November 2005

Ray of Enlightenment

by Marina Krakovsky

Michael Ray taught a generation of students to listen to their gut, find their own path, and aim for their highest goal—all in the name of creativity.

Joe Tye, MBA ’85, miscalculated, bidding only 60 points on GSB 341, Personal Creativity in Business. That was almost two-thirds of his bid allotment for all classes, but not enough to make the roster of Professor Michael Ray’s course—which was so popular that many students bid a maximum 95 to get in. Unfazed by the setback, the second-year student and class co-president showed up anyway.

“Let’s get creative about this,” he recalls telling Ray. The move may have showed more chutzpah than creativity, but it worked: The professor bent the rules to allow Tye to stay if he promised to do the work. Tye, who now lives in Iowa and consults as “America’s Values Coach,” calls it “the single most influential class I’ve ever taken—for class credit or not.”

Perfectly Ordinary, Yet One-of-a-Kind
This revelation seems surprising on meeting Ray. In his Santa Cruz home office, the semiretired professor (who hasn’t taught his famous class in over a year at Stanford) walks around tidying up and talking about the house. Ray seems to be demonstrating one of his “live-withs,” or rules for living creatively: “Be Ordinary,” which is to say, be yourself and don’t try to impress.

When I ask about something extraordinary—the colorful space where he leads a weekly chanting and meditation group, he steers me away from talk about the particulars of his personal spiritual practice. Invoking universals like gratitude, peace, and communion, Ray says he tried to open ways for students to explore their inner resources by bringing in multiple approaches to class but never advocating any in particular. He makes sure I’m comfortable in an overstuffed chair before settling himself in a mahogany-stained rocker—a farewell gift from his marketing faculty colleagues. “I was part of the marketing area, but toward the end I was pretty much in my own area,” he tells me. (His title is John G. McCoy–BancOne Corporation Professor of Creativity and Innovation and of Marketing, Emeritus.)

Ray’s uniqueness among the faculty offers a big clue to his popularity with students. After all, his teachings about self-actualization, looking inward, and living a life in accordance with your highest values aren’t exactly groundbreaking, having entered mainstream culture decades ago through humanistic psychology and New Age literature. Yet by the go-go eighties, these ideas once again seemed countercultural—especially at the Business School.

“It was completely unlike any other course at Stanford,” says Denise Brosseau, MBA ’93, who co-founded the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs with classmate Jennifer Gill Roberts from the personal mission statement Brosseau developed in the course. “It was the first recognition at the Business School that there’s more to life than money. I had always known that, but you can question your reality when you go to a place like that,” says Brosseau, who led the forum for 10 years. (She’s now CEO of Showcase Technology Inc., a company she recently co-founded.)

She and others call the course a misnomer. Its scope goes far beyond business, and most people think of creativity only as the ability to generate ideas. Ray is interested in this innovative sort of creativity, but he cares far more about the broader sense of the word: what one alum called “being your self in life.”

This double meaning serves Ray well. Tye recalls that when he once told Ray that the creativity class is really about courage, Ray responded, “I know, but don’t tell anybody because they wouldn’t have approved a class on courage.”

Perhaps not, though when he introduced the class in the 1979-80 academic year following a period of intense soul-searching, Ray was already a tenured professor, teaching courses in advertising, marketing management, and research methods. He had arrived at Stanford in 1967 after working in advertising and earning his doctorate in social psychology, and by the late seventies was outwardly successful but inwardly miserable. In one of the personal development courses he took during that period of turmoil, he met Rochelle Myers, a multitalented artist and art therapist, and the two developed and taught Personal Creativity in Business, the first such course in a major business school. The class quickly took off and eventually led to similar courses elsewhere. Srikumar Rao, a professor at Long Island University who also has taught his own Creativity and Personal Mastery class at Columbia, Kellogg, and the London School of Business, calls Ray an inspiration. Rao says he’d wanted to teach a course like this for some time, but thought that no business school would ever want it. But when he learned of Ray’s course and its popularity, he thought, “If Michael can pull it off at Stanford, maybe I can pull it off, too.”

While it’s hard to know the course’s impact on its more than 1,500 former students, interviews with a decidedly nonrandom sample—mainly those Ray has stayed in touch with—reveal a profound and lasting effect. The biggest take-home lesson: Listen to your inner voice.

Trusting Your Intuition
Brosseau provides a most dramatic example. During an in-class exercise she describes as a guided meditation but that Ray says is more generally known as a “visualization,” she made what she calls the best decision of her life: to call off her wedding 10 weeks before the big day. “I had the dress, the invitations, everything—and the next day I left the relationship.”

What happened? The exercise, in which Ray had students imagine meeting and getting advice from a “wise old person” of their choice, left her sobbing—”something you just don’t do at the Business School,” she now says with a laugh. The exercise helped her quiet her mind enough to hear what she already knew. She’s learned, she says, that “there may be 450 reasons to do something, but if your heart isn’t saying ‘Yes,’ don’t do it.”

“For the kind of student attracted to the Business School, that’s a counterintuitive message,” says Heidi Roizen, MBA ’83, a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital. “It’s OK to think analytically,” she adds, “but especially in early stage in venture capital, there’s no amount of due diligence you can do to be absolutely certain something is a good investment, so you have to trust your gut.” Roizen often uses Ray’s question, “Is it a Yes or is it a No?” as a simple way to tap into that inner wisdom. “Take a deep breath, and often the answer comes to you.”

A Road Less Traveled
Listening to their inner voice took some alums off the seemingly logical career path. Larry Smith, Sloan ’01, says that when Cummins Engine paid his way through the competitive one-year program, the company viewed him as “one of the fast-trackers, to be gross about it.” So when he left Cummins just a couple years later to work in the nonprofit sector—taking a pay cut of about $40,000—some people said he was crazy. But those who knew him well weren’t surprised. Smith, now associate director of the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University and a lay minister in his church, hasn’t looked back.

That’s because living a life true to your self is priceless, suggests Ray. Kraig King, MBA ’83, who left a management career to earn a doctorate in psychology, feels his current work in helping executives and organizations become more effective is a more authentic path for him. But, he says, “If I were to just do a cost-benefit analysis, I doubt that I would have taken the approach that I took.”

The path for Jim Collins, MBA ’83, became clear when he applied his favorite live-with from the course: “Do only what is easy, effortless, and enjoyable.” Collins, who wrote the foreword to Ray’s latest book, The Highest Goal (Berrett-Koehler, 2005), realized in his twenties that for him, having a job did not pass the “EEE” test. “I was just not cut out to work for other people,” Collins says. That discovery led him to independent research, which became the basis of the bestsellers Built to Last and Good to Great. But when he started that work, he had no idea it would make him rich. “I thought if I could barely scratch a living I’d be happy.”

Ray makes no claims that his techniques will bring material wealth—in fact, worldly success is beside the point. What is important, says Ray, is making your life itself a work of art. As he’d tell his students, “This kind of creativity is essential for health, success, and happiness in business and in life.”

Microfinance: Small Loans Make a Big Impact

Doing Good Pays Unexpected Dividends

Creativity: Ray of Enlightenment

Personal Finance: Renegotiating Debt One Consumer at a Time

Best Practice: Pioneering Supply Chain Forum Turns 10