Meet KPU: Brad Anderson

Brad Anderson is a former biotechnologist and current instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Melville School of Business. He has been chair of the entrepreneur leadership department at KPU since May 2022. He is also an author with many books under his name, like Duatero and the Triumvirate Trilogy, and a short story “Naïve Gods,” which was longlisted for a 2017 Sunburst Award for “Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.”

Anderson has also worked to help make education more accessible to all. He recently adapted his open-access digital textbook, Developing Organizational and Managerial Wisdom, which discusses the dynamics of values, rationality, and power in organizations, into an audiobook to reduce educational barriers, a first for KPU’s open educational resources. 

When did you join the KPU community and why?

It was January 2009 when I had my first class. So I started off in the biotech industry. I have a masters in sciences and I used to make drugs for a living, I did that for about 10 years or so. A couple of things lead me to this career change. One of the things I found working in biotech is when you are in a discipline, you learn how to think a certain way and everybody around you thinks that way because you are getting the same kind of education. Then you go to the real world and meet people who are like, “Wow, you think totally differently.” So we in science have to encounter these business people who we think don’t know how the universe works. We are scientists, we are trying to do research, and they don’t get it. 

The companies that I saw succeed were the ones which bridged the gap between business and science people. If I saw the business people had all the power and the science people had no power, those businesses would struggle and vice versa. The ones where there was a marriage between the two, those were the businesses that I tended to see being successful. That influenced me to think that there is value in speaking both languages. There is the science language that I know and there is the business language that I don’t. So that inspired me to go back and get my masters in business administration (MBA). 

The biotech industry is really volatile, it’s an extremely tough industry. The statistics are that it costs about one billion dollars to produce a drug that has to go through multiple clinical trials with a failure rate of 80 per cent. When I was in my 20s, I was hopping from company to company. Around 2008 was when we had the great recession and I got laid off. Having recently got my MBA, I started to explore work options and I was trying to get into consulting. It was my wife who said, “You know what would look good on your resume if you want to get into consulting, if you taught at a couple of universities.” So I got a contract, and I had my first class and I loved it. It was the best thing I have ever done in my life, “Why have I not been doing this the whole time?” So I threw myself into teaching and I’ve been doing it ever since. I like to tell students, if something is not working, have the courage to make the change. There is something you are built to do.    

What is your favourite story of your time at KPU?

I really enjoy teaching, I have many great moments at KPU. The first thing that comes to mind was 10 years ago — teaching this one course with a very interactive component to it, students are almost in class debates. There was a student who had severe social anxiety. He had a tough time functioning in the debate type of environment. At that time, he came to me, talked to me about it. I recognized his problem since I knew him from other classes. He had so much courage to work and struggle with this. I could not make the debate component go away for him, since it was a major component of the course, but we made a deal that every class, he would raise his hand and I would start really soft and gentle with a softball question, then I’d move on to somebody else. As he got comfortable with that, we started ramping up the discussion and he did it. He had courage to deal with it. You could tell that he was overcoming this visceral fear as he would be shaking sometimes during interactions. He overcame this issue and passed the class. It is amazing seeing students do things and overcome their problems. This incident sticks with me. 

What is something you’d like to say to people new to KPU?

The first thing I would say is to have fun and enjoy yourself. My advice to business school students would be to explore a bunch of different disciplines. There are so many aspects to business, it’s so incredibly diverse. Explore and find out what fits for you and pursue that. Sometimes, I see students choose disciplines where they don’t know if they’re enjoying what they are doing. If you’re in marketing for example, and there’s certain things you need to do that you don’t like, you’re going to have a job you hate. Listen to that in yourself, so take a whole bunch of disciplines, see what resonates with you, then pursue that. 

Business is a social activity, nobody does business by themselves. Therefore, you need to be able to function in a social environment. Look for opportunities that will help you develop your social skills. Join clubs, have fun, look for extracurricular activities, get involved in that stuff to help you improve operating in a social environment which is a really invaluable skill. It’s really difficult to teach that in the classroom. 

What are you working on or doing right now?

I am chair of the entrepreneurial leadership department, so a lot of my creative energies have been going into developing and supporting that program. I have a little list of things that I would like to do towards my courses, probably towards the fall. Entrepreneurial leadership is a super cool department. We are doing some cool, exciting things, creating new courses, and developing this social incubator, which will be open to all KPU students and alumni. We’re hoping to help them develop business ideas that are related to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

In terms of my personal stuff, I am continuing to learn about universal design for learning, which is how do you improve the accessibility of your course to different learners in different life situations. To me it means, “How do we reduce barriers to education?” Increasing access and zero cost textbooks, like the open access book I wrote, reduces barriers to education. I am learning more about those skills and working on incorporating them into my classes. I would like to crowdsource ideas from my students so they can help me create a supplementary package of examples that show the stuff I talk about in the textbook. These examples would be more relevant and current to students. 

I got some cool ideas for projects I am doing. So we are trying to really integrate the UN’s SDGs into our business program. With this, students will solve a business problem but think about the impact in relation to the SDGs. I want to create these projects that start to expand students’ awareness about the impact that their decisions are having on society as a whole. A lot of  business education focuses on maximising profits, but I want to create these assignments where, in addition to that, students start to see the broader impact of the decisions they make. 

What is something you’d like people to know about you?

My goal is to reduce barriers towards education. Education is a way to elevate a society, and the more barriers you can eliminate to get more people in, I think that benefits all of us. If anyone has any great ideas to reduce barriers to access education, let the entrepreneurial leadership department know, we would love to see how we can expand access. If anyone likes the textbook, Developing Organizational and Managerial Wisdom, it supports course ENTR 2110. If what we talk about in that textbook is of interest, there is a whole course on it. I highly recommend it. It’s fairly easy with very few prerequisites. Myself and most of the students think it’s a cool course.