Introit

Small Thinking is Deleterious to Your School

I couldn't fall asleep last night because I was mentally revisiting the gathering of development officers I attended earlier in the day.

When I mentioned that I was charging my alumni advisory council with leading the charge with each 8th grade to establish a fifty-year term endowment, one development director from a NJ school asked, in a rather discouraging tone, "Don't you find it difficult to convince donors to give to endowment, with all that has happened in the markets?"

He didn't like my response.

Actually, I don't think that he understood my analogy, nor do I think that he understood the possibilities that are staring us in the face right now.

My response was - and I admit that I borrowed it from something I had read or seen somewhere - "It's K-Mart out there, and the blue light is on!"

Point: equities are at historically CHEAP prices right now; to not invest money in your endowment would be foolish. Think long term. Think of what your school's return will be in 10, 25, 50 years!

Is it difficult? Absolutely. Is it impossible? No. However, it takes big thinking to get past the hand-wringing and the status-quo-is-comfortable thinking that is paralyzing too many schools. See the "FedEx box commercial" on YouTube for a great visual of what I'm talking about.

As one of my favorite twentieth-century German poets, Gunter Eich, wrote "Wacht auf, denn ihre Traume sind schlecht!" [Wake up, for your dreams are bad!]

In other words, it's time to stand up and lead! It's not pretty out there, but we can't just sit on our hands and continue to be crushed by the bulldozer of economic doom and gloom.

There's opportunity everywhere, but our schools need leaders now more than ever, especially those who can manage discomfort and crisis while treating them as the new normal. The much-beloved status quo is history.

Collaboration for Dummies

Pardon the provocative title.

It's all about collaboration.

I attended a meeting today of various development officers from schools in our regional association. Our specific theme was building alumni advisory boards/councils in K-8 schools, but plenty of other topics arose as well.

I mentioned that we were in touch with one other Catholic independent school (gds. 9-12) regarding holding our first joint alumni event during the 2009-10 school year. It will enable both of us to hold an event outside of our locale - and do so in a financially sustainable manner. In short, we share alumni already, so why not host a joint alumni event and share fundraising costs as well? [We're also reaching out to a second Catholic independent school with whom we share alumni]

That comment produced looks of shock on most folks' faces. That's small thinking for you (see my previous post on Michael Port's book)! Colleagues couldn't get over the fact that we would actually consider (gasp!) sharing an alumni event! Happily, several folks commented after the meeting that they thought our action plan was downright fantastic.

Collaboration is the way forward in the Great Recession and post-Great Recession!

Our mission will guide families to self-select us (provided we're doing a bang-up job with marketing). However, once they're in the door, our schools will need to collaborate to keep down costs and to offer innovative and creative programs for students (think: expanded course offerings) and faculty (think: professional development opportunities), among other possibilities.

Leading During Troubled Times

Among the many blogs that I follow, the Tom Peters Blog is always full of nuggets of wisdom and tons of common sense. In the culture of instant gratification, however, this kind of wisdom and common sense gets lost - quickly.

Permit me to quote Tom's post from 4/8/09:

Daily Wisdom for Troubled Times

Get up earlier.
Go to bed later.
Work harder.
Finish what you start.
Learn one new thing.
Renew one contact.
Ask, "How can I help you?" at least once.
Make yourself visible.
Be of good cheer.

Catch a break.
Or not.

Repeat tomorrow.

Sounds like an old-fashioned WORK ETHIC to me! Elsewhere, Tom has suggested that, in economic down times, we all consider doubling down on professional development. What's more, it doesn't have to be costly. One can read books, trade journals, attend a regional conference, re-establish contacts with colleagues, reach out to someone you've always meant to ask for advice - you'll find that people are quite willing to speak with you.

This economic downturn represents an outstanding professional development opportunity! For myself, I've put more time into my job than I would have anticipated, and I've learned much by doing so. I've reached out to lots of folks, from teachers to executive directors of foundations to endowment managers to a chief US economist for a major financial firm.

BIG Thought - Free Independent Education

What if we could make an independent education free?

I'm serious. It's my big thought.

Let's say that you're about to embark on a capital campaign. Why not add a piece whereby you solicit $500,000 to fund a term endowment?

Consider a 100-year term, during which time the following would happen: 1) at 50 years, you would take 1/2 of the value and transfer it to your unrestricted endowment; 2) at 100 years, the term endowment ends and the full corpus transfers to your unrestricted endowment...for which you've been raising money for the previous 100 years.

Care to guess what that original $500,000 investment would have produced at the end of the 100-year term, if invested aggressively (annualized 9% return)? $1.3 billion.

Think of what could be accomplished with such an endowment!

Say you've got 500 students - that works out to an endowment of $2.6 million per student. Impressive! Tuition is taken care of, and there's money to spare. All because your school had the foresight to be a steward for the future.

"But no," say the small thinkers. "We need money now, not 100 years from now. We have all kinds of needs that need to be funded."

No kidding. Who doesn't?

Think BIG!

Think Big!

I just finished reading Michael Port's recent book, The Think Big Manifesto (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009). Port also runs a website called Think Big Revolution at www.thinkbigrevolution.com, which complements the book quite nicely.

His points hit home.

There is a slight disagreement right now in the independent school world regarding the future of our schools, as we pause to consider the economic times in which we live. ISM (Independent School Management) is of the opinion that 2009-10 enrollment declines are temporary, and that the 2010-11 school year should see a rebound. NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools), on the other hand, feels that the landscape of independent education has changed significantly...perhaps forever.

For myself, I subscribe to the NAIS point of view. I have attended a couple of talks given by Pat Bassett, President of NAIS, but I've also had the occasion to speak with three executive directors of state independent school associations, and all three cited numerous challenges that they're seeing in their schools - and they don't anticipate those challenges disappearing anytime soon.

Although I would argue that all independent schools must reconsider the way that they conduct business-as-usual, I think that Catholic independent schools (my world, 2009) can take some pointers from Michael Port. He tends to focus on individuals rather than groups, but I feel that it's perfectly appropriate to expand his thesis to a group.

Port suggests that our values and actions are contagious. In a nutshell, if we - as schools - make a decision to think BIG about our current and future operations, the result is that we should have a like influence on other schools. If, however, we are surrounded by let's-continue-to-think-small schools, we put ourselves at risk of failure. Commit to thinking BIG, and go with it! After all, the marketing goal is to make our (Catholic) values contagious!

As Port points out, however, the danger in thinking big is that the status quo schools will want us to continue to think small, i.e. to remain mired down in the same kind of thinking that prevents us from growing: growing enrollment and revenue perhaps, but also growing our ethos...our mission.

If we're going to think BIG, though, we need to be prepared for...discomfort. This won't be the usual, comfortable life that we may have known in the past; rather, as we move forward, we will encounter increasing discomfort. The upshot to that movement, however, is that we'll have to increase our candor with one another (boards, administrators, teachers, parents, students) in order to cope with the discomfort. Eventually, we will become comfortable with discomfort.

Discomfort is the new normal..at least for the foreseeable future. What is more, the agitation caused by discomfort is going to produce LOTS of ideas...and that is a good thing! Catholic independent schools (my current world) need LOTS of ideas. The successful leader in our schools will be someone who can mange the discomfort, oversee the agitation, and identify the ideas to try. That too will be an indicator of success in our schools: the desire to try a new idea. It was good enough for Ben Franklin, why not for us? No more small thinking!

In terms of what drives us, let's get back to basics: our mission. What do we do? Our mission. What do we provide? Our mission. Knowing that, how do we make our mission break out, revolution-style? What will be - what is - our BIG thinking?