It Takes a Tribe by Will Dean

Author:Will Dean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

MUDDER INNOVATOR: Rob Camm

Given my skepticism about how much value my academic study had for my business, I’m enjoying the irony that last year I was invited to help establish and chair the new Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Bristol University, where I earned my undergraduate degree. I’ve relished the opportunity to put what I have learned at Tough Mudder, and some of the best lessons of my time at Harvard, into practice, to put my money where my mouth is. The Bristol initiative is, I think, unique in the academic world. Ours is the first department to offer a syllabus that does not aim to provide a standalone business qualification but that instead integrates insights into innovation and entrepreneurship into the university’s other majors. Students can take four-year courses in Music with Innovation or Computer Science with Innovation, and so on.

The approach Bristol has taken has allowed us to experiment at the center in creating a framework of innovation that initiates students in the virtues of the quick and cheap build-measure-learn loop, in terms of their own specializations. It does not aim to teach leadership as a pseudoscience but instead focuses on providing anecdotal insights from people who have established businesses and lived to tell the tale.

As part of my own teaching involvement I launched a competition last year for our undergraduates to design and create a new Tough Mudder obstacle using our innovation principles. I was privileged to be able to launch this venture on stage alongside Rob Camm, a veteran of two Tough Mudders, who in recent years has learned far more about obstacles and how to innovate to overcome them than anyone in the room. As ever when any two Tough Mudders are gathered together, the thing Rob and I wanted to do most was swap stories. He talked the audience and me through his own history with the event, as a way of introducing the challenge of obstacle creation.

Rob has a special place in Mudder history. In 2015, he became the world’s first tetraplegic to complete a Tough Mudder and earn an orange headband. He navigated the course with the help of friends in a pioneering wheelchair that he controls with his chin. Now twenty-two, Rob has been tetraplegic, with no movement in his body from the neck down, since he was a passenger in a car crash in 2013. The crash happened just a week before Rob was due to start as an undergraduate program at Bristol, when he was on his way to a party in a friend’s car after playing rugby. He subsequently spent ninety-six days in intensive care.

A year later, on a permanent ventilator, and in his specially modified wheelchair, Rob took up his place at the university and is now in his final year studying politics, philosophy, and economics. Onstage, he explained how his plan was to do postgraduate work to become a lawyer. Before the accident Rob was a committed rugby player, and the thing he missed most, he suggested, was that sense of being part of a team.

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