Flipping the Switch
A journalist turned eBay pioneer, Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation faculty member Mary Lou Song reflects on curiosity, leadership, and the entrepreneurial mindset.
Mary Lou Song (’91) knows what it means to follow your curiosity. A journalist turned tech pioneer, Song spent 25 years working at the intersection of technology and community before joining the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation as a faculty and advisory board member.
Today, she teaches Leading Innovative Teams , a course offered in the winter and spring quarters. Below, Song unpacks curiosity, leadership, and the meaning of the entrepreneurial mindset.
What does the entrepreneurial mindset mean to you?
The entrepreneurial mindset is caring so deeply about another person's problem that you're compelled to find a solution. And even if that solution takes a lot of effort, you keep trying and trying and trying again.
How do you teach that to students?
We focus a lot on curiosity. In my leadership course, I teach students how to ask questions and to use questions and even conflict as an expression of care and curiosity.
What's the benefit of developing that kind of curiosity in the classroom and beyond?
The benefit of having an entrepreneurial mindset is not just academic. It helps you venture into the world and make life better for other people. This is a life skill. We're teaching students to be committed to something so deeply that it drives them forward.
Tell us about your early career. How did you end up at eBay?
The story of how I got to eBay is a good example of the entrepreneurial mindset in action. Some of the best advice I ever heard from a professor here at Medill was to follow your passions. In 1996, I knew that I was passionate about the internet, building community, and shopping.
I happened to go to a gathering one evening where I met one of the founders of eBay. I asked him what he was doing for work, and he said, "Oh, we're building an internet company where people buy and sell from one another." I thought, "Oh my gosh, I'm so curious. I have to learn more." We met the next week, and I basically begged him for a job. I was very lucky he hired me. The rest is history.
What ultimately brought you to teaching?
I had just shut down my last startup, and then the pandemic hit and my mother was dying of cancer. She made me promise that I would go back to school. It was a promise I had to keep.
I went back to school and decided to study leadership, people, and organizations. What I learned through getting my doctorate degree was that I wished I'd known all of this as a student before I started my entrepreneurship and my career. I knew I had to come and teach students about how leadership and organizations and teams would help them in their entrepreneurial endeavors.
Why focus specifically on leadership and organizations?
Every failure I saw in my career was rooted in a team's inability to come together and function as a team. I realized that it's up to leaders to build that sense of team. That is a key ingredient to succeeding as an entrepreneur and an innovator.
How does curiosity connect to building strong teams?
At the heart of teams and entrepreneurship is our ability to share knowledge with one another. Being curious allows us to open up and to share what we know. The team then benefits from that shared knowledge to build its solutions.
How do you know when a student has truly embraced the mindset?
The great thing about having an entrepreneurial mindset is that your curiosity becomes part of you and it's embedded in everything that you do every day. Once you really embrace that curiosity, it's hard to let go—you can't undo it. I think of it as a switch. After that switch is turned on, it stays on. Part of our mission here at Farley is to make sure we flip that switch.