Reeducating Our Educators

The Conference Board Review^® Article

It’s the first step toward inspiring today’s youth.

By Larry Farrell

Larry Farrell is the founder of The Farrell Co., a worldwide organization that researches and teaches entrepreneurial practices. His most recent books are Getting Entrepreneurial! and The Entrepreneurial Age. He can be reached via www.TheSpiritOfEnterprise.com.

The same week that the United States and Peru signed their long-awaited free-trade agreement, I was speaking in Lima at the eighteenth annual Latin American Congress on the Entrepreneurial Spirit. Of course, the trade agreement was the headline news all week, promising new economic opportunity for 27 million Peruvians and giving a major political victory to the country's pro-growth government. The large conclave on entrepreneurship that I addressed, hosted by Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola (USIL), was also an apparent success, with participants attending from more than twenty countries. I soon realized, however, that the most interesting aspect of the week for me was not the conference or even the historic trade agreement — it was the hosting university. It is the most innovative, entrepreneurially focused academic institution I have ever come across.

USIL was founded fifteen years ago by Raúl Diez Canseco Terry, a Peruvian serial entrepreneur who brought to his country KFC, Pizza Hut, Chili's, and Starbucks. He also served as Peru's economic minister and, for three years, vice president. During a long interview with Terry, I learned that his is an authentic rags-to-riches story. "I come from a middle-class family," he explains. "My father worked in a chocolate factory, which was taken over by the military in one of our earlier military coups, and he lost his livelihood. So I was only able to go to college because I was awarded a scholarship by Pacific University, a Jesuit college in Peru. Because of that, I had a dream early on to start a prep school to help poor but deserving kids get into college."

After begging and borrowing to get the required franchise fee, Terry was somehow able to convince KFC to give him a chance to start up its Peru business. This proved to be a seminal event in his life, one that not only made him rich but also enabled him to become Peru's most notable "social entrepreneur" by fulfilling his youthful dream of helping poor people help themselves.

His social mission really took hold during a terrible flood, when he opened dozens of KFC free-food tents to feed victims. "I was working with poor people, and I saw two ways to go with my entrepreneurial success," he recalls. "The first way was to say that this is not my problem — poor people don't affect me one way or another. The second way, I could say that if we don't change all this poverty in Peru, the country can never succeed politically or economically. It was an easy choice for me, to devote the rest of my life trying to help good but often poor people help themselves."

Terry's educational ventures actually began when he founded a unique high school in Lima, a preparatory academy that served as an innovative alternative within the Peruvian education system to promote vocational and professional training. Terry describes the school's mission at that time as "being an educational organization that enables enterprising young people to successfully perform in a competitive labor market." Expanding that concept to the university level, Terry founded USIL. With fourteen thousand students, USIL is Peru's fastest-growing college and is already recognized as one of Latin America's most prestigious private schools. Terry has also expanded his original mission statement to "preparing enterprising professionals for a globalized world."

The most innovative thing about USIL is its faculty. Every professor is required to imbue every student with the idea of seeing his or her education as an entrepreneurial possibility. The university's vice chancellor, Lourdes Flores Nano — a lawyer, political leader, and two-time presidential candidate — put it best: "We want professionals for a twenty-first-century Peru — graduates who are well acquainted with the national economy and who regard the world as the space where they will operate. This is why we emphasize entrepreneurship and management in all the educational programs we offer, whether it's engineering, law, medicine, information technology, the humanities, or social work."

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Return to the March/April 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.