A Q&A with Eric Zackrison, Lecturer in Technology Management

Our department had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with Professor Eric Zackrison, one of our incredible lecturers. Read his full interview to learn more about his background, teaching experience and more—as well as to get an in-depth look at a recently developed core course for our Undergraduate Certificate, TMP X111, which he has been teaching. 

Find him at his LinkedIn here!

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Tell me a little bit about yourself. 

Q: What is your background?  

A: I was a restaurant owner! I’d worked in a restaurant since I was a kid. Then, at 23, I started managing a chain of restaurants called Bombay Bicycle Club. I was quickly made into a fix-it person, so I was sent to stores and tasked with turning them around. After that, I worked for independent restaurants before I opened my first restaurant in 2002 in Springfield, Missouri. In pretty quick succession, I’d built four restaurants and a full-service catering business. 

Then, In 2008, I started to pull back a bit. We had just closed my fine dining restaurant, Agrario due to financial reasons, backed out of another due to a bad partner, and I was running the Patton Alley Pub. I remember it was around 3 AM, I had one kid and was planning for a second, and as I was closing the bar, I thought, “Money’s never a guarantee, and it’s hard to spend time with my family.” We’d already lost one restaurant due to financial challenges, and with one child and another on the way, I decided to change course.

So I decided to go back to school to get my PhD. Funny though as I didn't actually have an undergraduate degree yet. I had a hundred and 30-something-odd semester hours, which is a lot, but not in one thing. So, I met with an advisor, and they gave me options: Theater, Creative Writing, Anthropology, or Communication. For Theater, Creative Writing, and Anthropology; I only needed 2-3 classes for each major, but I needed 3 semesters of foreign language. With Communication, I had more classes to take, but I could do it in a year, so I decided to do that for my Bachelor's. And it turned out that I loved it. Then, I was torn because the idea was to return to school to get my PhD in business or management. So then I thought…well, maybe I want to do communication? 

I got an MBA and a master's in communications concurrently. Then, I applied to UCSB. It was the only school I applied for in the Communication Department—with Dave Seibold and a couple of other folks. And I got in, right? So then, after that, there was no looking back. I came out here and have been associated with UCSB since 2011. 

Q: What brought you to the Department of Technology Management? 

A: So, this is interesting! During the first year of my PhD in the Communications department I was encouraged to take something outside of the discipline. I had signed up for an Economics class that was really interesting. I can't remember the name of it, but it was looking at the intersection between civic, nonprofit, and for-profit leadership and policy—economic policy creation—and that's something I am really interested in. I took this class, and the first night, we get about an hour and a half in, and I'm like…I have no idea what is happening. Like, completely. I know that he's speaking English, but I have no idea what the words are! And so, right away, I called a friend of mine who was getting her PhD in Economics, and she was like…get out of that class. That's so far beyond what you know! So, Dave Seibold was teaching a TM class on leading innovation or something like that, and I took it. Of course, Dave was my PhD advisor, but I still really liked it. I ended up TA-ing for him a couple times. After I finished my PhD in 2017, that next year, Paul Leonardi asked me if I would teach a business communication class for the MTM program. 

So I ended up teaching that business communication class for the Master’s students right after I got my PhD. I did that one or two more times until Gary Hansen asked me to revamp the management class for the undergraduates. So I started teaching that, and then Strategy. Then Guy Gabriele fell ill and the team was like, well, Eric's got an MBA so he knows marketing, and I said yes, I would teach marketing. So now, I think I've taught a bit of everything—except entrepreneurship, which is funny because I was an entrepreneur for so much of my life! 

Q: What is one thing that people would be surprised to know about you?

A: My dad lived in Sweden when I was a kid, so I spent all of my summers there, as well as my freshman year in high school to my 21st year. 

Tell me about the core class for the Undergraduate Certificate Program, TMP X111.

Q: What is new and/or different about this course, and what does it bring to our curriculum?

A: It's an offshoot of John Greathouse’s speaker series class that he used to teach. With his, I believe it was typically a one-credit class that students would take twice. He brought four to five people in a quarter, and I think his class style was more of a speaker course with prepared slides. 

In the shift to TMP X111, the goal was to use the course to motivate more people to complete the certificate. Not that students don't love taking finance! But we wanted to provide something that students would really dig. I already have a good relationship with students in general, and I know many people locally—not anything like Greathouse did, of course—but the idea was that I might be a good person for it. 

And it's a really fun class! It’s a fireside chat-style interview. I look for a blend of diverse speakers in a few ways. I try to mix it up by bringing in speakers from various industries and ensuring we have a diverse group, including women and people of color. I bring in folks who are far along in their careers, like top-level executives with these amazing, inspirational stories that make students say, "Oh, that's really cool." And then I also get speakers who are a bit earlier in their careers—usually around the director level, and many of them past MTM students—so it shows current students, "I can see how I can get from where I am to that." It also works as promo for the MTM program! We’ve got a number of kids who applied for the MTM program right from this class.

We get some great people to come and speak. This quarter, we already had Ali Bauerlein, who participated in the second New Venture Competition. That was with Inogen, which specializes in handheld oxygen tanks. And funnily enough, last quarter, I had Kathy Odell, who was the CEO of that company. She's a luminary in women-owned businesses; locally, she was the executive director for Women's Economic Ventures (WEV) for a while. We had Richard Townhill, who was in product marketing for Apple. And now he does that for Airbnb. We had Matt Beane, of course. Steve Wells, who does transportation stuff. Heike Schirmer, who ran the Amazon space downtown. And more!

For next quarter, we've got a couple of MTM-ers: Michael Curtis, who's at Apeel, Matt Baum, who's out of Procore, and then people like Kevin O’Connor, who's at ScOp Venture Capital and actually started the company that Amazon acquired for their work here in Santa Barbara. 

Q: How has the student experience in the class been so far? 

A: The students are loving it. I mean, the feedback is really positive. It gets them ideas about what Technology Management means, right? They hear from a lot of different perspectives, and they can see all of the directions that they can go in. Because we have people that are in hardware, people in software, people in medtech, people in biotech…I've got Kelsey Judd, who works for Redwire Space, which is an aerospace company, right? It's a wide range of industries they get to hear about, and they hear what it means to be a leader there. One of the things that keeps coming up over and over again is that it's about relationships, which I love them hearing. It's about who you surround yourself with and how you treat them. 

We’re already seeing student enthusiasm reflected in our numbers. Typically, we have less than 200 students a year finishing the certificate. In the Fall Quarter, we had 75, and this quarter we got 105. Next quarter already we have 75. So we’re already blowing the numbers away.

Q: What might prospective students not know about the class, and what will students really be focusing on? 

A: Again, it's relatively straightforward. It's a 2-credit class, so it's not a heavy workload. It really consists of questions, discussion, and a short reflective paper to cover what they learned. And then a little bit of reading…and that's really it. Mostly, it’s a way for students to see where they could go, and an opportunity for them to meet and hear from business people in tech and to bring our previous MTM students back full-circle. 

For the focus…it's really broad. I mean, it covers leadership: how to face challenges in different technology organizations, manage those, and build teams. It varies. Strategy comes up, since most of these students are talking about the strategies they took and how they were successful. Management: the decisions you have to make. All of our classes just provide more examples. For example, you can go, oh, I remember this idea from this other class and now I can see it here. I see that a lot in students’ questions. 

Q: Do you have any additional context that you think would bring more eyes to this class?

A: It was a really smart move to build a community around MTM and TM. So, not just getting more students involved and seeing how they can apply what they’ve learned, but also bringing more of the business community into it. That's one of the things I really like: this class brings together the things we do in our department. All of the things the TM department does—TMP X111 makes it real and brings those disparate groups together in a really interesting way. 

Tell me more about teaching, on a broader level, in our department. 

Q: What has been your favorite class to teach? 

A: I've developed a leadership class for this quarter that has been super fun. It's my primary area of expertise, you know. It's been a lot of fun to engage with the students in a way that gets them to really think about the way they interact with the world and other people around them. I sent out a survey to all the students, and people are loving it. It’s funny because one student told me, “It just feels like a lot of this is common sense.” And I had to tell him that he’d be shocked by just how much common sense is not as common as you would think! 

Q: If you could give your students—past, present, or prospective—any advice, what would it be?

A: It's what I tell my students all the time now: it's about your network. That's how you build success in the future. By making sure that you're talking to people, building relationships, and maintaining those relationships, that's how you’re going to be successful. The price difference between schools doesn’t come from learning anything different. What you're really doing is getting exposed to different people, right? One of the big advantages I have on this campus and with TM is that we can connect people. These students don't have to be taking these classes. They're all doing something above and beyond their own majors. And so I tell them, you've got all these people in class that you know are driven. Talk to them, meet them. Know them! Because they're going to go out and do cool things, and they may end up doing something, somewhere that you’ll want to be at, 10 years from now. 

That's the big thing. Relationships, network. 

Q: Are there any classes you’d be interested in teaching in the future? 

A: If I could bring one class up here, it would be the interviewing class I used to teach for the Communication Department. I covered how you should structure your interviews, what kinds of questions you should ask, that kind of thing. Interviewing is used in marketing, it's used in consulting, it's used in all kinds of situations. In the class, we would go over persuasive interviews with sales, and then we’d spend a number of weeks on hiring: from the side of the interviewer, but also from the interviewee. 

It was a basic interviewing class, but it was just super fun to teach. I don't know if we have room for it right now, but maybe in the future!

Tell me a little about your other academic or on-campus activities.

Q: Are you associated with any academic or on-campus organizations that you would like to highlight?

A: Oh, there's a few. So I'm the faculty advisor for the Gaucho Creative, and they kill it. They’re a marketing consulting group, student-founded and student-organized. They brought me in when they were doing some huge projects one quarter, but now I've been the faculty advisor for them for three years. I love that I’m just an advisor, too; they really do everything. 

I've also had a number of students come and tell me that they want to start a group, and I help them with it. I just guided a group of students as they put Gauchos in Business together, and I speak to many of those groups, often about hiring. 

Q: Do you have anything that you'd like to promote to our readership? 

A: I've got a lot of online courses, in places like LinkedIn and Coursera. I've got 10 courses on each of those. The classes are primarily on soft skills—things like critical thinking, problem-solving, and leadership. But viewership has been great. I am at about 1.3 million views there!
I'm also on the board of Ventech. They've always got really good programming. And then I do a lot of work with the Economic Development Collaborative and Women's Economic Ventures, mostly focusing on small business advice. I was a small business owner for a long time, and so I don't get to solve those kinds of problems or talk much about that in class, so being able to help with those on a volunteer basis is fun and so rewarding.