Just Do It!

I had my bitter taste with the Waterfall approach when I became the Founding Dean of the music department at the University of Shanghai Science and Technology at a young age of 26. At that time, I had lived in the States for 13 years, and I have always wanted to be more than just a successful concert pianist who has performed at all the great halls all over the world, hence I moved back to China with a dream to change the world.

The year was 2011. With the rise of the middle class in China, Chinese people began to appreciate performing arts, and seek to provide a well-rounded education for their children. I want to make music education fun, easy, and innovative.

My department was the first of its kind in the whole country. All the students came from Engineering and Science major, with little or no prior music experience. I had to design a completely new curriculum that is easy enough for them to pick up yet sufficiently challenging to keep them engaged. I also incorporated technological aspect into the curriculum with music engineering courses as well as sonic design, so they can understand the linkage between music arts and their respective domain expertise.

Good universities in China are all state-run, and with their multi-layer leadership, it resembles a mini-government. I had to go through an extremely tedious process in order to get any new ideas up and running, such as writing a detailed 5-year plan with student survey, benchmarking with other universities, budgeting, and many more. Often times I suspect the rules are made this way so one loses the desire to change along the process. What frustrated me most was that they expected me to come up with a complete 5-year plan while I was not even sure if this idea could take off and grow. How can I start imagining numbers when I was creating a truly original idea in the whole country?

Knowing there is little I can do to change the bureaucratic system of a state-run university, I decided to change tack and open my own music school where I used the Agile approach, although at that time I was not aware of this terminology. I did not waste too much time writing up the ‘perfect’ business plan, because I knew by the time I finished writing the plan, the business climate would have changed. I started looking for locations, recruiting team members, designing curriculum and brochures simultaneously. I also started spreading the word that I will be opening my own music school and have early bird pre-registration available before I finished renovating the space. By the time of my soft opening, the original ‘plan’ had been changed 10 times, and design of the classrooms ended up looking nothing like what I designed originally, as it was an evolving process with many moving variables. For instance, I first designed the class size to be 10 for kids age 4 and younger, however later I learned that one of the parents would usually attend the class together with the child, which means I have to increase the classroom sizes in addition to changing the price. With this Agile approach, I was able to get my ‘start-up’ business off the ground with minimum expenditure, and I am proud to say that we successfully have 100 students within our one year of opening.

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