Prof takes road less traveled

Why has Mason Carpenter connected with his students so well that he’s won two teaching awards in the Business School plus a nomination for a third in just four years?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind that whistles through a mountain pass in Southern California. The pass was part of a very eclectic set of experiences that Carpenter had before he ever set foot in Grainger Hall in 1997 as an assistant professor. And that diversity, he says, profoundly affects his teaching.

Carpenter did something in 1991 that probably no other bank vice president – that’s what he was then – has done in the history of the world: haul 25-foot blue-and-white umbrellas to artfully placed positions on a mountain pass. The designer of the umbrella irruption was Christo, the “installation artist” who has wrapped an island in fabric and assembled a wall of 13,000 multicolored oil barrels, among other things.

Carpenter coordinated 200 volunteers for the Christo umbrella event because his bank was a cosponsor, and he got a mind-blower out of the bargain. “The idea was far-fetched,” he says, “but once the umbrellas were in place, it was surreal, just amazing to see.”

Peer farther back into Carpenter’s past, and you won’t be surprised that one day he found himself tussling with giant umbrellas on a mountain pass.

When he enrolled at Humboldt State University in California, he wanted to become a forester, and for good family reasons. His mother’s grandparents were part of an entire village in Denmark that picked up and moved to Oregon almost a century ago. “Our family is still there as lumberjacks who have developed techniques of sustainable logging,” says Carpenter.

But as a college student he saw that the job market for foresters was not especially expansive, so he switched to a finance major. Oh, and to help put himself through college, Mason Carpenter worked as a – what else? – mason and carpenter. His double-tradesman name was sheer coincidence, “or at least that’s my parents’ story,” he says.

After graduation Carpenter was an assistant bank manager for three years and then took, at least for the banking world, a flying leap. He enrolled for a year at the University of Bordeaux in France and earned a diploma in enology, the science of winemaking.

“I was told that if I loved wine, I would hate the winemaking industry,” he says. It was indeed a tough time in the industry, with lots of retrenchment and layoffs.

But while a student in Bordeaux, Carpenter did get a chance to work for Legh Knowles, a former trumpeter with Glen Miller who later transmogrified himself into the chairman of Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa Valley. Knowles wanted a greater European presence for his wines, so he leaned on the language skills of Carpenter, who speaks French and Danish plus some German and Spanish.

“People come from all over the world to buy wine in Bordeaux, so you hear lots of languages,” he says. It may also be in the blood, because of his mother’s Danish roots and his paternal grandmother’s birth in Switzerland, where polyglottism runs rampant.

Carpenter was lured from the French vineyards to run a consulting and software company in Bakersfield, Calif. “They said they would pay me enough so I could fly to Napa Valley any time I wanted to,” he says with a smile.

He knows Napa well, by the way, having grown up in the Bay area. “I remember my dad and I driving there back when the wineries were barns,” he says.

After two years as a software CEO, Carpenter moved back to banking as a corporate officer/Christo coordinator. Bakersfield also brought him his wife-to-be, Lisa, from a fifth-generation local family.

She went a long way from those family ties when she followed her husband on another his leaps, this time into academe, when he enrolled in 1992 as a doctoral business student at the University of Texas in Austin. Five years later Carpenter came to UW–Madison, where he conducts research on the role of CEOs and boards of directors in the strategic management of global firms.

And teaches up a storm, apparently. This year he was picked by MBA students to receive their Professor of the Year Award and by the Business School to receive the Larson Excellence in Teaching Award, one of only two teaching awards granted each year by the school. He also was nominated by the school for the UW–Madison Distinguished Teaching Award.

Carpenter’s classes, which include the strategy unit in the MBA curriculum, are known for their high energy and student involvement. “I don’t want students to be passive recipients of messages,” he says. “That’s why I use class exercises that allow students to take over the teaching at times.

“My ultimate goal in strategy is not to teach students the mastery of tools and techniques, but to help them ask the right questions. It’s easy to have a tool and then look for an opportunity to apply it. But it’s more important to know when the old tools don’t apply and it’s time to find or invent a new one.”

Carpenter wants his students to have a deeper understanding than black-and-white textbook examples convey, and that’s where the experience of this banker-winemaker-CEO-professor cuts in.

“There are so many shades of gray in the world, including some that are counterintuitive,” he says. “I try to recognize those nuances through the complexity of questions I ask, as well as the practical implications of those questions.”

In other words, Carpenter uses questions as an enologist uses grapes: To tease out the glorious complexity of life.