Introit

Innovation Sabbatical

In the interests of promoting innovation within independent schools, I propose a new kind of sabbatical program: the Innovation Sabbatical.

Some basic parameters: the sabbatical would be three to six months, the school would pay a stipend to the person in question (faculty, staff, or administrator), and the requirement is that the person must share what s/he learned during the sabbatical at an all-school meeting, plus publish it in the alumni magazine (and any associated social media).

An added bonus would be if the innovation turns out to be a viable product or service. The school, as the originator of the stipend, would receive partial ownership in a company created to sell the product or service, and revenues could go into the endowment.

Bundling: Beware Marketing Backfire

We've all seen it over the past few years: admission offices that offer "incentives" (call them "freebies," if you'd like) to families to come to open houses and other admission-focused events. One school I know of (Pat Bassett has it featured at the end of one of his 'road show' PowerPoints) even went to the extreme of offering "free tuition" for the second semester of the current academic year, in order to grow enrollment.

There is a psychology involved with this tactic. Alexander Chernev, associate professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, has done a good deal of research on the concept of "bundling" (a combination of a single expensive item and a cheaper one). His findings, co-authored with Aaron Brough of Pepperdine University, show that the psychology of bundling can backfire: quite often, actually. Schools that are following this tack should pay attention.

Basically, Brough and Chernev's research shows "that bundling expensive and inexpensive products changed what people thought those items were worth. Even when they found both items in a bundle attractive, they were willing to pay less for the bundle than for the more expensive product alone. [They] also found that people were less likely to buy bundles that combined expensive and inexpensive products. [...] This suggests that the popular strategy [I'd call it a tactic] of adding premiums to products can sometimes hurt, rather than increase, sales." (HBR, June 2012, 30).

The underlying driver is a process called categorical reasoning, which holds that "people naturally tend to classify products as either expensive or inexpensive, and this categorization influences how they judge products. When an expensive item is bundled with an inexpensive one, people categorize the bundle as less expensive, and this lowers their willingness to pay for it."

Marketers (this would certainly include admission offices in independent schools that are striving to increase enrollment) follow conventional wisdom, which suggests that bundling products helps to increase sales (tuition dollars). This does hold true in numerous situations, but it does not hold true across the board. "Although categorical thinking is a pervasive tendency, it has boundaries: People categorize along just one dimension at a time. So if you get people to focus on nonprice attributes, the price effect will go away [schools, for example, could focus on values, character, signature programs, and the like]. Our research shows that when customers [families] focus on one of those attributes, they're much less likely to categorize items in terms of their expensiveness and consequently less likely to devalue combinations of items from different price tiers."

Question: when you've got board members who are marketers or work in marketing, what do you think their default position would be, in terms of a school's falling enrollment? Offer something in a bundle, to provide incentives to attract families!

What the marketers are relying on is people's preference "for making simple binary decisions in the face of complex information. [...] People rely on decision short-cuts, or heuristics, that trade accuracy for reduced cognitive effort." What these Chernev and Brough highlight is that such heuristics do not work in all scenarios.

I would submit that independent school admission efforts represent such a scenario in which traditional heuristics don't work along the same lines as they do in other purchasing situations.

Schools that are effective at getting families to focus on nonprice attributes, as listed above, are going to be more successful at breaking through the psychological boundary of "categorization". Schools that are offering really bad bundles (free t-shirts to the first 25 families, or free tuition for one semester followed by full-price the next semester) are doing themselves no favor in attempting to attract families; the probability that their effort will fail is extraordinarily high because they have just placed a significantly inexpensive item in the same bundle as a high tuition, meaning that they've forced families into categorical reasoning. That reasoning will result in families ascertaining that the value of the more expensive product is actually diminished.

Educators as School Marketers: Exploring the Potential Disconnection

Given the need for independent schools to attract and retain qualified students and families, it should come as no surprise that the last few years have likely prompted many conversations in which teachers have been asked to be more sensitive to and proactive in the marketing of their school to current and prospective families.  Unfortunately, many teachers are quite confused by such requests and simply fall back on “doing what I always do” in hopes that such actions fulfill the request.  Such reactions highlight a disconnection between the teacher’s role as instructor and the need to assume a more conscientious role of marketer.

I don’t blame teachers for feeling confused.  After all, I doubt many of them had any formal marketing training as part of their teacher preparation.  Certainly a course in school and community relations may be helpful, but as a marketer?

Probably not.

As an administrator at an independent school that has asked its teachers to be more conscientious of their marketing role, I have spent the past few years reflecting on this issue.  My reflections generally revolve around a few questions.

Why might teachers feel a disconnection between the role of classroom instructor and school promoter?

 

Is there a way to make the connection between classroom instructor and school promoter that makes logical sense to the teacher?

 

If not, why not?  If so, what strategies can a teacher use to make that connection?

This post shares my thoughts on these questions.

I believe that the reason some teachers feel a disconnection between the role of classroom instructor and school promoter (or marketer, evangelist, etc.) is a matter involving the evolution of what an educator is today.  Today’s educator is trying to operate effectively in a period which will likely be identified by the access to choice, desire for change, and ease of networking.  It is an era that continues to force us to reflect upon and leverage the power of relationships and communication.  Thus, what society now sees as successful, necessary, and desired is undergoing a change.  Most noticeably, this change involves a growing desire for deep and meaningful experiences and interactions which produce a desired sense of distinction and specialness.  I suggest this is a result of almost unlimited choice which demands that consumers reflect much more on, “Why?” one option is more attractive than another.  Herein lies the basic problem.  Before people had access to so many options, “Why?” was not nearly as important as answering, “What?”.  You needed a new shirt, you went to the mall and bought one from the stock available.  Now, you can get a new tie from any tie maker in the world over the Internet.  In order to choose one from another, “Why?” becomes a much greater factor.  

What does this have to do with educators?  

Well, for as long as any living educator can remember, teachers have worked (and have been taught) in a model of education that does not sync well with the growing market for distinction, the market that needs a clearer answer to, “Why?”.  It is a mode of operation that follows a set way of thinking about, preparing for, and delivering one’s class.  I will refer to this model as the factory model and its related mode of thinking as the factory mode. Therefore, this model of education, and the related mode of thinking that accompanies it, has become part of the professional genetic code of educators.  It is part of the educator’s DNA.  This mode of thinking, while useful in clarifying, “What?”, but falls short of clearly answering, “Why?”.

The factory model leaves little room for, and certainly doesn’t place much value in, expanding the nature of a class  beyond the curriculum - no matter how artfully it is delivered.  The teacher’s role in factory mode is limited, teach your course and make sure students are ready for the next course.  There is nothing inherently wrong with that role.  As matter of fact, effectively delivering content is an essential part of teaching.  However, when we ask teachers to expand the nature of an effective class, we then move from content and curriculum to experience and relationships, two areas the factory model cannot and does not address.  There needs to be a heightened awareness of the other pieces of the educator’s DNA to provide the balance and approach to delivering a great class that includes relationships and deep, meaningful experiences.  In other words, the environment created by deep and meaningful experiences helps students and parents answer the question, “Why do I choose this school?”.

These suggestions may seem easy to understand.  I would agree that they are easy to understand, but often circumstances make them hard to employ.  Especially when circumstances prompt a strong response from the factory mode that is deeply embedded in the educator’s DNA.

When things are going well, we naturally are inclined to avoid disruption.  The message most teachers hear is “keep doing a great job in class” or “keep up the good work” which, as open to interpretation as it may seem, for many teachers translates as “keep being a good factory worker.”  

However, in recent years the economic reality many schools face has caused them to rethink operations and work like never before to retain and attract families.  These have been years of uncertainty and pressure to perform at the highest levels, often asking every member of the school to act as “adjunct marketers and school ambassadors.”  Stated a different way, schools need teachers to be more than good factory workers.  In essence, we are asking teachers to ignore a strong and significant piece to their professional DNA (the factory worker) and become more of the artist, evangelist, innovator, and magnetic creative.  We are asking teachers to transform their classes from solely places of learning into places of learning that serve to engage students and families in making deep and lasting connections with the school.  We need teachers to embrace their “intellectual celebrity” and become linchpins for our schools.

Certainly, the switch away from factory mode is not easy.  So, a set of guidelines or examples to help teachers understand exactly what is involved in this new approach is helpful.  For some teachers, this requires an acceptance of a dual perception of their work and a commitment to an approach to their work that is conducive to the creation of deep and meaningful experiences.

The Perception of the Work

Many teachers talk about their responsibilities, but rarely do they speak of their cause.  I believe this is directly associated with the factory mode.  Responsibilities are external.  They are dictated to us as part of the job.  They represent a contractual agreement between school and employee.  Typically, responsibilities are specific and measurable.  There is a place for responsibilities, but that place is part of a market agreement between school and employee.  With responsibilities, there is an expectation of immediate reciprocity.  You fulfill your responsibility and you get something in return (a paycheck).

Your cause, though, is personal.  You chose it.  It defines you as a person, not as a worker.  The only contract you have with your cause is with yourself.  Any agreement involving your cause is social.  There is no immediate expectation for reciprocity.  You give of yourself for your cause because you recognize the value in sharing your talents for the betterment of others.  You may not even get a “Thank you”, at least not right away.  That’s “ok” because you do not engage in your cause for the rewards.  You engage in your cause for your contribution.

In order to suppress the factory mode and embrace the marketer inside, teachers need to accept their responsibilities, but adjust their approach to their class as their cause.  Perceiving one’s class as their cause (instead of their responsibility) begins to place the emphasis of the work on the receiver (student) and not on the giver (teacher).  

In other words, if you view your class as your responsibility, you are doing YOUR job, fulfilling YOUR obligation, serving YOUR need to collect a salary.  Again, there is nothing wrong with being paid a fair wage for doing a good job.  However, viewing your class as your cause places the emphasis on the receiver.  Your class is serving THEIR needs.  You are responding to THEIR issues.  Your role is to demonstrate that your class is worthy of THEIR following and participation.

Your cause is student centered.  Your responsibilities are yours alone.

Accepting the cause perception, and the social agreement from which it operates, is not a denial of the factory mode of thinking and the responsibilities that accompany it.  After all, the market agreement that brought a teacher into the classroom must be honored and there does need to be some markers set up for the teacher to measure content delivered progress.  Finding the balance between the two, or applying the correct approach to any given situation, is the key.

The “Open House Culture” in Your Class

Once you begin to perceive your class as your cause, you are in the right mindset to build an inviting and engaging culture in your class, one conducive to deep and meaningful experiences.  To do so, I suggest borrowing the characteristics of one of the more enchanting events at schools, the Open House.

Open house is your school at its best.  Your doors are open and you welcome new prospective families to tour and learn more about your school.  Ultimately, successful open house events prompt the attendees to take the next step in the admissions process with the eventual desired outcome being a new enrolled student.  Your class’ “Open House Culture” operates similarly.  In an “Open House Culture”, you are presenting your class (your cause) at its best.  An effective “Open House Culture” prompts students to “take the next steps” towards becoming an active contributor to your cause (your class).

Borrowing from the numerous Open House experiences I have had, I suggest their are five qualities of effective open houses and also provide the ingredients for an “Open House Culture”.  These qualities are: friendly, trustworthy, reliable, responsive, and interactive.

The Director of Admissions at my school frequently reminds us all that every interaction with parents and students is an opportunity to either improve retention or motivate that family to recommend a friend.  Having a cause mindset and nurturing an “Open House Culture” in your class are powerful foundations upon which you can clearly address the dual role of educator and marketer in your school.

Final note:  If you and I share some of the same reading preferences, you probably noticed the influence of a couple of different people in this post.  Over the past few years, I have found the writing of Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki among the most influential.  Kawasaki’s Enchantment has become my “go to” guide for winning the hearts and minds of people.  Godin’s Linchpin, Tribes, and practically every title from his work with the Domino Project are invaluable reminders and prompts for us to embrace our ability to do great work.

Troy Roddy is the Head of Middle School at Wakefield School in The Plains, VA.  In addition, he frequently shares his thoughts and reflections about leadership and education on his blog, The Art of Education.  Dr. Roddy is the author of two eBooks, Paying Attention: Thoughts on Communication in Schools and Foundations: Examining Vision, Beliefs, Mission, and Philosophy.  Troy invites all independent school educators to join his LinkedIn group, the American Society of Independent School Educators.

 

 

 

 

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...

Opus ipsum loquitur

"Opus ipsum loquitur" -- "the product speaks for itself."

In an age when "edu-speak" substitutes for clarity of thought and precise communication regarding education, we in independent schools need to remember that our product, an articulate and well-rounded graduate, speaks for him/herself.

As Simon Caulkin writes in the May 9 (2011) issue of Business Education (supplement to the Financial Times) about management and management-speak, "The less the products can speak for themselves and the more the work has to be done by words and appearances, the more likely both are to be fake. The result is an arms race in which more means less and loudest signifies least" (12).

In education, simple talk ("the truth", plain and clear, about our product) is always "explosive and revolutionary" (Caulkin, 12).

Consequences of Choice

As schools, our choices shape the footprint that we leave in the world, as experienced through the lives of our graduates. We talk much about mission and its importance, precisely because mission is important: mission is our footprint.

As Kevin Kelly writes in What Technology Wants, "We have latitude in selecting the defaults of our mass education, so that we can nudge the system to maximize equality or to favor excellence or to foster innovation. We can bias the invention of the industrial assembly line either toward optimization of output or toward optimization of worker skills; those two paths yield different cultures. Every technological system can be set with alternative defaults that will change the character and personality of that technology" (184).

Does your school actively create its footprint, or does it let external forces create it? Does your school strive to optimize output (highest SAT scores, highest AP scores, college placement sans pareil), or does it strive to optimize the skill set of the soon-to-be graduates so that they can be adaptable and successful learners for the rest of their lives? Perhaps it's a bit of both at your school.

Some schools, however, aren't clear at all on what their mission is, and they're suffering, especially in this economy. Their choice, actually, their absence of choice in terms of articulating and celebrating their mission, can be seen easily by numerous parties: parents, students, civic leaders, you name it. Those schools look very much like North Korea, as viewed from space at night:

Notice that North Korea is almost entirely dark. There is a speck of light, signifying some potential for creating something, but, for the most part, the absence of light is remarkable, compared with the countries surrounding it.

Where is the innovation? Where are the "bright lights" in that school? How will that school keep pace with others in its market place?

Choice matters. Dark or light?

The Book is Here!

De rebus scholaribus ("On School Matters") is now available for purchase!

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Leadership in a Complex World

IBM just released a piece of research from late 2009 and early 2010, Capitalizing on Complexity: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study. The study dovetails nicely with what we've been hearing and/or experiencing in independent schools during the same time frame. Leadership is the key, going forward; not the leadership to which we've been accustomed, but leadership that is creative. Permit me to provide some highlights from the executive summary (the entire document is worth the read, I assure you, as there are many parallels with school leadership).

As a preamble, the document states, "In our past three global CEO studies, CEOs consistently said that coping with change was their most pressing challenge. In 2010, our conversations identified a new primary challenge: complexity. CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex. Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways."

• Today's complexity is only expected to rise, and more than half of CEOs doubt their ability to manage it.
• Creativity is the most important leadership quality.
• The most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes.
• Better performers manage complexity on behalf of their organizations, customers and partners.

The point of the IBM study is to suggest how leaders can capitalize on complexity. It identifies successful companies/leaders as Standouts. These Standouts:

• Embody creative leadership. "Creative leaders invite disruptive innovation, encourage others to drop outdated approaches and take balanced risks."
• Reinvent customer relationships. "In a massively interconnected world, CEOs prioritize customer intimacy as never before [...]. CEOs said that ongoing engagement and co-creation with customers produce differentiation."
• Build operating dexterity. "CEOs are revamping their operations to stay ready to act when opportunities or challenges arise [...]. Flexible cost structures and partnering capabilities allow them to rapidly scale up or down."

The danger, as one might expect, is a mindset that cannot handle such complexity or change. As the CEO of one energy utility put it, "Most people are looking backward, wishing it was still like it always was."

It isn't.

Can we draw a lesson from the IBM study? Are our schools committed to upsetting the status quo, inviting disruptive innovations into our classrooms and board rooms, all in an effort to make our relationships with families more intimate, thereby helping us to maintain (or even grow) market share? Or, are we looking backward, wishing it was still like it always was?

Control Culture No Longer Works

Henry Ford was famous for his assembly-line model of automobile production. In short, he was able to keep costs down and enable the average person to buy a Ford because he controled the process by means of simplicity: you can have any color you want, as long as it's black. Standardization was the name of the game. Control the process of production and keep it simple. One model, standardized parts (i.e. they did not have to be custom-fitted, as had been the case previously), a predictable manufacturing process, etc.

The control culture that Ford epitomized is similar to the culture in a number of independent schools: our product is X, this is how we provide it, you can have anything you want here so long as it's what we provide.

The problem, however, is that the control culture no longer works for our schools. As technology has progressed--and has become more disruptive, independent school families have become accustomed to greater choice and greater flexibility, to the point where they're looking for those characteristics in our schools.

Families are working on a "collaborative culture" model (they want input, in some way), and a "control culture" model no longer serves their wants/needs. If your school operates in the control culture model, can you see how you might be seeing a drop in enrollment, perhaps exacerbated by the current economic climate?

Control culture schools need to move toward becoming collaborative culture schools, although the trick will be for each school to determine just how collaborative it wants to be. Some will be more, some will be less. Schools will continue to remain diverse, just as before, but they will be diverse in different ways.

Inattentional Blindness

"Inattentional blindness" is a phrase that references what happens when, in our case, a school is so focused on item X that it is entirely unaware of item Y, the latter being some sort of fault or glaring omission.

I'm doing an online graduate certificate program in Advanced Project Management, what one instructor said should be termed more appropriately "Organizational Engineering." I have to agree with him; it's about culture and strategy as much as the execution of a portfolio of projects. Most folks taking the course are from the Fortune 500 world, although there are a few educators or executive directors of non-profits. The instructor used the phrase "inattentional blindness" to describe companies who are focused so intently on one aspect of operations that they miss--quite entirely--what might be the real culprit causing their under-performance, their drop in sales, etc.

Permit me to translate the phrase into a more school-friendly situation. Imagine a school that is losing students, where parent complaints are the norm (as opposed to parent praise), where the program hasn't kept pace with developments in education. In that same school, the board has a single focus: finances. If they can get the finances right, it stands to reason (to them) that the school will be successful once again. Finances, they would argue, are the key to the school's viability.

Yet, they ignore the obvious: the program.

Inattentional blindness!