Exemplary leaders face difficult circumstances, work with others to devise plans for addressing these circumstances, cultivate support for these plans, and execute plans with a degree of success. Such success in difficult circumstances is possible. However, as the following vignettes illustrate, leadership is crucial. If top leaders remain stewards of the status quo, fundamental change […]
Most organizations and people like to think that everything is under control, proceeding as planned, and the sought outcomes will be realized. If anyone suggests otherwise, they will be chastised for not being team players, perhaps for having bad attitudes, or quite simply for being outright wrong. Unpopular positions are seldom socially acceptable in organizations. […]
Many problems and potential fixes are being considered and debated to address the pandemic, associated economic slump, and economic and social inequities. Climate change is hovering in the wings. How do all these potential initiatives fit together? I think we can integrate all of these ideas by thinking about how they all support pursuit of […]
I often encounter people seeking mentoring. What are they usually seeking? My sense is that they are facing one or more dilemmas. They are seeking help to make sense of and address these dilemmas. One dilemma is that they are facing an important decision about what to do next in their careers. They can see […]
This book provides a great tour of philosophy, primarily German, in the early decades of the 20th century. Eilenberger, W. (2018). Time of the Magicians. Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy. New York: Penguin. Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859), Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (1905), and Freud’s Psychoanalysis (1917) had upset […]
It is very difficult to foster change and innovation in complex social systems. You need to understand key stakeholders; their perceptions, concerns, and values; and how to gain their support for central elements of the changes being entertained. It can take much time and work to build a coalition capable of moving forward. Examples of […]
Recent challenges suggest that the complexity of society in the US has become increasingly difficult to understand and manage. We seem to have great trouble agreeing on anything. Consequently, we do not act to quickly understand what is happening and competently develop and execute compelling courses of action. Let’s explore the sources of the impasse. […]
Academia scales down problems to make them rigorously tractable for the methods being researched. Industry scales up the methods, often sacrificing rigor, to assure results are applicable to real problems. While these may seem like mutually exclusive strategies, that need not be the case. What are needed are intermediaries who understand both sides of the […]
Over the past two days I was immersed in two Zoom meetings, one for 6 1/2 hours and another for 7 hours. The first was a National Academy of Engineering convocation, which I helped organize. I was one of the two speakers who wrapped up each half day. The second was a Division of Behavioral […]
After 163 posts of over 90,000 words — a 360-page book if published traditionally – we have reached the 10th anniversary of this blog. So, what has happened? Here are a few highlights, none of which this blog influenced. On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency with 365 electoral votes to 173 received […]
George Adams was a graduate student in Public Policy at Georgetown. He relied on a cognitive assistant that he named Emily after his favorite aunt. It was sort of a fun thing to do, thinking that Emily might be of some I’ll-defined assistance. George totally underestimated the possibilities. Emily learned from everything George did. His […]
The reception and dinner for Board of Trustees was held at the River’s Edge an upscale venue on the Hudson River on the eastern side of the Beresford property. “Welcome to everyone – trustees and guests,” Marie opens, after having clinked a spoon of a water glass to gain attention. “Welcome to Beresford Village. Most […]
Brad, Mary, and George meet in Marie’s conference room. Marie will join them later. Pete O’Connor has been recruited to help. Pete is Director of Educational Technology at Beresford. “Pete, we have been doing some benchmarking of course offerings around the country,” George opens. “What have you found?” Pete asks. “There is sufficient high quality […]
Phil Chen, the Beresford Provost, walked into Marie’s office. They greeted each other and shook hands, and then sat across from each other at Marie’s conference table. “Phil, I want to outline a new hiring strategy and get your opinion.” “Sounds great.” “Let me provide a bit of background first.” “Ok.” Marie discussed her analysis […]
Marie and George were drawn to exploring the real nature of value in higher education. “Are we investing in the things that create the most value for students and society?” Marie questioned. “It is not just a question of where we deploy each year’s discretionary resources. It is also an issue of where we deploy […]
“Ok, what is the upside of the subsidy? I think I know, but I want your assessment, George,” Marie opens. “Faculty members publish journal articles, that get cited, and over time increase their h-index,” George responds. “An h-index of N means that you have N or more articles cited at least N times. Right?” “Yes. […]
George has been exploring how money is spent and the outcomes produced. His latest quest has been trying to understand the benefits of subsidizing faculty members so they can pursue research. When Marie and George operated at the department level, it never occurred to him to question this. However, Beresford is trying to make it […]
While George continued his sleuthing, Marie focused on building relationships across campus with faculty, staff, students, and alumni, as well as each member of the Board of Trustees. It was a lot of work, leaving her exhausted every evening as she retreated to the President’s House. She tried to stay connected professionally with her colleagues […]
Marie Cornwall had a distinguished career as an engineering faculty member and department chair at one of the top universities in the US. Her specialty was decision making under risk. She had published widely on this topic and was frequently sought for consulting engagements, as well as prestigious advisory boards. From the perspectives of her […]
A couple of ideas intersected this week. First, a piece I was reading suggested that the endeavor they were elaborating was “As difficult as baptizing a cat.” Depending on how you have related with cats in the past, this statement evokes an immediate sense of what the baptism experience would be like. I am on […]
To achieve promotion and tenure in science and engineering, you need 16-20 articles published in reputable journals. You need to accomplish this in five years, so you need 3-4 articles per year. You need to publish a significant portion of these articles with your PhD students. I will assume 10 with PhD students and 10 […]
When do organizations fail? It is typically when their financials go south. Their deficits are unsustainable. Cash is draining from the enterprise. Their strategies for stemming the tide are too little, too late. Why do organizations fail? What causes these financial outcomes? The story that led to these consequences almost always started playing out much […]
I have started and led several companies, as well as research centers at universities. Often, things get started with a serendipitous opportunity. Suddenly, you have a paying customer or a willing investor, and soon an employee or two. You begin to formalize things. People ask about your strategic plan. Winning another contract or securing another […]
A university chief executive has come to realize that competitive forces are closing in. Fortunately, the president has an AI based cognitive assistant to help formulate plans for addressing this new reality. This assistant is named George. “How can these projections be correct, George? We keep on raising enrollment and tuition to generate surplus revenue […]
In my last post, I noted how Kodak, Motorola, and Xerox delayed introducing new market offerings in order to avoid cannibalizing their existing offerings – film, analog cell phones, and paper copiers. They wanted to milk their cash cows as long as possible. Now these companies are shadows of their former selves. Their cash cows […]
This has been quite a week for dealing with technology. It started with submitting a revised journal article using a web-based publishing platform. It was unhappy because the zip code for one of my coauthors was missing. It wanted me to add this information but I did not know the user name and password for […]
I have spent much time in recent years studying the possibility of transformation, fundamental change, of healthcare and higher education. For many years, healthcare was the poster child for runaway costs. That is still an issue, but cost control has received quite a bit of attention. Higher education is now the poster child for runaway […]
Academia has become rather frustrating. Out of control costs have been leading to spiraling students debts, exceeding the total US credit card debt. Increasingly narrow and unreasonable criteria for tenure have led to people spending endless years in servitude. The overall academic value proposition has been completely eroded for all but the administrative leadership and […]
What are we trying to do by rethinking the ACA? Perhaps we are seeking an ideologically acceptable ACA, one that the Republicans get credit for rather than the Democrats. On the other hand, is insurance coverage really the ultimate goal? I don’t think so. We want a healthy and educated population that is competitive in […]
I have been researching Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), compiling best practices and other good ideas that I sought from a variety of colleagues. I recently completed the first lessons of three courses on the best-known MOOC sites: Coursera course: “Chicken Behavior & Welfare” edX course: “Dinosaur Ecosystems” Udacity course: “Design of Everyday Things” All […]
The wonders of the Internet and social media seem to have radically changed the nature of relationships. This is perhaps most apparent in personal relationships where email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, and other offerings provide constant updates on what a vast network of family and friends are doing and thinking at the moment. Many people spend […]
Engineering and science account for roughly three quarters of all PhD graduates, with half of these degrees awarded to US students and the other half to international students. Many of these graduates aspire to tenure-track faculty positions at universities. However, the percentage of faculty openings that are tenure track has been steadily decreasing for quite […]
An industry executive that chaired an advisory board at a major research university once commented to me that academia’s unit of time is the semester. “When a faculty member says he will get back to me right away, he means by the end of the semester.” We measure performance of computers in cycles per second, […]
The August 2016 issue of Consumer Reports summarizes a much longer report from revealnews.org on student debt. Their headline is 42 million people owe $1.3 trillion. Their survey found that “45% of the people with student loan debt said that college was not worth the cost. Of those who said college wasn’t worth the money, […]
The steadily escalating costs of a college education coupled with spiraling mountains of student debts cannot be sustained. Universities are unwilling and unable to control costs, in large part due to the bloating of administrative and support functions (Rouse, 2016). A great example is the University of California System where, excluding the number of faculty […]
One of the PhD students in the School of Systems and Enterprises asked me a few questions after reading my March 15th blog post on “Thoughts on Teaching, Classrooms, and Computers.” She wanted to know what I would do if I was now a PhD student. Before getting to her specific questions, I need to […]
The purpose of teaching is to enable learning and, over time, mastery. Classrooms and computers – smart boards, workstations, laptops, tablets, smart phones, etc. – are enablers of learning. The most important enabler is student engagement. This can be a challenge as ubiquitous digital devices often lead to significant student multi-tasking, much of it irrelevant […]
University research centers are delicate organizational systems. They bring together faculty, research staff, and graduate students for several reasons. Centers are often formed as a result of a large NIH or NSF grant or because of a large gift or grant from industry or wealthy alumni. So, there is money on the table and researchers […]
Enterprise transformation involves redesigning or creating new work processes that enable remediating anticipated or experienced value deficiencies. This implies that some aspects of the enterprise have to be discarded. Why not discard everything? That is certainly as option, but it is called liquidation rather than transformation. A central question is what do you keep and […]
You are leading a very successful enterprise in airplanes, automobiles, mobile devices, healthcare — or perhaps higher education. The business model that got you to where you are — successful, profitable — seems to be faltering. The growth of revenue is diminishing while costs are escalating. The costs of infrastructure — physical, financial and human […]
It is fairly common for the perceived benefits of current market offerings to fade and new value propositions to displace older offerings. As noted in earlier posts, Schumpeter called this process “creative destruction.” Steel ships replaced iron ships, which replaced wooden ships. Microprocessors subsumed transistors, which replaced vacuum tubes. Change happens and creative destruction causes […]
I am a student of history, particularly economic history. Lately, I have been immersed in reading about technological innovation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Transportation was transformed from stagecoaches and steamboats to railroads, automobiles and airplanes. Electricity transformed communications from mail, telegraph and telephone to radio, television and now Internet. In the […]
Change happens when it is forced. The force can be an opportunity or a threat, perhaps embodied in a crisis. In many domains, the forces for change are manifested as market forces. Competitors, large or small, recognized or unrecognized, are the sources of market forces. Thus, change happens when there is competition to meet market […]
A few months ago, a colleague asked me, “What if our big idea does not get approved by the powers at be?” I said, “We will start an insurgency and just do it anyway.” We are still waiting for approval, and may get it, but we are quickly progressing despite the lack of formal blessing. […]
There are many impediments to addressing and solving executives’ toughest problem – see my last post. Resource limitations – time, money, and people – can obviously be impediments. Less obvious, and often much more troublesome, are the stewards of the status quo. These stewards include people and organizations who are determined to keep everything as […]
I recently resigned from an administrative leadership position at my university, having served for ten years in this position and an earlier one. The precipitating event involved decisions by senior administrative leadership that I felt limited my abilities to continue in my role. My guess is that it was not intended to have that effect, […]
I recently read John Lynch’s Simon Bolivar: A Life (Yale University Press, 2006). Bolivar played the central role in freeing six Latin American countries from Spanish colonialism. The eventual domination of his armies and his subsequent nation building destroyed the old colonial order. However, creating the new order was a much more daunting task than […]
I just finished reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Lewis relates the story of the Oakland Athletics and their ability to use scientific management to maximize wins per dollar. I could not help but wonder how their empirically derived principles might apply to academia. What is the equivalent of On-Base […]
We often see dire assessments of our educational systems. K-12 is judged to be quite poor compared to other developed countries, as reflected in comparisons of educational achievements across countries. This is particularly true for STEM — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. More broadly, our high school graduation rate of roughly two thirds means that […]
I am in Beijing and Shanghai for a few days. The reason for my being in China is to chair the International Review Board at Tsinghua University where we are reviewing the Department of Industrial Engineering. The basic statistics are chilling. In the U.S., 4% of undergraduates matriculate in engineering. Of those that graduate, 12% […]
Our graduate seminar on “Transforming Academia” started this week. We focused on the roots of the modern university in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and The Enlightenment. We debated the interpretation of developments in terms of transformational versus evolutionary changes. Also of central interest were the causes of change. The plague, printing press and paper all […]
Here are all the suggestions received thus far: Altbach, P.G., Berdahl, R.O., & Gumport, P.J. (Eds.).(2005). American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political and Economic Challenges. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barke, R. (2000). Sustainable Technology/Development and Challenges to Engineering Education. Proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education, St. Louis, MO. […]
The first universities in Europe — University of Bologna (1088), University of Oxford (1096), University of Paris (1150), University of Modena (1175) — began as private corporations of teachers and their pupils. Soon they realized they needed protection against local city authorities. They petitioned secular power for privileges and this became the model for academia. […]
I have worked with well over 100 enterprises and several thousand executives and senior managers, often focused on initiatives that have the potential to fundamentally change their enterprises. Somewhat simplistically, these initiatives depended on three ingredients – technology, people, and organizations. Frequently these executives and managers commented that technology was the easy part. People and […]
How does change differ within various aspects of society? Are differing changes somehow related? C.P. Snow has argued that there is a chasm between the arts and humanities, and science and technology (Snow, 1965). However, all of these endeavors are inevitably influenced by the times in which they are pursued. Consider the late 18th and […]
I am at the IEEE Workshop on the Future of Information at the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, DC. The purpose of the workshop is to consider how engineers and scientists will access and use information in 2020, including what types and sources of information they will seek and find available. Yesterday was the […]
In January, I discussed the notion of transforming organizational silos in academia to collaborative networks that can address large-scale research problems. At the moment, I am sitting in a meeting at the University of Illinois that is, in part, focused on this possibility. People are discussing the difficulties that they have encountered in pursuing this […]
The transformation framework from the last post can be applied to thinking through the four scenarios for academia from the post before the last one. Consider the Network U. scenario. This scenario basically involves changing offerings across the instruction function and/or organization via process and technology changes. Put simply, teaching would be quite different. All […]
What will the academic world be like in 25 years – 2035? Thinking 25 years into the future is quite difficult, as is evidenced by thinking back to 1985 and imagining our current iPhones, Kindles, and pervasive social technology such as Facebook. Nevertheless, it is interesting – and potentially useful – to consider future scenarios. […]
I have been a faculty member at four universities – two in leadership positions and two in one-year visiting positions. Nevertheless, academia is a bit of enigma to me, perhaps because of my thirteen-year “leave of absence” to found and lead two software companies. In terms of content, in my case science and engineering, universities […]
