The guest lecture that multiplied.
A marketer without an upsell.
It started with one workshop — the College of Business asked for social media training for its staff, and we taught it the way we teach everything: the customer first, the platform second.
Underneath the workshop was a bigger idea. A university is a business, whether it talks like one or not — and its community is the customer: faculty, staff, students, alumni, supporters. Teach the people who run it to see that, and everything they communicate changes.
The syllabus asked for technology. The students needed people.
When the Executive MBA program brought us back in as an Executive in Residence, the course was Management and Evaluation of Information Systems — and the honest move would have been to take the outline as handed.
Instead we reworked it with the professor, blending a customer-led marketing lens into the technology framing: what does AI mean to your customer, what does a data breach cost in trust, who is surveilled when software is free. Technology taught as a people question, because for an executive, it always is.
Show up to serve.
No pitch, no pipeline, no follow-up sequence, no upsell. The engagement was the whole point: prepare thoroughly, teach generously, and let the work speak for itself.
"Marketing people" forget: this — serving people well — is marketing. The oldest kind.
This is not a university lecture.
More than 200 slides — built to move and engage, not to be read. Words got taken apart to their Greek roots and rebuilt. A World War II bomber taught survivorship bias better than any spreadsheet could. A game of "cool or creepy?" turned data ethics into a room-wide argument, and a gorilla walked through a basketball game to prove how much executives miss in their own data.
That's how complex strategy becomes practical — make it fun, break it down, until the room can carry it, then hand it over: the entire deck went home with them, QR code on the closing slide. Co-taught with Dr. Santosh Venkatraman, trading the floor whenever a teachable moment walked by.
His verdict afterward:
Then they asked us to teach the professors.
The staff workshop earned the student residency. The student residency earned something rarer: the Dean's personal invitation to the Faculty Professional Enrichment Program — the same material, reshaped for the people who teach it.
Staff, then students, then faculty. Each room opened the next one.
A season, served well.
Teaching without an upsell is better marketing.
Serve the room in front of you, and the next room finds you. No pitch survived contact with that classroom — just preparation, generosity, and the whole deck handed over on the way out.
Tennessee State's motto says it in three words: think, work, serve. We've never taught anywhere that proved it faster.