Interview of John Gonas

INTERVIEWER: This is Ian White, it is November 15th, 2023 at

AM. Interviewing Professor John Gonas. Could you tell me about the organizations that you work for and your positions in them?

PROFESSOR GONAS: I’m a board member, I have been for the last 4 years at the Branch of Nashville at 41 Tusculum Road in Antioch. The Brach is also part of a coalition of non-profits that serve the Antioch community. It serves the lower socio-economic population in Antioch, which primarily consists of immigrants and refugees.

INTERVIEWER: OK. What about at Belmont?

PROFESSOR GONAS: I’m a professor of Finance in the Massey College of Business at Belmont. I’ve been here for 26 years. At Belmont, I teach corporate finance and investments, I’ve started teaching an honors collaborative with Dr. Mary Ellen Pethel, and I started to co-teach that last year. I’m also the point person on a grant that was a presidential initiative 2 and a half years ago called “Basic”. It’s a collaborative where professors and students from multiple colleges come together to focus on one social issue. In our case, the issue was, generally, the challenges in a post-resettlement world for area refugees and immigrants–what I call “the gap”; the challenges of further assimilating and integrating into society in Nashville, in middle Tennessee. It encompasses many literacies and challenges as it pertains to financial literacy, healthcare, transportation, and education. There are many, many, many categories if you will of issues that plague families beyond just language and command of the English language [these challenges] systematically plague the families. (2:50) I work alongside other colleagues to try to help the Branch of Nashville offer what they now call, “comprehensive care”. The Branch has historically been a food band and an English –ESL, ELL center. It has been primarily focused on basing needs as pertains to food and language education. This past couple of years we have diversified to more comprehensive care families and caretaking of those families on a case-by-case basis. I’m trying to be a liaison, if you will, to Belmont so that Belmont faculty staff and students can at appropriate times bring resources to Antioch to educate and serve pockets of families that are under the comprehensive care network.

INTERVIEWER: OK, interesting. Being that you are interacting with a lot of different cultures on a regular basis, the question is: What cultural identities/experiences are most salient for you? Or have held the most significance to you?

PROFESSOR GONAS: Cultural identities?

INTERVIEWER: Or experiences. A cultural interaction that you have had that stuck with you or has taught you a lot.

PROFESSOR GONAS: In my own life? I would say the primary cultural–a foundational experience in my own life 28-29 years ago. If you see that pic you see my wife with a group of Kurdish girls, they were in our wedding. My wife and I met through teaching area Kurds, helping families with life skills, as well as their children–tutoring them so they can survive in the metro school system. I would say that was foundational to me today, and it allowed me to have a simple exposure to the complexity of all the problems, all the challenges that a family faces, beyond language. A lot of categorical– a lot of other experiences within that, across many different cultural differences, we’ll just say, unique differences to the way I grew up in the southern part of the US, were made evident. Simple things around how the Kurds cook, how they discipline their children, how they interact with the elderly and serve the elderly. Both social, cultural, economic; there are just so many differences. Some are very, very easy to understand, others it takes days, months, years of building relationships and establishing relationship trust to understand. I would say the answer is, formative to what I do, where I am today with my interests and my passion, was 30 years ago, about 29-30 years ago, serving area refugees that were just getting here from refugee camps in southern Turkey that had fled Saddam Hussein in Iraq and were living in southern turkey and were literally dropped into Nashville and given an apartment and some cash to live for 6 months and a little bit of language help. I was filling in gaps very quickly–and my wife and I– to help them survive. That opened my eyes to all the cultural, social, and economic, differences that we hold, and a lot of the similarities we hold just as human beings. The differences–they’re Muslim, there’s a difference in religious belief and faith and what informs their faith, and all these different things are merged through building bonds and really strong trusting relationships. With these particular families–coincidentally, I was with some of the children who are now adults, last week. They have started to document their family experiences since the early 90s and they had this exhibition in downtown Nashville to celebrate the Kurds being here. So anyway, there are a lot of rabbit trails there.

INTERVIEWER: So would you say that the experiences you’ve had building relationships with families of immigrants–have those experiences shaped you the most as a leader?

PROFESSOR GONAS: Well, it shaped me as a leader in that it has certainly allowed me to be more patient and understanding and sensitive to their needs and struggles. Which I think has allowed me to be more patient and understanding with my students and with colleagues and other people that I work with, both at Belmont, or at church, or in my community. That’s vague, I mean, we’re all leaders to a certain extent, but as a leader in the classroom, shepherding students and shepherding other faculty and staff towards being servant leaders in the Antioch community. Yeah, that experience definitely helped shape me and shaped my posture and approach to shepherding–leading a group.

INTERVIEWER: So would you say that–to you–leadership means shepherding a group in that way–guiding them?

PROFESSOR GONAS: Yeah, well leadership means listening and understanding. It means being very strategic and knowing, having–there are a lot of things that we teach in the business school in terms of casting a mission and a vision and being very strategic. In my mind, yeah, a great leader is one who can build or take a team towards achieving a common purpose where all the people in the team are valued and are all participating and are able to contribute with their unique gifts while at the same time, meeting the objectives, the corporate, group objective, and maintaining that. That balance is very, very complex and challenging, and we teach a lot of classes in this building that are focused on the ability to maintain a corporate identity–an objective, while at the same time allowing the individual in that corporate framework to thrive, contribute, and be valued. That’s very vague but it's generally what I think of. And being sensitive to all those, or understanding to all those areas, evolving–you're always a lifelong learner in that, and I'm evolving in that space, so that I can hopefully be somewhat effective in leading our board at the branch towards a really robust, comprehensive care model.

INTERVIEWER: OK, interesting. How would you measure success and how do you learn from failure?

PROFESSOR GONAS: Some people like to use statistics and measurables to measure success. I would say that's important to be able to express in a real simple way percentage, if you will. In the Branch, so many people have gained a certain amount of more earned income, job placement, have overcome or been able to achieve a certain language fluency, to better their lives, those types of things. So there's metrics. I like to think impact metrics are important, but I don't think they're the only thing. I think there's a balance between impact metrics and anecdotal evidence as to whether the person or people that you are serving are better positioned to flourish and thrive–in our case, Nashville's society and economy. So that's a hard one to answer because its both personal, anecdotal, and quantitative. It's both qualitative and quantitative. There are a lot of qualitative and quantitative metrics. I typically use a blend of quantitative and qualitative metrics that I will create if I tackle a challenge or if I'm serving a group to try to achieve something. That blend of quantitative and qualitative is unique to each circumstance, so there is not a fixed rule around what metrics are qualitative what metrics are quantitative, and the blend they're in. The second part of that question–so that's vague, but I generally will… the succinct answer to that is there's a qualitative And quantitative basket of metrics if you will; measurements that I will try to assign that will be the north star if you will, objectively, our objective north star in setting a program in motion. In this case, a comprehensive care program. How do I– failure, you said? How…

INTERVIEWER: How do you learn from failure?

PROFESSOR GONAS: I think the key to learning from failure is to truly reflect on the experience. I am not as good at… I'm learning a lot about how to learn from failure. I've worked with so many different non-profits and social enterprises and seen what works and what doesn’t work in the marketplace place what works in the non-profit vision and programming. So I would say the key to learning is simply taking the time to sit down with the non-profit board or executive director, the employees, and truly reflecting on what didn't work and why we weren't able to meet or achieve certain goals or objects–certain expected outcomes before moving on to the next investment, if you will, of capital and resources. I would say the reflection time, which I think a lot of nonprofits and a lot of investment boards I've been on do not do this, they just move forward, they may cut a program and move forward to a new program, and I think the time to simply sit and nest in what the plan–prior plans and prior commitments of resources–and why, again, the outcome wasn’t achieved is really really important. I want my students to learn that and grow from that more than anything else. A lot of my students within the Enactus team–I've been the Enactus advisor within this college for 18 years– We have helped conceive, implement, and sometimes develop social enterprise, and we fail all the time. 95 % of all small businesses fail within the first 5 years–something like that, some extreme statistic. That depends on the sector and industry and a lot of other demographics and geographics. Generally, there’s a very high failure rate with small businesses. So if we are out trying to help area immigrants, refugees, formerly incarcerated, anybody served by different nonprofits, conceive and develop social enterprise, that failure, creating a business model and being part of a business model that does not achieve its objectives, may just completely fail to where the model is completely shut down– is really is an amazing learning opportunity. Reflecting on why that happened is incredibly fruitful for my students and for me.

INTERVIEWER: OK, interesting. What have you learned that has–just a few more questions, we can start to wrap it up. What do you think you have learned in your life has served you best in your leadership? Do you think it was kind of an experiential education, kind of street smarts that you picked up naturally, or was it knowledge that you learned in the classroom?

PROFESSOR GONAS: It's definitely the former. Trial and error has served me better than the classroom, in my case. I go to conferences I have a few degrees where I've studied economics and finance, even education at a graduate level, and then at a deeper level with my Ph.D. Most of what I pull from is from experience.

INTERVIEWER: OK.

PROFESSOR GONAS: Talking to business leaders, talking to industry leaders, talking to nonprofit leaders, talking to the private sector and public sector leaders. I have been able to glean a lot of wisdom–church leaders–a lot of wisdom, and that has helped me more than anything.

INTERVIEWER: Just one more question, if you have to go. What do you want your legacy to be, as a leader, or just in general?

PROFESSOR GONAS: My legacy… that is a hard one. I don't really think–I used to think about that. In today's world, I’m not so worried about my legacy. I would say if I had a legacy, quote on quote, that I was able to point my students, and anybody that I served with, that I was able to shepherd and teach with, number one, to the Lord, his mercy, his grace, his love, and then secondly, to how to seek the Lord’s will in employing–let's say his provision in your life to do his will and to serve and love those around you. That is very general, but it really comes back to I pray a lot that I'm able to serve, and not do this for me. A lot of times, I can get caught up in whether or not I am building a legacy. “Am I able to achieve what is good and right?”, but more and more, I'm taking myself out of it. More and more I am being considerate–being more submissive, let’s just say, and seeking not my will, but His will. That would be my legacy, I guess that I was not… hopefully people would see me as somebody who was not seeking to build my own reputation and my own legacy, just to serve and with an appreciation He has given me– that the Lord has given me.

INTERVIEWER: Good, thank you. Thank you very much.

PROFESSOR GONAS: You’re welcome.