Founder of the Price-Babson Symposium for Entrepreneurship Educators, Jeffry A. Timmons,

wrote and spoke extensively on the process and context of teaching. We have included the

information about him below from New Venture Creation (2009). We have also included two

examples of his work on teaching the first, Learning Goals, Expectations, and Philosophy outlines his teaching philosophy that he gave to all students. The second War Stories: To Tell or

Not to Tell? is a thought piece on the role of war stories in the classroom. Please enjoy.

Jeffry A. Timmons

In Memoriam

(December 7, 1941 - April 8, 2008)

Franklin W. Olin Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship and

Director, Price-Babson College Fellows Program at Babson College;

AB, Colgate University; MBA, DBA, Harvard University Graduate

School of Business.

Days before he died Jeff submitted the last few revisions for this text.

He was never more engaged intellectually then when he was

translating research and experiences into coursework. He worked on

the belief that deep thinking could motivate decisive action and

provide dedicated students of entrepreneurship a competitive

advantage.

Jeff's commitment to higher education and to entrepreneurship was a

statement of his belief in humanity...striving for the betterment of the human condition. He

believed goodness and achievement were inherent in everyone. Jeff also believed that

entrepreneurship classes were a perfect vehicle to redefine and amplify purposeful study and

action that would lead to a better life and a better world.

Beginning his career in the 1960's, Jeffry A. Timmons was one of the pioneers in the

development of entrepreneurship education and research in America. He is recognized as a

leading authority internationally for his research, innovative curriculum development, and

teaching in entrepreneurship, new ventures, entrepreneurial finance, and venture capital.

Professor Timmons was also an enigma in academia-having resigned tenure twice, as well as

resigning two endowed chairs. In 1994, he resigned the Harvard endowed professorship he had

held since 1989 to return to Babson College, which he had joined in 1982 and in 1995, was

named the first Franklin W. Olin Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship. Earlier he had

been the first to hold the Paul T. Babson professorship for two years, and subsequently became

the first named to the Frederic C. Hamilton Professorship in Free Enterprise Studies, from which

he resigned in 1989 to accept the Harvard chair.

Earlier at Northeastern University in 1973, he launched what is believed to be the first

undergraduate major in new ventures and entrepreneurship in the country, and later created and

led the Executive MBA program. Both of these programs exist today. Business Week's 1995

Guide to Graduate Business Schools rated Timmons as the "best bet" and among the top 10

professors at Harvard Business School.

Success magazine (September, 1995) in a feature article called him "one of the two most

powerful minds in entrepreneurship in the nation." Michie P. Slaughter, former president of the

Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation,

calls him "the premier entrepreneurship educator in America." Before her death in January 2001,

Gloria Appel, as president of the Price Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies noted, "he has done

more to advance entrepreneurship education than any other educator in America."

In 1995, the Price Institute and Babson College faculty and friends chose to honor Dr. Timmons

by endowing The Jeffry A. Timmons Professorship in recognition of his contributions to Babson

and to the field. In 2007, Forbes Small Business called Dr. Timmons one of the country's best

entrepreneurship educators.

In 1985, he designed and launched the Price-Babson College Symposium for Entrepreneurship

Educators (SEE), aimed at improving teaching and research by teaming highly successful

entrepreneurs with "an itch to teach" with experienced faculty. This unique initiative was in

response to a need to create a mechanism enabling colleges and universities to attract and

support entrepreneurship educators and entrepreneurs and help them create lasting collaborations

that would enhance the classroom experience for their students. There is now a core group of

over 1400 entrepreneurship educators and entrepreneurs from over 300 colleges and universities

in the US and 38 foreign countries, who are alumni of the Price-Babson College Fellows

Program.

In May 1995 INC. magazine's "Who's Who" special edition on entrepreneurship called him "the

Johnny Appleseed of entrepreneurship education" and concluded that this program had "changed

the terrain of entrepreneurship education." The program was the winner of two national awards,

and has now been expanded to eight countries outside of the United States and continues to

grow. In 1998 Dr. Timmons led an initiative now funded by the Kauffman Center for

Entrepreneurial Leadership to create Lifelong Learning for Entrepreneurship Education

Professionals (LLEEP) offering a series of training clinics for entrepreneurship educators.

In 2003 Timmons worked with Professor Steve Spinelli to conceive a sister program to the SEE

program which would be available for engineering schools with an interest in entrepreneurship.

They partnered with colleagues at the new Olin College of Engineering on the Babson campus;

President Rick Miller, Provost David Kerns, Dean Michael Moody and Professors John Bourne,

Ben Linder, Heidi Neck, and Stephen Schiffman to win a three-year National Science

Foundation grant to design, develop and deliver such a program. The first pilot was done in June

2005 with significant success, and offered on the Babson/Olin Campus in 2006 and 2007.

During the past decades, Dr. Timmons helped launch several new initiatives at Babson, including

the Babson-Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research Conference, the Kauffman Foundation/CEL

Challenge Grant, the Price Challenge Grant, business plan competitions, and a president's

seminar. In 1997 he led an initiative to create the first need-based full-tuition scholarship for

MBA students with a $900,000 matching grant from the Price Institute for Entrepreneurial

Studies. Each year one of the recipients of this Price-Babson Alumni Scholarship is named the

Gloria Appel Memorial Scholar in honor of this longtime benefactor, colleague and friend.

In addition to teaching, Professor Timmons devoted a major portion of his efforts at Babson to

the Price-Babson programs and to joint initiatives funded by the Kauffman Center for

Entrepreneurial Leadership and Babson, including new research and curriculum development

activities. He provided leadership in developing and teaching in initiatives that assist Native

Americans seeking economic self-determination and community development most notably

through entrepreneurship education programs at the nation's several Tribal Colleges. In April

2001 Professor Timmons was recognized for these efforts in a citation voted by the legislature of

the State of Oklahoma naming him Ambassador for Entrepreneurship.

Since 1999 he served as special advisor to the National Commission on Entrepreneurship. The

work of the Commission culminated in a national conference held in April 2001 that was jointly

sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, the National

Commission of Entrepreneurship, and the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership.

Professor Timmons served as a lead moderator at conference sessions.

A prolific researcher and writer, he wrote nine books, including this textbook first published in

1974. New Venture Creation has been rated by INC, Success, and the Wall Street Journal as a

"classic" in entrepreneurship, and has been translated into both Japanese and Chinese. In 1996

and 1998, INC. featured the book's fourth edition as one of the top eight "must read" books for

entrepreneurs. Venture Capital at the Crossroads written with Babson colleague William

Bygrave (1992) is considered the seminal work on the venture capital industry and is also

translated into Japanese. Earlier, Dr. Timmons wrote The Entrepreneurial Mind (1989), New

Business Opportunities (1990), The Insider's Guide to Small Business Resources (1984), The

Encyclopedia of Small Business Resources (1984), and his contributed chapters to other books

including The Portable MBA in Entrepreneurship (1994, 1997, 2003). More recently, he has co-

authored How to Raise Capital with Babson Professor Andrew Zacharakis (2005), and Business

Plans that Work, with Steve Spinelli (2004). Timmons authored over 100 articles and papers,

which appeared in numerous leading publications, such as Harvard Business Review and Journal

of Business Venturing, along with numerous teaching case studies. In 1995, he began to develop

a new audiotape series on entrepreneurship, working with Sam Tyler, producer of the In Search

of Excellence series for PBS with Tom Peters. He has also appeared in the national media in the

United States and numerous other countries and has been quoted in INC., Success, The Wall

Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Business Week, Working Woman,

Money, USA Today, and has had feature articles written about him in The Rolling Stone (1997),

The Boston Globe (1997), and Success (1994).

Dr. Timmons earned a reputation for "practicing what he teaches." One former graduate and

software entrepreneur interviewed for the Rolling Stone article put it succinctly: "When going to

his classes I couldn't wait to get there; and when I got there I didnt ever want to leave!" For over 35 years he has been immersed in the world of entrepreneurship as an investor, director, and/or

advisor in private companies and investment funds including Cellular One in Boston, and New

Hampshire and Maine, the Boston Communications Group, BCI Advisors, Inc., Spectrum Equity

Investors, Internet Securities, Inc., Chase Capital Partners, Color Kinetics, Inc., Flat World

Knowledge and others. He also served since 1991 as founding member of the Board of Directors

of the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the Ewing Marion Kauffman

Foundation. For the next 10 years, he served as a special advisor to the President and Board of

Directors of the Kauffman Center, where he conceived of the Kauffman Fellows Program and

served as its dean of faculty. In 2003 he worked closely with the President and alumni of the

Kauffman Fellows Program to successfully spin the program out of the Kauffman Foundation

into an independent entity as the Center for Venture Management, and continues as Dean,

Chairman of the Educational Advisory Committee, and on the Board of Directors. The aim of

this innovative program is to create for aspiring venture capitalists and entrepreneurs what the

Rhodes scholarship and White House Fellows programs are to politics and public affairs. In 2001

Jeff joined the President's Council at the newly formed Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

In 1994 and 1996 he served as a National Judge for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year

Awards.

Dr. Timmons received his MBA and DBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a

National Defense Education Act fellow and is a graduate of Colgate University, where he was a

Scott Paper Foundation Scholar. He served as a trustee of Colgate from 1991 to 2000. He lived

on his 500+ acre farm in New Hampshire with his wife of over 40 years, Sara, and winters at

Brays Island Plantation near Savannah, Georgia. He loved the outdoors: fly-fishing; hunting and

golf. He is one of the founders of the Wapack Highlands Greenway Initiative in New Hampshire,

was active in the Henry's Fork Foundation and Wildlife Conservation Trust of New Hampshire,

and served as a director of Timber Owners of New England. He was a member of numerous

other wildlife and nature organizations, including The Monadnock Conservancy, The Harris

Center, The Nature Conservancy, The Moosehead Region Futures Committee, Atlantic Salmon

Federation, and Ruffed Grouse Society.

Learning Goals, Expectations, and Philosophy

A Memo to Students in Venture and Growth Capital

Jeffry A. Timmons

A Perspective

Einstein noted that creativity is more important than knowledge. In entrepreneurial situations an ounce of creativity is worth ten pounds of analysis, an ounce of analysis is worth ten pounds

of winging-it, and an ounce of action and implementation is worth more than ten pounds of planning and strategizing. Why? Because timing can be everything due to the frantic pace and

changing velocity of so many critical entrepreneurial decisions. In many ways I see this class

and our collective assault on the cases, the issues and the intellectual territory as a metaphor for

the real world. By creating an intellectual collision with real world entrepreneurial issues, we can at once compress and accelerate the accumulation of some of the more important of the

50,000 Chunks of know-how, pattern recognition, and insight most commonly referred to as intuition or gut feel.

My Expectations

Meeting for only six sessions poses special challenges to all of us. My prior six years before

returning to Babson full-time, involved teaching 103 MBAs in two back-to-back sections for 30

sessions over 15 weeks. It usually took me about 8 - 10 of those sessions before I knew

everyones name. It isnt realistic for me to think I will know all of yours immediately, but I will try, and our roundtable discussions will help. Having your face-card well in advance of the

course certainly helps, and using your name card in class is vital. To get the most out of the

class requires a very high degree of preparation and extremely careful listening by both of us.

You can alert me before or after class, or during the break if you think I have missed your hand.

In most of the cases we will progress further by building on the collective wisdom from many

contributors to the discussion, rather than a lengthier dissertation by a few. That is not to say that

we should look for quick-hits of superficial comments, but rather, for insights and crispness.

One of the most valuable aspects of the course will be for you to develop a habit of distilling the

lessons and insights from the cases and our collective discussions. Ask yourself as you prepare

each case as well as during and toward the end of our discussions: what are the most important

lessons and insights here? What have I seen here that can improve the risk:reward ratio? As the

course progresses, the cases and issues grow more complicated. They will require hard work,

before and during class. Lack of preparation and active involvement carries a high cost in lost

learning opportunities.

Judging by previous experience, we will have very valuable life experience that we bring to the

class, which I will try to draw on as much as possible, without overdoing it by drawing on too

few of you. Please be sure to post your resume, along with a statement of your own goals and

expectations for this course on Blackboard. Even though I may know of the outcomes of the

case there is no such thing as a case solution: there are many ways to succeed--and to fail. Because of the sequential nature of the cases and the course, there are great opportunities for you

to test your own analytical skills and judgment while also getting a firmer grip on your own risk-

taking comfort zone. I wont conclude each case discussion with a simple three clear points of what you should have learned, but I will share some of my own observations and insights, and

will ask our class visitors to do the same. You will have many opportunities to test your

analyses, judgment and decision-making abilities to recognize opportunities and to figure out

what has to happen in each situation, and as it changes, to create success and avoid fiasco. I also

will frequently ask you to summarize the generic lessons that have emerged from our discussions

and cases. It is your responsibility to cull those lessons and insights, and to anticipate and see

before, rather than after, the fact. As Mark Twain observed: I was seldom able to see an opportunity, until it had ceased to be one!

My Role and Yours: A Joint Responsibility

Im here as a resource, catalyst and a discussion facilitator and, also, a learner. I will strive to be highly prepared for each class, and I expect each of you to do the same. I expect to learn as

much from the term as you do, though the lessons will not all be the same ones you gain. I will

attempt to be simultaneously your most ardent supporter and your severest critic. It is my aim to

raise some good questions for our discussions--and to encourage yours--rather than to provide

all the answers. While I do not believe wisdom can be told; I do believe there may be some know-how and insights I and classmates can share from time to time that may save some of us a

lot of future tuition and avoid unnecessary accumulation of scar tissue.

I encourage each of you to express your opinions and to contribute to an active and lively debate

in class. Perhaps the most powerful contributor to this process of tapping the intellectual capital

and experience of the group is to build the collective wisdom during a discussion. Come to class every day, well prepared, with strong opinions but with an open mind. If you come to

class with a final set of answers you may turn off your receive button, just waiting for that opportune moment to turn-up your case-cracking send only button.

We will have several case protagonists as visitors to class, so I expect you to be courteous and

professional; though I (and our guests) fully expect you will have tough, thought provoking

questions for them. I also ask these entrepreneurs to comment on the class discussion and to

share their comments and feedback with the class. I will ask you to give some careful advance

thought to questions you want to ask and email them to me.

Lastly, you will see early on that I am also a believer in having a little fun while learning. Ill have fun with class situations and individuals from time to time and you can do the same with

me. But I do not single people out to ridicule them or to embarrass them, and I do not expect you

to do so either.

Evaluating Your Performance

Other than the comments in my syllabus I have no magic here. As Winston Churchill noted,

democracy is a pretty inefficient form of government, but it is better than the alternatives. You

will note that your class contributions will account for fifty percent of your final grade. The

reason why is important and simple: in my observation perhaps 90%-95%+ of the key decisions

that take place in business are based on verbal analysis, discussion and action proposals, rather

than on written memos, reports and proposals. Further, the heart of effective entrepreneurial

management occurs face-to-face and verbally, not through written communication. More often

than not, it will be the oral arguments and dialogue that carry the final decision, rather than just

what is written. The class is a wonderful, low-risk setting to try out your ideas and your knack

for real-time, mental and verbal agility. Even if you arent always on-target, never in your career will you pay cheaper tuition for being wrong, or for taking a calculated risk!

Perhaps the hardest part of this evaluation process is for me to assess your participation. Ill take in to consideration several things: first, are you there and, when called on, prepared? I will

cold call to help broaden out participation, to reward those who are prepared, and to draw on relevant real world experience for the case that day. In addition, I typically make numerous cold

calls throughout each class session to encourage listening, sharing and synthesizing; and to draw

upon individuals who can potentially contribute to the discussion and to our collective

understanding. Secondly, how frequently did she or he contribute and what was the quality?

How insightful were the comments? Did you build on the discussion to move it ahead or did it

take us back or off track? Someone may speak frequently yet receive a low evaluation, because

his or her comments were not particularly insightful or were disruptive (i.e. totally unrelated to

the current discussion). Finally, what has been your progress and growth over the term? There

is a cumulative character to the course, with increasing complexity in cases, and enlarging beads

and threads of knowledge, analytic tools and skills, and pattern recognition that weave the course

together. I assume each of you has as much to contribute as the rest, and that my evaluations are

based on contributions rather than your familiarity with the territory.

The key is in the spirit of my earlier comments on building the collective wisdom: positive contributions toward individual and class understanding. All forms of contributions are

potentially valuable including declarative statements and questions.

Finally, an equally important part of your contribution to the class is accepting your

responsibility to help keep standards high. If you feel someone if off track, speak up. Think of it

as being in a board meeting for a company in which you have personally invested $50,000 and

are a director. You would not sit and just roll your eyes or fume inside about a comment or line

of thinking you thought was off base: youd speak up. If there are comments that are not well-founded, or by someone whom everyone in the class (except me) knows has not read the case, it

is your responsibility to speak up.

Outside Class

I welcome the chance to get to know as many of you as I can outside of class. In addition to the

roundtable which I will schedule with our guests for Wednesday evenings, I plan to be available

regularly on Thursday mornings while class is in session. I will make additional time available as

needed (in person or, more often, by telephone). Do email any requests for an appointment to

timmons@babson.edu. I look forward to talking with you about any issue of substance in the

course or your career plans, etc.

If you and I each accept the responsibilities implicit in these thoughts, then I can easily commit

to make this semester both rewarding and fun. If you put as much into it as I do, you can be very

confident you will come away concluding this is the best, or at least one of the two or three best

courses, you have taken at Babson. I very much look forward to the class and to getting to know

and work with each of you!

War Stories: To Tell or Not to Tell?

Jeffry A. Timmons

One of the challenges faced by faculty with real world experience is whether and how to utilize

those experiences in the classroom. There are basically two schools of thought on this subject:

(1) Tell, and, (2) Whatever you do, do not tell war stories. As you would guess these two groups

are not seen frequently together at the faculty dining area. In fact, the entrepreneurs and business

people are often admonished in advance by some regular faculty with a severe warning: no war

stories. However, one must put this advice in perspective. Donald Brown, a highly successful

real estate entrepreneur from Washington, D.C., spent many years teaching one semester each

year at HBS. Students considered him to be a highly effective professor. His insight on the

advice of sage regular faculty colleagues at HBS to avoid telling war stories is priceless: I finally figured out, Don noted in his talk at SEE-2, that THEY did not have any war stories to tell!

But it is not the regular faculty that you need to be concerned with. The students, especially

MBAs, are likely to grow impatient and downright ornery if that is all you bring to your classes.

It is very important how you weave your experiences into the tapestry that is the class and

course. What follows are some tips that you may find useful.

1. Use examples of your intimate knowledge of companies you know to contrast and compare with each other, and to the company, situation, management, and other stakeholders in a case

you have assigned.

2. In inserting your own war stories into the discussion or lecture, you can contrast what is different or similar from the case at hand. What are the generalizations, insights, or lessons

to be learned about what seems to work and not work; to look for and to look out for? Are

there strategies or tactics overlooked by students in the case being discussed that you have

seen work in similar situations?

3. Note what is different about the requirements of each situation. What is most important to appreciate that the class may not have seen? Or can you reinforce a case? Using war stories this way can significantly help students to go beyond their case discussion and to appreciate other nuances and subtleties that can make quite a difference. Introducing a

company whose approach was different and worked or did not work can help students to

avoid the risk of over-simplifying or over-generalizing from conclusions they may have

come to from the single case they were discussing.

4. Be sure to not overdo it. Do use appropriate caveats when it is evident that it would be hazardous to over generalize from X, i.e. you can emphasize that there are usually a million

ways to skin the cat and that creative problem solving is the entrepreneurs ultimate weapon. But if you recognize a pattern, or an approach that will work in your situation as well, it can

be a competitive advantage to not have to reinvent the wheel.

5. Share any generalizations you may have derived from knowing how a number of founders, CEOs, etc. would likely deal with the problem, paradox, situation, etc., and any cautions

since X may have worked ten times for others, but there may be some subtle differences so

that it may not work for you.

6. What have prior students said is the most useful thing about examples you have included?

7. Can you explain why there was a success, mistake, failure, delay, or acceleration vs. plan or intention? Can you use your war story to illustrate what contributed to this situation that

brings a new insight beyond what was discussed during the case discussion, or to help take

the discussion to a higher level? Why was this not obvious or recognizable early on, to the

class, to the company management, etc.? What new questions are raised? What creative

alternatives are available?

Here is a brief example of one way this can work from a turnaround situation:

The focus of the discussion is on the action plan: immediate need upon entering the company as

a turnaround manager is to stop the bleeding and generate cash. The students focus on some of

the obvious and very appropriate items: receivables and inventory. The Price-Babson Fellow

probes the students furtherwhat is the specific plan? Which receivables do you focus on for collection? Some students immediately seize upon the obvious: those 120 days in arrears, which

is what they learned in accounting, and in the management textbooks. The Price-Babson Fellow

who is leading the discussion has made a living as a turnaround specialist. He pushes the other

studentswhat do you think? Is that where you would focus? Why? If these are the accounts to zero in on for collection, why havent they been collected previously? Another student responds: Id forget the 120+; it may take forever to collect them. These are going to be the toughest ones to collect or the company would have gotten to them a good while back. Besides,

we may already have written these off (well check to be sure.) Id zero in on those A/Rs 40-50 days old. I believe we have the best chance of actually collecting more from them, and sooner.

This was a very astute insight during the discussion, and led to a very different direction and

conclusion from where everyone else was headed. The Price-Babson Fellow used this as an

opportunity to reinforce the point and compliment the student. Without the injection of his keen

questions, and his own insights based on practical experience this point would have been missed.

It provided a quite useful action lesson.