the courage to take non-traditional paths have shaped his career, his approach to navigating the school’s pandemic response, and how he views commitment as a disruptor.

*Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*

Show Links:

University of Michigan profile

Episode Quotes:

A mentor’s wisdom: Take the chance, even when you feel unready

07:36 My belief is that if you've got a really great opportunity and you don't feel like you're ready for it, take it. So, I don't know if he was talking about that more generally or about he was just trying to say that I was actually more ready than I thought I was, but I actually have behaved that way in a number of other capacities throughout and tried to not be afraid to try to blaze a new pathway even if it seems like a non-traditional pathway.

Making tough calls during the COVID pandemic

16:07: As a trained general internist, I think, compared to many, I have a much higher comfort level with uncertainty, and even making hard decisions with incomplete information is what we do in medicine, right? I mean, you gather information, you do some deeper digging with some tests or studies, or something. And then, you don't know exactly what you're up against most of the time or often. And you still make some decisions about, let's try this, whether it's some kind of procedure or medicine or some non-pharmacologic treatment, and then get back together and see how it's going. Maybe there's some new information and you shift and things like that. And we don't blame ourselves for not having been able to see the future with incomplete information. And we just trust our experience and our judgment, weighing its risks and benefits. And that's just how we behave. And I have a really high comfort level, and practicing that way and that was the course through COVID.

How Bob Quinn’s writings shaped Dr. Rob Ernst’s leadership style

27:29: The temptation for us as humans is to tinker with problems and add here, reclassify that position, move that person's blah, blah, blah, as opposed to just saying, "If we were trying to solve this problem from scratch, how would we do it?" And then, just oftentimes, it's a completely different approach.

What does it take to become the Anthony Fauci of the University of Michigan?

*Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*

Show Links:

University of Michigan profile

Episode Quotes:

A mentor’s wisdom: Take the chance, even when you feel unready

Making tough calls during the COVID pandemic

How Bob Quinn’s writings shaped Dr. Rob Ernst’s leadership style

Previous Episode

Franchising as a Disruptor with Dave Keil

For four-time franchise CEO Dave Keil, it’s all about scaling companies for good. A few years back, Dave had a hypothesis that if you applied the same processes and operations of franchising commercial businesses to nonprofits, you could scale them just as successfully, and with massive positive impact.

This is how Franchise for Good was born. Before that, Dave spent his career leading and growing businesses like HoneyBaked Ham and Pure Barre where he fell in love with the art of franchising. Now, he’s bringing those lessons to the nonprofit world and unlocking potential for organizations to scale their missions.

Dave chats with Breaking Schemas co-host John Branch about his career journey from engineer to franchise CEO, how he has helped grow franchise brands through incubators like Franworth, and how he plans to disrupt the nonprofit space with the franchising model.

*Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

His first CEO job

05:02: I ended up going and leading three different franchise companies as chief executive. So, the first one was the Honey Baked Ham Company. A family held company who had been operating for 59 years. I had been on the board. They needed an M&A person and someone that knew CPG because their desire was to move. They had shops that they sold hams in, but they wanted to expand, and they wanted to go into grocery. And they were needing to do some M&A’s. So, I went in. I'd been on the board and saying, “Guys, you got to bring this together. We're leaving a bunch of money on the table.” And they finally convinced me to come join.

Only 16% of all franchisors make money

12:00: The secret in franchising is that there's only 16% of all franchisors that actually make money. And franchising, as you know, it's not just McDonald's. It's every fast food on the planet. It's every hotel. It's every boutique fitness, every boutique beauty business there, every service-based business. Molly Maid, Mr. Handyman, Garage Kings, those types of businesses are all franchises. So, it's a great way to scale and replicate, but it's hard to do only 16% get to that 100 mark. And that tends to be the number, John. If you can go and get 100 units open, then you have a successful franchise.

Disrupting the franchise business by taking off the hurdle of half a million dollar net worth

25:39: We're building what we're calling Beloved Brands, our seven brand portfolio. And we're removing $500,000 as the hurdle to buy a franchise. We're going to test for your competence as a leader. Yes, you've got to be fiscally responsible. Yes, you're going to have to show leadership capabilities and be able to follow a system and lead a team and go deliver milkshakes or garage floor coating, whatever that is, but honestly, we were using half a million bucks of net worth as the proxy for your ability to be a great owner of a business. And that's not right. What it should be is testing for grit and leadership skills and fiscal responsibility. So that's what we're changing.

Show Links:

Next Episode

Passion as a Disruptor with Scott Hegstrom

Some brands are so iconic to the American family that the passion for them is passed down generationally. Scott Hegstrom knows all about those kinds of brands.

With a marketing degree in hand from Michigan State University, Scott started his career journey at the household appliance juggernaut – Whirlpool. Through the company’s innovative leadership development program, Scott went on to lead KitchenAid’s Stand Mixer unit, and learned how to harness the consumer’s passion for a product. Now at NIQ, Scott leverages his market insights in the tech and durables sector.

Scott joins Breaking Schemas co-host John Branch to discuss his experiences at Whirlpool, emphasizing the value of rotational leadership programs and direct consumer interaction, what the transition was like to the private equity-funded company SVP Global, and how passion has underlined the disruption in all of his work.

*Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How Scott launched his career from an internship at Whirlpool

02:45 I started what they called the Consumer Appliance Care Leadership Development Program. And what that was, was a rotational. Every time you get good at something, 12 to 18 months later, they plucked you out and they made you go learn something different. So, really big investment from the company that really made sense across multiple functions, whether that was procurement or finance. I ended up in the consumer services portion of the business, which is really where I had a great opportunity to learn the consumer at the very onset of my career at Whirlpool.

On understanding your consumers

Empower those individuals with the ability to solve the customer's problem, and then also ride along with the service technician, like, you can learn a lot by looking at your computer, of course, of the metrics, but at the end of the day, what that taught me is get out of your desk environment, go sit with a call center agent where you're listening to consumers directly, and you'll learn as much or more than the 250, 000 research project that tells you how good you are on a dashboard.

What surprised him after shifting from OEM to agency

I think what surprised me the most was even if you have retailers that on paper look virtually identical, like if you asked somebody at a dinner party, what the difference between CVS, Walgreens, or Rite-Aid, like, oh, they're pretty much a similar business, but the needs of organizations, even if they seem similar on the surface, are dramatically different. And I think the biggest thing for me to understand was how to probe with questions on the front end, how to understand their needs, and then tailor our approach to be very custom to what those retailers need at any point in time. And then also understand that that might change.