This is a transcript of the Spur of the Moment episode “Loving nature, science, and each other with George Sparks.” It is provided as a courtesy and may contain errors.
George Sparks: We create belonging and hope through nature and science, and I am really excited about that. Given the state of the world today and our political fractious nature that we’re going through right now, how do we bring people together? I say how do we fall in love with nature and in love with each other? Again,
Jocelyn Hittle: Welcome to Spur of the Moment, the podcast of Colorado State University’s Spur Campus in Denver, Colorado.
George Sparks: Well, I think people, we’d like to think that as human beings, we are really special. We’re separate from nature, and I liken it to sometimes I think we think we’re going to the zoo and looking in on nature. We are nature.
Jocelyn Hittle: On this podcast, we talk with experts in food, water, health and sustainability and learn about their current work and their career journeys. I’m Jocelyn Hittle, associate Vice president of the CS u Burg campus. I’m joined today by George Sparks, the CEO of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. George has been with the museum for 20 years. Prior to this, he spent 24 years in the electronics measurement business at Hewlett Packard and Agilent Technologies. His career included marketing, sales and general management of global businesses and software systems and services. Prior to hp, George spent nine years in the Air Force as a pilot and as assistant professor of aeronautics at the US Air Force Academy. He’s a distinguished graduate of the US Air Force Academy with a BS in aeronautical engineering and holds an MS in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. And I want to ask questions about those words and what those degrees mean as we talk today. George is also passionate about public policy and how it intersects with science and education. As a result, he is the founder of the Institute for Science and Policy at the museum, and he sets on a number of boards related to business policy and education in Denver. Welcome, George.
George Sparks: Thank you Jocelyn. Glad to be here.
Jocelyn Hittle: So glad to have you. So I’d like to start with your work today and talk a little bit about the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the museum?
George Sparks: Yeah, the Denver Museum Nature and Science was incorporated in 19 hundreds, so we’re 124 years old. Originally, we were the Colorado Museum of Natural History, then became the Denver Museum of Natural History, and now we’re the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. That happened about 25 years ago. Last year we served 2.4 million people inside the building and outside the building budget’s about $50 million. We have about 1500 volunteers, which are one of our superpowers, and we just love serving the people of the region here. It’s a fabulous place. I’m blessed to be able to be at an organization like this.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s great. You mentioned a couple of statistics about the museum. I wonder if we could focus in on a couple of those. You mentioned how many visitors come to the museum? Are they mostly from Denver and from Colorado, or do you welcome people from all over the place? How does that break down a little?
George Sparks: Well, it’s interesting. Places like the Smithsonian are 90 to 95% visitors and only about 10% of our visitors are people from outside the state. Most people when they come to Colorado go to the mountains skiing and hiking and such, and they’re on their way to or from the airport when they come through here. So we’d like to grow that part of our business, but we really are here for the local audience for the most part.
Jocelyn Hittle: Well, that must change things a little bit in how you approach what it is that the museum offers. I mean, I think most of our listeners are probably familiar with the Nature and Science Museum. They probably have something similar in their own cities. How does the fact that you are serving repeat visitors really impact how you design the programs and exhibits you have?
George Sparks: So while the Smithsonian doesn’t have to change that often because you may only go once in a lifetime, we like to have people come two or three times a year. So that means we always have to have something fresh here. So traveling exhibits are the way that we do that typically, and programs, we’ll have somewhere between four and five temporary traveling exhibitions come through the museum every year. We also do lots and lots of programming with people from local region or people visiting from out of state. So we try to mix it up a lot so that every time you come to the museum there’s something new to see.
Jocelyn Hittle: So what’s at the museum right now?
George Sparks: So right now we have orcas, which is about whales, and we also have poison, which has been one of our most popular. It’s actually the second time here, so that’s pretty fascinating. The traveling exhibit business is kind of fascinating. It took a hit during Covid and it really hasn’t recovered yet, and there aren’t that many more ramseys to be discovered or titanics to be found, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we’re going to have to figure out a new way to look at new things like AI and quantum, et cetera, to turn the new discoveries and especially around humanity and health, if you will, biology into traveling exhibits.
Jocelyn Hittle: So you have some core areas that are always the same that you change, but on a slower basis you have space odyssey and gems and minerals and other things that are kind of the favorites that everyone comes back to time and again. And then you have rotating exhibits that are traveling that are coming through like poison. You mentioned as one of the ones that’s there right now. How do you think about balancing those two things and what are some of the favorites that people come back to time and again?
George Sparks: Well, I think Space Odyssey and Expedition Health and the gems and mineral halls are top three as far as permanent exhibits. We also have an area for small kids, the discovery zone that’s really, really popular with families, with young children, and we’re constantly looking for new areas to add to that. So gems and minerals, we’re in the process now redesigning that, making it much larger and we spend a lot of time with the community about what they want. So those permanent exhibits are the foundation of the museum. And then the temporary exhibits are ones that we rotate through on a three to four five month rotation schedule. But we also have a slightly different set based around discoveries. For example, we have one now called Teen Rex, three young men up in North Dakota discovered a teenage T-Rex and called us up and we went up with them to help excavate that. A large screen film crew was there with us and made a film about it, which is now showing in museums all over the world. And we took one of our open spaces and set it up as a temporary exhibit very quickly, and we’re preparing the fossil live in front of the public right there in that space. So we have this new class of thing that’s kind of between a 10 year permanent exhibit and a four month temporary exhibit that our science team provides great opportunities for us.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s a great segue to another question I had about the museum. So yes, you’ve got sort of the longer term permanent exhibits that people come to time and again, you have the rotating exhibits, the traveling exhibits that come and go. But the museum also has a science team that is doing scientific research and work all the time regardless of what is on display, and provides an opportunity for new discoveries to be part of what the museum is showing to the public. So could you talk a little bit about that science program and what are some of the museum’s particular strengths?
George Sparks: So we have 15 PhD curators and about 65 people in total in the science division. So we cover all of the natural sciences like zoology and entomology and paleontology is probably the one that we’re most noted for vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology. That’s where a lot of the most popular discoveries come from because these are ancient things. We have an anthropology department that works on things like ancient humans as well as current things like Native American tribes, et cetera. So their job is really, they are really scientists publishing papers in real magazines like Science Magazine or Nature Magazine. And in some cases like this one with the teen Rex, they have great public appeal and we try to take advantage of that. Two weeks ago we had a press conference here. We had the three young men that discovered this. We had about, I don’t know, a third of the town of Monmouth, North Dakota came down for the viewing of the film.
George Sparks: There are only 97 people in the town. And then we had the premier of the film that was followed a week later by us going up to North Dakota and showing that film to all the people in the town. They have a theater up there that is under years old. It’s been closed about 40 years, and we had two showings of that for all the local people in town. And it was just magical to be able to give back to the folks up there, made the kids stars obviously, and was just one of the most memorable things that I’ve ever gotten to participate in. So our science team is one of our superpowers as well, and that’s what differentiates us from a science center. Science center really doesn’t do research. They’re probably a little stronger in some of the things like quantum mechanics or energy, et cetera, and we’re stronger in the natural sciences, although increasingly we we’re doing some of the short-term things around things like AI and quantum new discoveries in science and in biology.
Jocelyn Hittle: So the teen Rex discovery is a great story of how the public can engage with science. This was a discovery that they made on their own and then reached out to you. Why was the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the institution that they reached out to when they made that discovery?
George Sparks: So it starts 30 years ago, so 30 years ago up in Monmouth, North Dakota, which is in the Badlands, which is ground zero or heaven for vertebra paleontology, because of the way the fossils were preserved 30 years ago, a 10-year-old boy called up the museum and talked to our paleontologist, Kirk Johnson, and he said, I think I found a dinosaur. So Kirk goes up there and sure enough that 10-year-old had found a dinosaur. Today that 10-year-old is Tyler Leeson, our curator of paleontology here, and he has made many notable scientifically important and emotional scientific discoveries. One of his friends from high school calls up Tyler and says, Hey, my three young men up here that are related to me, two who are sons and one’s a nephew, I think they found a dinosaur, what do you think? And sent him a photograph of his son lying next to this giant femur.
George Sparks: Tyler said, yep, that’s a dinosaur, and I think it’s a duck bill because they were pretty prevalent up there. So toner went up and sure enough they’d found a dinosaur. So he made plans to go up and dig last summer to excavate what he thought was a duck be dinosaur. At the same time, a giant screen film crew called up and said, Hey, we’re doing a film around T-Rex. You got any T-Rex digs going on? And Tyler said, no, but we got this thing up in North Dakota. You’re welcome to come up and be with us. So they were there when as they began to excavate this, and as soon as they uncovered the first T-Rex tooth, they knew that it was a T-Rex and not a duck bill. And the film company captured all of that live in real time and were there for the entire dig. So we brought it back last fall and the film was finished and we have now sort of closed the loop on it after two years. So that kind of stuff, you just can’t make up. The oldest of these three young men now wants to be a paleontologist. So 30 years from now, the story could well repeat.
Jocelyn Hittle: And what I love about that story is the multi-generational piece of it. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science was a museum that they called because of this history of and legacy of being the people who were there and who have helped over many years to help explore the fossil beds in that area and getting the next generation excited about science. It’s not only something that happens in your walls, but it’s also happening out in the field.
George Sparks: And most things in life, it’s all about relationships. When you develop these relationships and you have ’em all over the world, when things happen, you’re the first one that they think about.
Jocelyn Hittle: Sure. They trust you and that’s really important. Yeah. Paleontology is obviously something that the museum excels at, and these discoveries that you are able to share with the public are really remarkable. Are there areas, you’ve mentioned AI and quantum computing or quantum technologies as an area that you’re growing, are there other areas that you’re interested in seeing the museum move into that you’re not working in as much right now?
George Sparks: Yeah, I think if the last 80 years, let’s say was the era of electrons and silicon and computers and the internet, I believe the next 80 years will be about biology and advances in health sciences. So we are really starting to pour a lot of work into redoing our expedition health hall, and then we’re partnering with, for example, the CHUs campus and the Gates Institute on what are some of the advances in biology that we need to be making people aware of. For example, you can go to the Gates Institute and they can regrow a retina on an assembly line based around your stem cells and plant that retina inside your eye. And similar things I think will be happening around regenerative medicine, replacing organs in your body and pairing that with ai. I mean, you can only fantasize about where that might lead as far as lifespans and what humanity means, if you will. So we are putting a major part of our plan into that area.
Jocelyn Hittle: I’m curious, the phrase you used there, what humanity means more about what you’re thinking about there?
George Sparks: Well, I think people, we like to think that as human beings, we are really special. We’re separate from nature, and I liken it too. Sometimes I think we think we’re going to the zoo and looking in on nature. We are nature. We were created at the Big Bang. All of the molecules and all of the universe were created in the Big Bang, all the atoms and mass, everything was created in that 300 milliseconds right after the Big Bang. And we evolved from that. I went to Ethiopia and saw Lucy the early hominid about a year and a half ago, and it was a transformative experience for me because there you realize that we’ve been around a long, long time and evolved a lot. The best day in human history was the day the asteroid hit the earth and put the dinosaurs out of business. So after the dinosaurs departed, mammals began to evolve and here we are. We are right now are the only intelligent life in the universe that we know about and we are continuing to evolve and we are nature. We are not separate from nature and it’s just a miracle when you think about it.
Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. And I’m originally a biologist by training and education as well. And so I don’t think of there being a bright line between humans and the rest of the ecosystem that we inhabit. Let’s talk a little bit about how you do spend your time as CEO. Tell us a little bit about what a typical day or a day in the life or week in the life for CEO of a Museum of Nature and science Looks like
George Sparks: Everybody’s different, but I get here at five in the morning so I can get a lot of work done before anybody shows up. And it’s really magical when you come to the museum at five in the morning, the dinosaurs are still out roaming around the museum and you just got to be careful. But it is a spiritual place at 5:00 AM in the morning and then people start showing up around eight and meetings begin three or four nights a week. I’m out in the evenings. So with either with donors or other business leaders or things in the community being part of this museum, I can pretty much get involved in anything I want. For example, I’m on the board of the Denver Council of Foreign Relations. I’m on a bunch of different business boards like the Metro Chamber or Colorado Business Round Table, ORM member of the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. We’re building a museum around that. So to me that’s fascinating to be involved in all aspects of the community. So lots of long days, but they’re all, for the most part, quite joyful. And I get to do things that I could never have imagined that I would when I was growing up.
Jocelyn Hittle: And you mentioned that because of being a part of this particular museum, you can engage in a lot of different ways, and I can imagine that that’s in part because the museum touches a lot of different aspects of our community and civic life.
George Sparks: Yeah, science and nature pretty much covers it. So if we were just say an art museum, that’s a much narrower lane, if you will. So we do a lot around education, sustainability, climate. As you know, we started the Institute for Science and Policy. Kristin Len Brock is ironically and maybe luckily is doing this season’s podcasts around wildfires. And three days ago before all these fires started, she was up on assessed 1 72 flying over the fire that almost took out Estes Park an hour after she landed the first fire up near Fort Collins broke out. And since then we’ve now four or five fires start along the front range. So we like to work on things that are relevant to people today. And this just happens to be one of the big ones this year.
Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely, it is. It could not be more relevant as I’m actually looking out of our window here in the podcast studio at Spur and can see, can barely see our mountains because of the amount of smoke that we’ve got coming from the four different fires that are happening here and the fires that are happening further west of us as well. So sometimes obviously you all have your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the scientific community and this summer maybe just happened to be particularly relevant, but it would’ve been relevant no matter what. How do you stay on top of what is coming? As you mentioned science touches everything, so how do you stay informed and how do you pick what topics the museum ought to tackle next?
George Sparks: Well, those are two separate things. One is how do you stay informed of what’s happening now? I read all the scientific publications, newsletters, et cetera. I probably get, I don’t know, 10 to 20 different newsletters every day around science, technology, current events, et cetera. So I consume a lot of information around that. I read a lot of books as you know around those topics. I’m engaged in conversations around those relevant topics as far as what the museum focuses on next. We have a team of people that are constantly out there scanning the traveling exhibition ecosystem to figure out what’s coming down the pike. And since we are one of the most successful museums that sponsoring temporary exhibits when they’re thinking about doing them, they usually come to us early in that process and say, how would this play in Denver? Because again, place like the Smithsonian wouldn’t be as interested in some of these as we might be.
George Sparks: So our team is really quite skilled at doing that. And then just trying to understand the big picture of what’s happening in the world, things like ai, quantum, et cetera. When Denver and Colorado, just the Elevate Quantum Award to be the quantum hub, and we were part of the team that we were part of that proposal, if you will, and we were responsible for working with DPS on helping educate DPS students around what is quantum computing and what does it mean for jobs in the local region. So it’s a bunch of different ways. You got to cover it through multiple fronts to really get a handle of what’s going on short term and long term.
Jocelyn Hittle: And maybe this is a good transition to my next question, which is around the kinds of tasks that you do as A CEO. Some of that is about making big decisions about how to engage with others in partnerships and which direction to take the museum in terms of topics and exhibits. Some of it might be more mundane. Yeah,
George Sparks: We’re really a business, so we’re not much different than what I did at hp. We just happen to have a lot more interesting mission than I did at HPO. HP was a wonderful company, but it was relatively narrow. But we are a business, we have to make a profit every year because without enough money we can’t accomplish our mission. So I spent a lot of my time around hiring the right people, setting the strategic plan. Right now we’re working on our next strategic plan. Our strategic intent for the next one is we create belonging and hope through nature and science. And I am really excited about that given the state of the world today and our political fractious nature that we’re going through right now, how do we bring people together? I say, how do we fall in love with nature and in love with each other?
George Sparks: Again, that’s something I think the museum is uniquely qualified to take on. So all of the standard things, setting the direction for the organization as far as being a leader, I thought the US Army had the best definition of leadership I’ve ever seen, and that is accomplish the mission because unless you accomplish the mission, nothing else matters. The second point is take care of the troops. And the third one is create new leaders. So over and over again, I think about that from a leadership point of view, from a market point of view, I got to shadow Peter Drucker for three days in the nineties and at lunch I asked him, tell me about strategic planning. And he said, if you only had 10 minutes to do a strategic plan, answer these three questions, who is the customer? What do they value and how can you deliver that? And from the big picture point of view, I constantly keep coming back to that and to leadership of an organization as the fundamentals of what I do every day.
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s what an opportunity to have a conversation with Peter Drucker who is sort of the father of strategic planning and what an opportunity for you. That’s pretty amazing. So you talked a little bit about some of the typical things. Yes, the museum is a business, you operate like a business. What are some of the tasks that you do as a CEO that you’re surprised you enjoy? It’s something that wouldn’t sound good on paper, but you actually really like, and what are some of the things that you kind of wish you didn’t have to do?
George Sparks: Well, they’re probably both the same thing, and that’s the people part. Given that we’re people and we’re fallible, we can be petulant and noble all within the same day or the same hour. So the hardest things are always the people things, performance management things. And we’re all quirky at times, and it’s the most rewarding thing when you help somebody achieve a goal or you watch a team come together and create something from scratch. Those are the most gratifying things. I’m personally am an introvert. If it were up to me, I would spend my life reading and writing and never get out. So being out like this, I’ve learned to do it and I’m pretty good at it, but it does take a lot of energy for me to do that. So I have to be able to recover at nights and weekends and sort of power down and rejuvenate myself. But I do enjoy it. It is something that has surprised me over the years that I’ve come to love that. And every day when I go home, I go, oh my God, I got to meet with this person today and that person day. And they were fascinating and this person’s fascinating, and every day is like that. It’s just amazed at how lucky I am to be able to do this.
Jocelyn Hittle: So let’s talk about the people you get to do it with a little bit. Who makes up your team? What are their skill sets? If there were a young person who’s interested in getting into the museum world, what kind of skills might they want to be developing?
George Sparks: So a lot of folks come into the museum business for museum studies, and I think that’s a sound way to do it become, you could do things like education or exhibits, et cetera, through museum studies or curation or collections management. Those are some of the standard skills. We constantly need people to understand finance and accounting because these are businesses and operations. So we’ve taken people that came out of the business world, out of academics, traditional museum programming, other nonprofit organizations, almost anything you learn in life, you can apply to the museum business. You just need to know that the museum market segment isn’t very big. So you got to kind of target those jobs. But there are plenty of jobs out there.
Jocelyn Hittle: One of the lessons that we learn over and over again, I think here at Spur and maybe just in general as we’re thinking about how to introduce kids to new careers, is that really any, you can find a place for yourself in any sector you really want to be in. If you really truly want to work at a science museum or an art museum or any other kind of museum, whatever your background is and skillset is, it’s definitely applicable. You just have to find the right fit.
George Sparks: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And the other thing is when you’re young, the jobs that you eventually end up in don’t even exist yet. I went through it once and I think I had 18 different jobs and 15 of ’em have no longer exist anymore. They’re just not there. So you have to constantly be reinventing yourself and be a lifelong learner and be curious.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yep. Keep your knees bent and ready to pivot and go in whichever direction life is taking you.
George Sparks: Well, I love that. I’m going to steal that metaphor.
Jocelyn Hittle: We use it here a lot. We never know what’s coming at us, so we keep our knees bent. So can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges in, let’s talk a little bit more broadly about the museum and cultural institution world, some of the challenges you’re facing, and where do you see the cultural institutions sector evolving in say the next 10 years?
George Sparks: Well, part of the thing about being in the nonprofit world is even though you have customers and you’re serving customers, the customers don’t usually directly pay enough to support the organization. So you need support from government and from philanthropy. So the museum has a $50 million budget. About a quarter of it comes from the local SEFD tax on sales tax. A quarter of it comes from the gate. And then we have food service and a shop and planetarium and a theater that the city of Denver owns the building. And so they give us money to heat the building and occasionally we get bond money from them to improve the building. We have a foundation that spins off some money. So having a diversified revenue stream is much, much more important for a nonprofit than it is for a for-profit business, especially as the economy goes up and down, we can kind of flex with our knees bent, like you guys talk about, to roll with the flow as the world changes. I think that’s probably the most fundamental difference between being a commercial business and being in the nonprofit world. And obviously philanthropy is a big deal. I spend a lot of time with donors. I usually try to have a donor or somebody notable in for breakfast and for lunch every day. Again, building relationships. And what I found is you really don’t have to go out and sell anything. You just tell the people of what we’re doing and they naturally say, how can I help?
Jocelyn Hittle: And what about how science museums or cultural institutions are evolving? Where do you see change happening?
George Sparks: I think we’re evolving to become less theoretical and more relevant. I think climate change is a big part of that, biodiversity, regenerative agriculture, a lot of the things that are affecting the natural world, obviously, especially younger generations are really concerned about this. So we have to change in that respect, think we’ve become much more diverse. When I got here 20 years ago, maybe 10% of the folks were people of color. Our board was pretty much all white guys who had a lot of money. So now our board is very diverse, our staff is very diverse, and our visitorship is very diverse. And if you look at the kids that come here on school buses, 55% of them are kids of color, and those are our citizens and voters in the next 10 years. So you have to evolve as demographics change, probably one of the things that worries me the most is the declining birth rate. As societies have gotten richer throughout history, the birth rate has naturally gone down. And we are highly focused on families with children. That’s our number one audience. And if families aren’t having children, we’re going to have to figure out a way to deliver value to the folks that are here.
Jocelyn Hittle: That is an interesting problem. I know it goes back to museums or businesses, and if your target market is shrinking for whatever reason, then that is certainly something that causes you to sit up and take notice and think about more major transformations maybe than smaller challenges. So when you do come up against a challenge, maybe a smaller challenge than the declining birth rate, is there someone that you call a group of people that you rely on to help bounce ideas off of?
George Sparks: Well, for almost 20 years, I’ve had this thing called my Kitchen cabinet, their leadership council, and they’re notable intelligent people of all ages and business things. And for the last 20 years, we’ve gotten together three or four times a year and we lock ourselves in a room and I say, okay, here’s bugging me, and I’ll just lay it all out there and they’ll give me advice. So that’s been a really valuable thing for me personally. Also spend time with my peers. We have a group called the G 13, which are the CEOs of the top 13 natural history museums in the world. We get together every six months, usually once in the United States and once in Europe, and talk about what are the problems that we are facing, things like cybersecurity. The museum in Berlin had a cyber attack, and in Germany you can’t pay the ransom.
George Sparks: So they had to rebuild all of their systems from ground up. So we naturally came back and investigated how good were we, et cetera, as did some of the other museums. And so I think getting a heads up on things like that is really helpful. And then I spent a lot of time in the business community with other business leaders and community leaders talking about what are the challenges we face? Things like cost of living, cost of housing, homelessness, workforce. The challenges that we face are real similar to what Amazon would face or any other business in town. So we work together to try to solve some of those things. Denver is a very, very collaborative place. I would maybe say Colorado. So this is a place we can come and you can get engaged and people will accept you and welcome you and ask your advice and give advice if asked very, very quickly. So it’s much easier to do business here.
Jocelyn Hittle: Right? Absolutely agree. It is a very collaborative place. So my last question for you about sort of your day-to-day right now is ideally, I like to think that most of us have over the course of a day or a week, a moment where you feel I just was good at my job, hopefully many moments for you, what has just happened when you have that feeling. And then the flip side of that is, what are the moments where you think didn’t nail that? Still learning and an opportunity for growth.
George Sparks: So I think I get those feelings when I’ve had a meeting with someone and I’ve had an epiphany, if you will, about something. And as I walk ’em out and we’re chatting as I go out and as I leave, I turn around and I think, wow, what an experience that was. You couldn’t buy that kind of an experience to learn from somebody like that, that I just had for free. And that happens a lot. I mean, it’ll happen two or three times a day on a really good day. And then at other times when you come up against a people problem that you really can’t figure out how to work around it, you kind of get flummoxed. For example, gen Z, gen Z, and I’m a boomer. We think about the world really, really differently. And especially after Covid, I’ve had to adapt my style to what their style is and hopefully they’re adapting their style to what the organization needs. And as you come up on those frustrations, you try to reflect upon them and how can I learn from that? And then with your staff, at least that’s the way I do it, how do we work on this together and try to be more effective? So it’s just like a lot of other jobs. There are lots of way more ups than downs, but there are definitely some downs.
Jocelyn Hittle: Yeah, I understand. And I understand the different perspectives, whether it’s a generational gap or a difference in upbringing or geography. There’s lots of different ways that people might be looking at a problem differently. And I think that the ability to sort of figure out how to use that as a strength and not get stuck takes a lot of practice.
George Sparks: One of the things I found that if you’re curious about somebody, you can learn enough about ’em to have empathy if you’re not curious about them, it’s really tough to have empathy for anybody that’s not just like you. So I try to, when somebody sits down at my table and I’ve met ’em before, the first thing I ask them is Tell me your life’s journey. Where were you born? How’d you grow up? Tell me about your life. And that gives me some framework about things they’ve been through, and I always learn something that’s the secret of that.
Jocelyn Hittle: Well, you’re getting a little ahead of me. I’m about to ask you that question, but before I do, I have a spur of the moment question for you, which is, what is your favorite pair of shoes and why?
George Sparks: My favorite pair of shoes are all of the shoes that I’ve begun wearing after Covid. And these are Pilates. They’re Italian racing shoes. So they’re leather, they’re not, I mean, they’re soft leather with, we’d call ’em tennis shoes in the old days. They’re sneakers, but they’re not running sneakers. They’re racing shoes that you used if you’re racing a car. And they’re extraordinarily comfortable. They’re very colorful, they’re kind of sexy. And I don’t even wear black leather shoes anymore. I can’t remember the last time I wore black leather shoes. So those are my favorite shoes now. And my wife thinks I have some sort of an obsession around ’em. I only have about 20 pair. I’m not sure what her point is, but
Jocelyn Hittle: 20 seems completely reasonable to me.
George Sparks: Right. It is just like, what’s your point here?
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. Well you had an answer to that question just at the ready. So you obviously do love those shoes.
George Sparks: I do. I really love shoes.
Jocelyn Hittle: So I would love to turn that question that you give to folks or you pose to folks back around at you. So tell us a little bit in the broad brushstrokes how you got where you are, what’s the journey that has gotten you to CEO of the Museum of Nature and Science?
George Sparks: So I grew up in Southern West Virginia in a little coal mining town. And you can see me right now on Zoom. And behind me there’s a map, and that map is an underground coal mine. And on July 17th, 1932, my grandfather went into that mine, but never came out. He was killed in that mine that day. And the next day, the coal company gave mom off 60 bucks and threw her in her six kids out of the coal camp and said, good luck. And because of that, my father and his brothers decided they were not going to become coal miners, but were going to go into other lines of work, otherwise I probably would be a coal miner now. So because they chose not to go into the mind. So I grew up during the fifties and sixties during the space race, and I decided I wanted to, those were my heroes, the astronauts.
George Sparks: So I decided early on I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy, become a pilot and an aeronautical engineer, and that’s exactly what I achieved. Went off and did that, taught at the Air Force Academy and then moved into the business world. My dad was a small businessman and I always enjoyed business. I consider myself a business person. Fundamentally, these are everything I’ve done has been mostly around that. I love the military, but the transition to business was really quite natural. When I was 45 years old, HP gave me an executive coach, and as part of that process, I decided that when I turned 55 years old, I was going to leave the business world and go find a nonprofit to run.
George Sparks: I was a VP at HP at the time. So six days after I turned 55, I left, retired from HP Agilent Technologies. At that point, they’d split off and went off and thought I’d do something like a school superintendent or run an educational nonprofit, but those wasn’t meant to be. So I started a small consulting company along with a few other guys, and one of them was Raleigh Heath, who some of you may know who ran for governor in Colorado in 2002. And we had a consulting and coaching business. And after a while, I said broadly, I really, I’m a big O guy, I need a bigger organization. So I was interviewing to be president of the Colorado Community College System one day, and that very hour he was on the floor of the Democratic National Convention and got a call from the headhunter about this job here at the museum. And he said, Nope, I don’t want that job and I’m going to give you a name and I guarantee you’ll hire this person. And that’s how I got here 20 years ago because nobody thinks about running a museum. It’s just not a big market segment. So
Jocelyn Hittle: That’s a great story. I guarantee you’re going to hire this person, and here you are 20 years later having successfully run the museum for two decades. And it is just about those relationships and those serendipitous moments
George Sparks: Lot. You never know when they come along. You need to keep your knees bent, just like you said,
Jocelyn Hittle: Flexed the knees. It’s important. Yep. So let’s go back a little bit and talk about your time in the Air Force. You mentioned that really business was your love and that transitioning to business made a lot of sense. But what do you feel like being in the Air Force set you up to do in the next chapter of your life?
George Sparks: I think the Air Force is a, and the military in general is a great way to start a career. It teaches you discipline, patriotism, duty. The thing is, I do my duty. If you give me a job, I’m going to give you more than you pay me for. I’ve never paid a nickel for any of my education. The citizens of the US have paid every penny of my education, and every morning when I walk in the museum, I say, I’m going to give you back more than y’all invested in me. So I think the government service or public service, something along those lines is really something that every citizen should do at some point in their life because it grounds you and helps you understand how blessed we are to live in the United States of America.
Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. And you taught as well, so the connection between sort of passing along to the next generation began even when you were at the Air Force. Can you talk a little bit about what you were teaching at aeronautics and Astronautics? I don’t know if Astronautics is a term that people know as well.
George Sparks: Yeah, so I was an aeronautical engineer, so I did actually, I started doing research when I was an undergrad, which was pretty unusual. I took a hologram of a plastic screwdriver handle in 1968, and holograms were only invented a few years before that, but the Air Force had enough money to buy a laser and all this stuff. So I got to publish a scientific paper as a senior at the Air Force Academy in 1969 around holography as a tool for the engineer that was brand new. Then I went off and became a pilot, went to MIT and really studied laser physics and how to use lasers and instrumentation around aeronautical engineering. So when I came back to the academy, in addition to teaching aeronautical engineering, I also did research around lasers and how to measure wind flow over airfoils and wind tunnels. And we published a couple scientific papers around that. Astronautics has more to do with space than earthbound things. And most of my stuff’s been around airplanes, aeronautics, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics, heat pumps, stuff like that. I love all of that geeky kind stuff. So
Jocelyn Hittle: I love it. Was being a pilot something, you mentioned you wanted to do it since you were a kid. What was the draw of being up in the air?
George Sparks: I dunno. I think it was the astronauts. It was just inspiring to me to think about these folks that had been, and my dad was a flew back seats and a dive bomber off of aircraft carriers in World War ii. He had a background in that I always wanted to fly, and flying was a wonderful physical skill. It’s a lot like skiing, but it wasn’t intellectually that challenging. So it was just something I always wanted to do. I’m glad I did it, and it was a wonderful physical skills
Jocelyn Hittle: I have. And it did bring you into the sciences, at least in part, or I don’t know, you could argue a chicken or egg question there perhaps, but you do have a science background. Not everybody who starts out in a scientific field ends up where you are. You’ve mentioned some of the transitions as you went along the way, obviously from the Air Force into business, and then you had a very intentional transition later in your career. Can you talk a little bit about those transitions?
George Sparks: Yeah. So when I was at the academy when I was teaching, I wanted to go get my PhD and come back and I wanted to be dean of the Air Force Academy. I was really into teaching. So I was ready to go to get my PhD in aeronautical engineering, and I called up the military personnel center and the sergeant there, I said, get ready to leave to go to CU to get my PhD. And he said, no, sir, you’re going to go fly B 50 twos for the next 10 years. And I said, gosh, I don’t think I want to do that. I mean, it would’ve been fine to fly B 50 twos, but at that point you had to set alert for weeks at a time in a concrete building waiting for the bomb to go off and congenitally, I could not do that.
George Sparks: I could not sit in a shack sitting on alerts. So I said, well, I’ll get out of the Air Force. And the sergeant said, well, I don’t care. Look sir, there’s a name on the list. He’ll go fly B 50 twos. I don’t give a damn. And that was one of those aha moments to me when I said, okay, that made my decision. I’m punching out. And I wasn’t upset or anything. It was just, that’s the reality of the situation. And that’s when I decided I would leave the Air Force. And like I said earlier, when I was 45 when I had the coach, her name was Lily Pratt King, she did a lot of coaching for hp. She said she specialized in senior women managers at hp. But she changed my life when she helped me figure out that later in life I wanted to go run a nonprofit. So I don’t even know where that epiphany came from, but gradually through that process that happened, so I’ve really only had two big transitions, one from the Air Force to business and then one from business to this. And I’d like to have one more gig after this. I’m starting to write a book now or two, and that’ll be something different. That’s probably the next phase.
Jocelyn Hittle: Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit about that transition and about those books if you don’t mind. What’s keeping your days full outside of work then as you’re exploring these book topics?
George Sparks: So I’ve become obsessed with this whole idea of humanity and nature and how we are created. So my book is called From the Big Bang to Breakfast Today, how was everything in the universe created? How did we evolve from every hydrogen atom in your body was created in the Big Bang? And when you think about that, you think that’s pretty amazing. And probably some of the hydrogen atoms in your body were in Napoleon’s body and we’re recycled. And how is all this stuff interconnected? And the fact that we evolved from those early hominids like Lucy, I was in Ethiopia and got to see Lucy and how we evolve from all those different species, Neanderthals and Homoerectus into homo sapiens today, and how that you and I, there has never been, of the 117 billion people that have lived on the earth, there has never been another person biologically and psychologically like you.
George Sparks: And in all of the rest of time, there will never be another person like you. And why don’t we treat each is those unique miracles as opposed to, oh, you’re a woman. I’m a guy, you can never understand me, or you’re black and I’m white, et cetera. We tend to put people into buckets. And the bucket that we belong in is that we’re one of a kind and we’re all individual miracles and we’re more alike than we’re different. And so back to how do we fall in love with nature and with each other Again, that’s sort of the topic of my book.
Jocelyn Hittle: Well, not much to argue with there. I would think we really, this idea of us coming together at a time when we’re, you used the word fractious before, I believe our politics are fractious. So I love that this topic is about coming back together and using sort of the science and the historical perspective to bring us to a place that’s a little bit more sensible in how we treat each other. So let’s take a little bit of a transition and talk a bit about, as you’re thinking about the next generation who is coming up behind us, if you were thinking about you have this book that you’re working on, and presumably some portion of that is intended to be inspirational to the next generation. So if you were going to give a 15-year-old some career advice or life advice, either way, what would you say to a 15-year-old and what would you say to a 25-year-old, slightly different? And then what advice would you have given yourself at 25? So three questions again.
George Sparks: Okay, good questions. I spent a lot of time talking to youth, whether at high schools or people that come through the museum. And one of the things that I always managed to tell young people, especially like a high school, is that you’ll be much happier, much more effective in life once you figure out that it ain’t about you, it’s about everybody else. And our role in life is to serve others. We are not the main character in the movie of life. We’re all supporting characters. And when you decide that you’re here to serve others, it’s easier, you’re more effective, and it’s just a lot more fun. So that’s what I always make sure that I get across to the 15 year olds, the 25 year olds, is you have to constantly be curious and always learning. I find it sad. I’ll run into people who are my age that have never read a book.
George Sparks: They may have read things when they were in high school, but they have never read a book. And the thought of reading a book is just completely foreign to ’em. And they’re so incurious about life. Not that you need to read books, but that you need to be curious about life and be constantly learning because you’re going to have to reinvent yourself time and time again if you want to have a long, prosperous career. And by prosperous doesn’t mean you make a lot of money, but you want to be comfortable and you want to have some satisfaction of whatever you do. So you have to constantly be learning things. When I was 25, I was always kind of anxious about what’s going to happen, et cetera. And at this point in my life, at 76, most of my life’s behind me and it’s, I’ve discovered, didn’t need to worry about stuff quite as much as I did. I wish I’d have been a little more chill about it than I was back then. Our son goes to mines, and it’s interesting that he was a freshman last year and the very first thing that every professor told him at Mines was, my job is to help you get a job when you graduate, which I found to be quite interesting because I think they worry more about that certainly than I did. I had a job waiting for me in the Air Force. But I do think each generation has slightly different things to worry about.
Jocelyn Hittle: Absolutely. Although I have heard, when I’ve asked this question of others, a very similar answer in the, I would have told myself to not be quite so worried vain. A lot of folks wish that their younger selves would have been a little bit less stressed out. That said, that younger, slightly stressed version of you probably helped get you to this prosperous career. So I don’t know, it’s hard to do revisionist history and maybe more chill. George would not have excelled in the way that you did and you wouldn’t be here now. Okay. And my last spur of the moment, question for you is what is one of the most unusual things you’ve ever eaten?
George Sparks: Have you ever been to Southeast Asia and had durian? I
Jocelyn Hittle: Have,
George Sparks: Yeah. Durian is probably the thing that most people don’t know. And if you durian smells
Jocelyn Hittle: Horrendous, you
George Sparks: Won’t taken on public transportation for one thing. No, it smells like if you stuck your head into an outhouse,
Jocelyn Hittle: It’s pretty bad.
George Sparks: It taste delightful, but the smell is just absolutely horrid. The most unusual things are probably when I was on survival training. I ate ants and grasshoppers as a net loss of energy by the time you trapped and ate ’em. But that was probably the most unusual thing I’ve eaten.
Jocelyn Hittle: Alright. Well thank you so much, George, for joining us on the Spur of the Moment podcast. We really appreciate your time and learning a little bit about your journey and appreciate your partnership.
George Sparks: Yeah, and thank you for your leadership in the community. You just, you’re a Jim and in Colorado and we are blessed to have you here. So thank you.
Jocelyn Hittle: Well, you’re very kind. Thanks for being with me today.
George Sparks: Okay, bye-Bye.
Jocelyn Hittle: The CSU Spur of the Moment podcast is produced by Kevin Samuelson and our theme music is by kea. Please visit the show notes for links mentioned in this episode. We hope you’ll join us in two weeks for the next episode. Until then, be well.
