Behind the Conversation: Brave, Brilliant … and Broke

The Word Nobody Says Out Loud

I have been in higher education since I was 21. Never left.

I know exactly why. I've known for 30 years. It's just not a thing you get to say in a professional setting without somebody shifting in their seat.

So when I asked Ravi Jain why he'd stayed, I expected the usual answers. The pace. The calendar. The students. He gave me those, and they were all true.

Then he said the other one. Out loud. Without hedging it.

Constraint was doing the work

Before we get to that, we have to talk about the money.

Ravi made an interactive web sitcom in 2002. Before YouTube. Before there was any such thing as a platform for it. He hosted it himself, and he told us he was genuinely afraid of what would happen if it took off, because there were horror stories then about people getting five-figure bills from their internet provider when a video went big.

So he only put one episode online at a time.

Sit with that. The reason the thing had scarcity, the reason you had to watch it now or miss it, was that he couldn't afford for you to watch it later.

Seven years on, at Boston College, he looked at the nine-minute department videos everyone was making and decided he could do better in 60 seconds. He got told you can't tell a story in that long. He said let's try. He shot a pilot and approved it by handing his director an iPod Touch and a pair of headphones and watching the man laugh in the right places.

Every format he's known for came out of a limit.

Then the limits went away

Mallory said something after the interview that I haven't been able to shake. She said scarcity was doing some of the work for him.

It's true. He made great decisions inside constraint, and constraint is gone. You can generate 40 versions of anything now, in a minute, for nothing.

Which means the thing that used to be forced on you has to come from somewhere else. Judgment. Taste. Knowing which of the 40 is the one.

That isn't a tools problem. You can't buy your way to it, and I'd argue you can't shortcut your way to it either. Ravi got his by spending 25 years unable to afford the wrong choice.

The story comes first, then the technology

Here's the through line, and it's the part I'd underline for anybody doing this work.

He never started with the tool. He started with a story problem, and then went and found what would solve it. The web sitcom came from a question about whether you can actually know someone from watching their life online. The 60 seconds came from watching institutions try to say everything at once and say nothing.

Work the other direction and you end up with a drone and nothing to point it at.

I have been saying a version of this to clients for years. Storytelling is a team sport, and the story has to lead. Hearing a man I'd never spoken to before describe the same conviction, arrived at independently over a completely different career, was its own kind of validation.

And then the word

So. Why higher ed.

He talked about the pace, and about coming home from Stockholm knowing he couldn't go back to corporate life. Fair. “I think I’ve seen this film before.”

And then he said that at Boston College, the word that comes up in meetings is love.

Not in a mission statement. In meetings. When somebody's grieving, when somebody needs something. He said he'd never had that anywhere else he'd worked. He said it sounds trite. He said it anyway.

I didn't learn anything in that moment. That's the part I want to be honest about. I've spent 30 years here for exactly that reason, and I could have told you so before we started recording.

What I got instead was rarer.

Thirty years of knowing something you don't quite say. And then a man I'd never met says it first, on the record.

That's not a revelation. That's company.