Introit

Strategy as Deduction is Insufficient

Most schools, I would argue, treat the concept of "strategy" in their "strategic plans" as an exercise in deduction. At least, that is what viewing almost 50 strategic plans from independent schools over the past few months has shown me.

One example of a strategy: "Given that we have fewer laptop carts than our 'competitor schools,' we must increase the number of laptop carts available to our faculty and students."

As Richard Rumelt says, however:

"The problem with treating strategy as a [deductive] exercise is that systems of deduction and computation do not produce new interesting ideas, no matter how hard one winds the crank. [...] Treating strategy like a problem in deduction assumes that anything worth knowing is already known--that only computation is required. [...] The presumption that all important knowledge is already known, or available through consultation with authorities, deadens innovation." (Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, 244).

A real tack toward strategy would be questioning whether it's even necessary to have laptop carts: could a school think beyond that? Also, is "keeping up with the Joneses" strategic?

Therefore, I must ask: why do schools bother with template strategy planning, especially now?

Looking at the strategic plans cited above, it is evident that the overwhelming majority followed some sort of template: let's restate our mission, principles, a brief history, and our philosophy, and follow up that section with a verbose section of "strategies," "goals," or "objectives." The widespread utilization of this template suggests that it is "the" method that works, though my analysis would suggest that the method fails far more often than it succeeds.

Template planning does one thing really well, however: it produces comprehensive and highly predictable "to-do lists". True innovation is rarely found there. Should schools expend all that time and effort in forming a major to-do list that, by design, tends to eschew innovation? Many plans have over 100 "action items." That's hardly strategic, folks. That's busy work.

Busy work may be germane to continuing to meet the mission of the school, but, largely, it's not "strategic" work. Let's be honest and call it what it is: a really nice (and expensive) checklist wrapped up in a really nice (and expensive) publication.

The Times They Are A-Changing: Gary Gruber Guest Blogger

In some recent research by IBM, 1500 business leaders from 60 countries and 33 industries were asked to list the three most important qualities needed in this new economic environment.  The top three may surprise you, maybe not.  They were: creativity, integrity and global thinking.  The next six (in order) were: influence, openness, dedication, and focus on sustainability, humanity and fairness.
Some of these qualities are listed in recruiting school leaders but the skills and abilities still preferred are things like the capacity to inspire and motivate others (still valid in my opinion) vision (also a necessary characteristic) and a high level of energy and enthusiasm for advancing the mission of the school.

One of the largest challenges seen by these business leaders is the ability to manage complexity and perhaps that says it all.  As our society has added layer upon layer of information technology, increased economic uncertainty, added to the density of population centers, looked at infrastructure and environmental concerns, and a spawned a revolution and paradigm shift in education, leaders will need an amazing repertoire and personal resource bank of intellect and emotion to deal with it.

Holly Green, CEO of The Human Factor, puts it this way:  “Leading in new ways will require a lot of things, but it all starts with recognizing that we have to learn additional skills and learn how to unlearn some of the ones we have relied on for success to date. We have to develop an awareness of our own thinking processes and be willing to shift them. Then we have to challenge our beliefs and assumptions, constantly considering “what if…” not just about our customers and our markets, but about the way we do things within our organizations and why we do them that way. We have to develop the ability to consider multiple perspectives and focus on winning despite all the noise and distraction. We must constantly ask the right questions and be flexible when everything changes again.”

I would equate “winning” with being successful and say further that we need to be able to have laser like focus on what our goals are and how we intend to achieve them.  It is rather like the athlete, musician or artist who spends a lot of time training in order to do well or to express his or her craft at the highest level.

Finally, from all that I hear, see and read, it seems like this next generation of leaders will need to be especially well-versed in creativity and innovation.  And that will require some real expertise in designing, managing and implementing change, perhaps in alignment with some of the biggest changes in this century.

Dr. Gary Gruber has spent a lifetime in education. He is a co-founder of the Santa Fe Leadership Center.

Progress Feeds Inner Work Life

I'm halfway through The Progress Principle, but already I am compelled to recommend it--particularly to those school leaders charged with managing a group of people (groups of any size, whether a committee, project group, department, division, or the entire school community).

Co-authors Amabile and Kramer identify a pattern of "prominence of progress", which is what they call "the progress principle: of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meangingful work; of all the negative events, the single most powerful is the opposite of progress--setbacks in the work. We consider this to be a fundamental management principle: facilitating progress is the most effective way for managers to inluence inner work life. Even when progress happens in small steps, a person's sense of steady forward movement toward an important goal can make all the difference between a great day and a terrible one" (76-77; italics by authors).

You may think that their assertion sounds obvious, but, interestingly enough, it rarely shows up:

"You might think it is obvious that managers should focus on supporting employees' work progress. It is not. Here's a startling fact: if managers were to draw [...] bar graphs [from an earlier chapter], progress wouldn't even be in the picture. We have asked dozens of managers, individually and in groups, to name their most important levers for motivating employees. They tend to favor the things that most management books tout: recognition, tangible incentives, and clear work goals. [...] Rarely--very rarely--does anyone mention progress in the work and how managers should support it. A 2009 McKinsey survey on motivating people at work yielded the same story--progress was completely absent from the results. In other words, if we had a group of managers draw a bar graph depicting what they think the key three influences on inner work life are, progress would be missing" (87; italics by authors; for the McKinsey study, click here).

I may highlight some other pieces from the book, as I work toward completing it by next week. Suffice it to say, it's a refreshing, not to mention deeply-researched, look at providing the right conditions for intrinsic motivation to work within an organization.

I am reminded of Bob Sutton's admonition to avoid the "smart talk" trap; Amabile and Kramer make it evident that smart talk (among other things) hinders progress and quashes intrinsic motivation on the part of others in the room.

Creating Competitive Advantage

By now, most readers are aware that Google is buying Motorola Mobility. The headlines and stories have centered on the strong portfolio of patents that this purchase brings to Google, which is accurate.

However, what I would consider the immediately-powerful strategic move is that this purchase gives Google instant entree to tens of millions of households. That is something that Google could not accomplish with Google TV: a great idea, but no platform to give them market entree. Google could not gain traction. So, what did they do? They came in through the back door. A brilliant move.

Motorola Mobility is the second-largest maker of those special set-top boxes that the cable operators use to deliver digital cable. Google will now control not just the manufacture of those boxes, but...wait for it...the software that runs the boxes. Oooh, that's nice.

Barclays Capital analyst James Ratcliffe was quoted in the Financial Times as saying, "Google will become not only a potential competitor [to major cable operators], but also a major vendor, and potential source of set-top box innovation."

Strategy: instant competitive advantage, building on a company's existing strength in innovation

Portfolio Challenge: End of Fiscal 2011

Although I havn't reported in some time on my "porfolio challenge" (aka an independent school endowment held entirely in gold bullion, just for the fun of it), I wanted to provide a year-over-year comparison, given that we recently closed the fiscal year 2010-11.

The stats from June 30, 2010 (one year ago):

June 30, 2010 marked the end of the first fiscal year of my portfolio challenge. As a reminder, my fictitious endowment for Independent Academy is based on holdings of 2,500 troy ounces of gold. My figures from the past year are as follows:

Starting Dollar Value as of 6/30/2009: $2,321,250   (New York close of $928.50/oz.)

Dollar Value as of 9/30/2009: $2,515,000    (New York close of $1,006) +8.3% from 6/30/09

Dollar Value as of 12/31/2009: $2,741,250   (New York close of $1,096.50) +18.1% from 6/30/09

Dollar Value as of 3/31/2010: $2,781,500   (New York close of $1,112.60) +19.8% from 6/30/09

Dollar Value as of 6/30/2010: $3,106,000  (New York close of $1,242.40) +33.8% from 6/30/09

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At that time, we did the following:

1. Annual Draw. As promised we will take 4.5% of the US Dollar value of the corpus and sell that many ounces of gold. Based on a New York Spot close on 6/30 of $1,242.40, our endowment was valued at $3,106,000.

SOLD: 112.5 oz = $139,770

Endowment Balance = $2,966,230 [2,387.5 oz. of gold bullion]

2. Annual Purchase, based on 15% of Annual Fund donations. Our Annual Fund brought in $500,000, 15% of which equals $75,000.

BOUGHT: 60.4 oz. of gold

Endowment Balance = $3,041,230 [2,447.9 oz. of gold bullion]

June 30, 2011 marked the end of the second fiscal year of my portfolio challenge. As a reminder, my fictitious endowment for Independent Academy is based on holdings of 2,447.9 troy ounces of gold. My figures from the past year are as follows:

Dollar Value as of 6/30/2010: $3,106,000  (New York close of $1,242.40) +33.8% from 6/30/09

Dollar Value as of 6/30/2011: $3,672,584  (New York close of $1,500.30) +18.2% from 6/30/10

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A return of 18% is pretty good, given the state of the economy! Independent Academy has done well. Now, two matters remain before we launch into the third fiscal year of an endowment based entirely on gold bullion.

1. Annual Draw. As promised we will take 4.5% of the US Dollar value of the corpus and sell that many ounces of gold. Based on a New York Spot close on 6/30/11 of $1500.20, our endowment was valued at $3,672,584.

SOLD: 110.2 oz = $165,266

Endowment Balance = $3,507,018 [2,337.2 oz. of gold bullion]

2. Annual Purchase, based on 15% of Annual Fund donations. Our Annual Fund brought in $500,000, 15% of which equals $75,000.

BOUGHT: 50 oz. of gold

Endowment Balance = $3,581,277 [2,387.2 oz. of gold bullion]

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Looking Ahead to FY 2011-12

1. Our ounces of bullion are diminishing, yet our dollar value of the endowment corpus is increasing. Don't you find that interesting? The dollar buys less than it did, which you can see in our purchases of bullion: we're not buying as many ounces as before.

2. It may make sense to change our policy, so that we always maintain a "balance" of 2,500 troy ounces of gold. However, word to the wise: that may become prohibitively expensive.

3. If you haven't believed me before, in terms of my own work and presentations on endowment -- including paying special attention to inflation, can you see it now? How do schools deal with that?

Importance of 'Inner Work Life'

I've begun to read a new tome entitled, The Progress Principle, which centers on the notion of "using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work."

The question arises early on: "How [can] companies possibly aspire to [the] double nirvana of business success and employee delight" (1)

"The secret is creating the conditions for great inner work life--the conditions that foster positive emotions, strong internal motivation, and favorable perceptions of colleagues and the work itself. Great inner work life is about the work, not the acoutrements. It starts with giving people something meaningful to accomplish [...]. It requires giving clear goals, autonomy, help, and resources--what people need to make real progress in their daily work. And it depends on showing respect for ideas and the people who create them." (1-2)

Sounds like many independent schools we know, doesn't it?! As schools, we get this. It's fundamental to who we are.

Based on 12,000 (!) daily journal reports (full stats available in the book), the authors discovered the following:

• people are more creative and productive when deeply engaged in their work, when they feel happy, and when they think highly of their coworkers, managers, and organizations (3)
• when the inner work life is positive, people are more committed to their work, and are more likely to work well with colleagues (3)

Again, I think that good independent school leadership knows, recognizes, and affirms that. Although schools have known it for years, it has been largely anecdotal, i.e. difficult to quantify. What these authors do, however, is to provide a study that combines work habits and psychology to show that inner work life is a principal driver for people...and for organizations.

The danger for schools, of course, is if they don't foster a positive inner work life. Schools that cannot recognize this principle, I think, will wallow in the rigors of mediocrity, at best; at worst, they will collapse.

We Like to Think That...

As the world markets show signs of distress related to the downgrade of the US credit rating, I can't help but wonder how renewed distress in the minds of independent school families might affect enrollment in our schools. Schools that have been hanging by a thread since the events in 2008 and 2009 are holding their breath, no doubt. That thread may be due to purely financial reasons, but I'm willing to wager that almost every precarious scenario in a school is due to two factors: 1) over-leverage (unsustainably high debt:income ratio) combined with 2) lack of differentiation in the market place. That lack of differentiation may take different forms: it could be over-confidence in one's product (relative to the actual experience of graduates); it could be diminishing importance of a former mark of differentiation; it could be the unarticulated switch to an entirely new mission, with no (or little) forethought.

A book I've read recently underscored this same concept to me, as told in a short story, excerpted below. By the way, the book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, is perhaps the most useful tome I've read in some time. I will write a review on it in the coming weeks, as its importance to schools (and to strategic planning in particular) can be hardly understated.

"Steve Jobs is great at criticism. Arrogant and smart, he cuts to the heart of an issue with no wasted effort. [...] I and several other faculty members met with Jobs to discuss Apple's future prospects. 'I know Stanford,' he said, 'but I am not all that familiar with UCLA Anderson.' [Anderson School of Management at UCLA, home institution of the author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy]. My department colleague [...] responded by offering the school's party line. 'We like to think that we are the entrepreneurial school.'

'That's interesting,' said Jobs. 'Which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have come out of your program that I would recognize?'

[The colleague] grimaced, then answered truthfully, 'There aren't any.'

'Well, then, you've failed,' Jobs said with finality.

The question for schools, I think, is this: are we too prone to saying "we like to think that..."?

In other words, perhaps schools "like to think" one way, when reality is suggesting something different. I know that I have seen such cases, and I'm confident that I'm not alone.

It doesn't mean that schools aren't different or that they don't have a place in the market, but it does mean that schools haven't been paying attention to strategy, which is the point of the book...and can help to explain how schools that are over-leveraged got there in the first place: a defective understanding of strategy.

But more on that later...

To Keep Things Whole: Questions for Tech Leaders

St. John's Episcopal School

via tokeepthingswhole.blogspot.com

Superb post by Mark Crotty, HOS at St John's Episcopal in TX. It mirrors discussions we've been having at Tower Hill School recently. Question: does technology drive the program, or does the program drive technology? We need to be careful here -- it's too easy to say that "we need to be doing more with technology," without providing some substantiation as to why. And I'm saying this as a guy, like Mark, who really enjoys tech and gadgets!

Another Season of Feedback

As Judy Schechtman and I end another series of leadership institutes for independent school leaders (sponsored by NAIS), we are again struck by the importance to leaders of accurate performance feedback and its relative rarity in the school world. Especially important is feedback about how the leader leads--less about technical or subject matter expertise and more about the ways things are said and done. Lack of congruence between the message intended and that received is something we see in many leader's 360-degree assessment profiles.

via triangleassociates.typepad.com

Annual evaluations do not always communicate what needs to be communicated, as highlighted by this post by Marc Frankel.

Measuring Heterogeneity -- Guest Blogger Landis Green

Why’s it so hard to measure the successes of heterogeneity?

Perhaps it’s the range of topics on my summer reading list, but I’ve been thinking about the testing craze of recent years, especially as it relates to independent schools.  Our schools, at once influenced by and influencing of the broader culture, are constantly walking along a ridge that balances what has been with what will be.  That balance can feel like a struggle—sometimes a mighty struggle—that isn’t new to humankind, but that seems profoundly important in an age of such great and fast transition.  

At a time when those both inside and outside of schools, private and public, are arguing, legislating, and directing those most centrally involved in the work of school to focus on performance outcomes, many of us fear that much is getting lost.  I, for one, am concerned that in an effort to standardize and then hold school people accountable for meeting standards, we are losing the acceptance of heterogeneity that has brought our nation and our culture to this place.

Differing camps can argue about the virtues and values of the range of programs and services being affected by the ongoing debate regarding the sustained testing-related focus in education.  The focus on standardization—which can foster academic, intellectual, artistic, and social-emotional homogeneity—puts at risk what heterogeneity is already present in our schools.   Independent schools have an opportunity—some would argue a responsibility—to inform and, perhaps, lead the conversation regarding what’s gained and lost by standardization.
   
I know of many independent schools that work diligently to find the balance between establishing base-level standards to which all students and teachers should be held accountable while also honoring the unique background, interest, and skill set of the individual members of their school communities.  I also know of few independent schools that don’t have a clear, public, and earnest commitment to fostering a culture of respect and inclusion among both the student and adult members of their communities.
   
Work toward a truly multicultural community sometimes requires us to make difficult choices to bring to an end exclusionary programs or services, while introducing to our school communities language, programming, and events that foster the inclusion of those who might be marginalized in some way.  While those of us who want our schools to reflect a range of human experience journey on, the movement toward standardization and homogeneity subtly whittles away at the potential for future success in creating the type of complex school communities that reflect the diversity of cultures that have been at the center of our country’s rich, resilient, and generally—albeit, evolving—respectful culture.  Our society’s strength lies in the coming together of differing cultures, informed by the differences among us, including the varying religious, racial, socio-economic, and ethnic backgrounds that have been a part of our history from the very beginning—and the diverse talents and passions of the populace.

Please don’t misunderstand my point.  I’m not arguing against standards or scope and sequence or the calibration of programs aimed at educating children in ways that are consistent with our individual school missions or which provide our students with the baseline they’ll need for responsible and healthy participation in a democratic society.  My colleagues and I work tirelessly to create and maintain high standards for our students and ourselves.  

To use language common to my own school—which represents one of the core elements of our formal evaluation of every student in every project, class, and grade—I want our students to develop the habit of perspective.  Doing so—as deeply as one can, understanding the perspectives of others—requires that students first understand and bear witness to their own perspective.  For our students to reach that goal, we as educators must affirm and respect the individuals who are in our care—their strengths, passions, talents, and weaknesses.  A myopic focus on standardization can impede our work.  

All too often absent from the debate about the race toward standardization is the degree to which it compromises the focus on the individual and the unique set of cultural identifiers, talents, and humanity each of us brings to our communities.  Respecting and appreciating the individual—avoiding the homogenization that arises from a one-size-fits-all pedagogical bent—is the surest way for schools and school people to preserve and expand that which is best about our culture.

It’s difficult to measure because it’s immeasurably important.

Landis Green is head of school at Wildwood School, a progressive, K-12, college preparatory day school of 700 students on the west side of Los Angeles.  His work in independent schools encompasses the last twenty years and includes work in a Quaker School in Delaware, a “Town Academy” in Maine, and now a progressive school in Los Angeles. The three very different school communities have all explored in ways unique to their mission the intersection of testing, standardization, and individualization.