What do we learn from living?
This is the question Dr. Derrick Warren wants people to ask themselves.
As dean of the College of Business at Grambling State University, a former associate dean at Southern University and A&M College’s College of Business, the son of educators and a self-professed super-fan of schoolteachers, Warren knows the academic world. And because his experiences have resulted in a great deal of wisdom, students, colleagues and others in his circle have wasted no time trying to glean some of it for themselves.
“I’m often asked, ‘What’s the most necessary skill a student needs to have?’ and it’s a tough question because the future of work is all about skills,” Warren said. “I tell people that one of the greatest skills we can have is the skill to continuously learn.”
Learning, of course, happens as much in the classroom as it does out in the world, and that’s the part Warren wants his students to think about most.
Prior to academia, Warren spent 32 years at IBM. He spent seven of those years working abroad—in Tokyo, Shanghai and Johannesburg—before returning to the U.S. to retire and then earn his Doctor of Business Administration from Georgia State’s Robinson College of Business.
“I’m like a cat. I have multiple lives,” Warren laughed, adding that, as the son of two educators, in the back of his mind, he always thought “part of a paying it forward strategy was to give back in education.”
“I earned an MBA [from the University of South Florida] and wanted to leverage my undergraduate degree in computer science [from Southern University]. I really wanted to work in the business of technology, and looked at programs that offered an executive doctorate degree,” he said. “Robinson has been recognized as one of the most innovative programs in the country. The staff and faculty created an amazing learning experience. The access to resources and opportunities was invaluable.”
Part of Warren’s vision at Grambling is to offer the same access to resources and opportunities he received at Robinson.
Warren speaks at a student event at Grambling State.
As someone who believes “there is no business without technology and no technology without business,” Warren hopes to infuse all of Grambling’s business degree programs with technology. AI and the ethics around it are a major focus.
“It’s not AI you need to be afraid of. It’s the person who knows how to use it,” he said.
Warren hopes to help his students develop an entrepreneurial mindset, so they can approach frustration with curiosity.
“Frustrations cause us to problem-solve,” he said. “Problem-solving is how some of our greatest entrepreneurs develop products. Companies like Uber, Doordash, Google, Open AI and Apple came out of wanting to make something better or taking something that was frustrating or hard and transitioning it into something new, exciting and innovative.”
Warren believes you learn best by asking questions, reading and having a curiosity about the world. He dedicated a TED Talk to his experiences living abroad, which taught him how to adapt quickly to life’s changing circumstances. By using his own life as an example, he hopes can encourage his students to parlay their experiences into skills they can take anywhere.
And it also brings Warren full circle to that question he wants people to ask themselves: What do we learn from living?
“I always tell people I just want to be better today than I was yesterday, and better tomorrow than I am today,” he said.
Watching his students strive to do the same thing in their lives is the only reward he needs.
“I’m seeing students grow, thrive and learn,” Warren said. “I feel I’ve found my purpose.”