Posted April 28, 2011
Competitive spirit, experience drive Carey’s success as a teacher
At age 22 and only a month out of college, Dwight Carey started his first business — a driving school — with $250 and a Nash Rambler. In three years, the company became the largest of its kind in the country.
At 27, Carey sold his business, started a consulting firm and partnered with Sears Roebuck to build another driving school. Two years later, that venture outperformed his first.
“Kiddingly, I say I don’t mind competing against other people, but when I have to compete against myself, I have to try even harder,” he said.
When Carey walks into a classroom at Temple’s Fox School of Business or College of Engineering, he carries with him a spirit of competition, self-discipline and a 47-year history of entrepreneurship in almost every industry.
He also carries a lot of paper.
Carey, a recipient of a 2011 Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching, meticulously reads and comments on each assignment turned in to him, ranging from business plans to PowerPoint printouts. He also includes rhetorical statements to encourage deeper thinking. “Would you have acted like the CEO did?” “How would you have handled that HR situation?”
“I love being in the classroom, but it’s a lot of work and a lot of preparation,” said Carey, an instructor of strategic management who joined Temple’s faculty in 2006. “Marking, grading and writing on papers, to me, is an intellectual conversation with your student.”
That isn’t the half of it. Carey introduces himself to students two weeks before the semester with an 18-question survey, course syllabus and description, and a welcoming letter with their first case study. During the semester, student teams typically analyze and present information from 16 case studies. Everyone, including Carey, evaluates each speaker on presentation style and content.
He prints his “presenter’s evaluation form” 10,000 copies at a time.
A senior fellow at Temple’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute and dean’s teaching fellow at the Fox School, Carey regularly advises student-entrepreneurs. He has mentored the grand-prize winners of the 2010, 2009 and 2007 Be Your Own Boss Bowl, a university-wide business-plan competition.
It’s no wonder his students are so successful. Carey has started 17 businesses and continues to manage three. His American Productivity Group is a leading provider of factory automation equipment worldwide. He is a four-time Congressional Business Man of the Year.
Fox School student Mohamed Ali Niang, whose social entrepreneurship venture Malo Traders seeks to help rice farmers in Mali, is one of the many recipients of Carey’s guidance. Carey sits on the company’s Board of Mentors, and he and Niang meet every Thursday morning.
“He brings what entrepreneurship is in reality, which is flexibility, energy and expertise,” Niang said. “As young, aspiring entrepreneurs, this is exactly what we need. We don’t want to be boxed in.”
Neither does Carey, whose passions range from robotics and fine art to his triplet grandsons.
“It’s a very selfish reason I’m so excited with my students. They’re going to partially make the world that my grandchildren are going to grow up in,” Carey said. “I sure hope it’s a nice world.”