Introit

Resilience More Important Than Brilliance

Luke Johnson's column in yesterday's Financial Times (6 November 2013) focused on the need for founders (of an enterprise) to apply grit in order to find success, when the going gets tough. After all, as Johnson says, "On certain days business can feel like a war of attrition. [...] It could be argued that struggle is at the heart of enterprise." He goes on to state that "any entrepreneur should be good at coping with the stress that inevitably arises from such conflict and striving."

In schools, I'm sure that, if asked, we could provide a kind of Top 10 list of the most stressful events we could imagine. As a matter of fact, it would prove a most instructive exercise, I'm sure -- it would make us realize that no one would be able to take time off during a time of high stress because of fatigue. And that matters.

Although Johnson is talking about entrepreneurs specifically, I think that his advice applies to those of us in independent schools as well: "Resilience in an entrepreneur is more important than brilliance--grit trumps almost every other trait."

Well said.

Role of Equities in Endowment (2013)

Some twenty years ago, David Swensen's thinking on diversification changed how Yale invested its endowment. As John Authers points out in this weekend's (October 26-27, 2013) Financial TImes, "Mr Swensen argued that he was most likely to find value away from the public markets. [...] He moved out of bonds and cash, and into hedge funds, private equity and real assets such as forestry. Yale now holds about 6 per cent of its assets in US equities. This reaped impressive investment returns for decades, and many endowments imitated it."

Authers goes on to illustrate that Yale, like everyone else, lost money (lots of it!) during the financial crisis. Interestingly, due to how it is diversified (as noted above), it has not seen the flattering returns of the S&P 500 index, though. And that's not a bad thing...Yale's endowment returned 12.5% last year, with its diversified model of looking for value in private markets. Yet, the main thrust of his article ("This is no time to get off the equity train") is that the notion of portfolio diversification hasn't worked terribly well over the past five years, mostly because large institutional investors diversified out of stocks, sometimes by a wide margin. Consequently, not having as much at stake in equities equated to a reduced return.

He is very supportive, though, of Yale's strategy of diversification, to the point that he supports endowment managers considering the application of the Yale process when purchasing assets, while being clear that managers shouldn't strive to imitate the portfolio's holdings. Basically, "look for assets that may be inefficiently priced and would not fall with equities."

What I appreciate is that Authers is looking ahead to the time when stocks lose their momentum, as is inevitable.

I don't hear this kind of talk from many, so it's refreshing to consider it.

Ruthless Prioritization

As I've mentioned before, I simply adore Luke Johnson's column "The entrepreneur" in the Wednesday issue of the Financial Times. Yesterday's column (October 2, 2013) dealt with the need for leaders to manage their time as well as their staff.

His premise is that "leaders need to be as good at time management as they are at staff management. They must understand the difference between urgent and important. And they have to know how to prioritise  ruthlessly."

This notion of ruthless prioritization struck a chord. It is absolutely essential, as I've learned from experience. Mark Twain's words in that regard resonate with me: "Good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgment." He was right. I've learned the art of ruthless prioritization the hard way, like Johnson, who says that his philosophy has been "the harder you work, the more successful you are. The trouble with this approach is that work can seep into the rest of your life -- evenings, weekends and vacations."

He highlights the notion of thoughtful and balanced leaders having a hinterland, and that makes good sense to me, as I've had to cultivate that myself. And, though I do have one, it remains a work in progress, which is how I prefer it. I don't want my hinterland to be static; I prefer a dynamic one that is a kind of "learning retreat."

And the key to keeping it dynamic is to engage continually in ruthless prioritization so that I can do just that!

Legacy Thinking

Irrespective of whether we're aware of it, we will leave a legacy in our schools.

Although this thought has been on my mind for some time, I was catalyzed by a great article on this very topic in Rotman Management (a magazine from U. Toronto) this week.

The person being interviewed (about legacy thinking) proposed an exercise in which the leader writes down his/her leadership legacy statement. Research by psychologists shows that the act of writing it down makes the leader more cognizant of it, and therefore increases the likelihood that the leader will make it happen. There are five questions for consideration:

(1) How do you wish to be remembered as a leader by those inside and outside your organization? For which two or three personal characteristics (skills, behaviors, values) would you most like to be remembered?

(2) What have you learned in your role, your work, and your life thus far that you would most like to pass on?

(3) How will you convey that learning?

(4) What remains to be accomplished? Why is that important in building or completing your legacy?

(5) Aside from more time, what will help or impede you in completing what remains to be accomplished?

Context is Everything

Two articles in the current issue of Korn/Ferry Briefings on Talent & Leadership really hit home. Each delves into the value of a liberal arts education as the ideal formative background for leadership. The authors (leaders themselves) and other leaders highlighted/cited have liberal arts backgrounds to which they return constantly as they contemplate strategy, vision, and the development of talent in their organizations. For them, the liberal arts trained them to look at context. Context is everything.

Speaking of context, what resonated all the more strongly with me was the context within which these articles were placed. This issue of Briefings centers on education, with a notable focus on STEM jobs, programs, initiatives, etc.

For all the talk about STEM in this issue, these heavy-hitting articles extoled the virtues of a liberal arts background. These leaders (including a military leader and a Fortune 100 leader) were adamant about honing one's mind across disciplines, analyzing, synthesizing...tying together ideas, peoples, themes, movements. So much aligns with what we value in independent schools. 

The STEM jobs are very real, yet I was moved by these leaders' arguments in favor of a full-blown liberal arts background for those who aspire to leadership. The liberal arts allow a person to contextualize what is happening (or needs to happen) in an organization by considering similarly-structured events, whether from history or literature. There is strength to be drawn from historical or literary figures as well, strength that impacts a leader's character and helps to inform his/her decisions. Nowhere was this more evident than in some coursework I completed this summer: the group was predominantly engineers (STEM folks, to be sure), and yet we worked through a decision-making problem by considering the context of Shakespeare's Hamlet. It was, in a word, powerful.

What worries me about the preponderance of STEM initiatives (buildings, programs, etc.) in independent schools is that, without meaning to, yet by not paying close enough attention, our schools may downplay (or, even worse, dismiss and then lose) the contextual value that liberal arts provide, all in an effort to appear competitive on the STEM front.

And for what gain?

Scarf It Down!

We're all faced with the perennial question of how we might motivate others in our schools. In a recent interview with Karen Christensen (Rotman Magazine, Spring 2013), David Rock, founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, shares that "they key is to create an atmosphere that promotes Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. We call this the SCARF model." I find the model worthwhile because so many independent schools are positioned to implement it; some already do, without knowing it.

• Status - "Within the brain, feelings of low status actually provoke the kind of cortisol elevation associated with sleep deprivation and chronic anxiety. [...] One common threat is the custom of offering feedback. The mere phrase 'Can I give you some advice?' puts people on the defensive, because they perceive the person offering advice as claiming superiority. Inside your brain, it is the cortisol equivalent of hearing footsteps in the dark." (30-31)
• Certainty - We crave it. "At work, not knowing what will happen next can be profoundly debilitating, because it requires extra neural energy, which can undermine performance and disengage people from the present. Breaking a complex project down into small steps can help to create a feeling of certainty. Although it's highly unlikely that everything will go as planned, people will function better because the project now seems less ambiguous." (31)
• Autonomy - "As long as people feel they can execute their own decisions without much oversight, stress will remain under control. [...] A perception of reduced autonomy--for example, when someone is being micromanaged--can easily generate a threat response. When an employee experiences a lack of control, his or her perception of uncertainty is aroused, further raising stress levels." (31)
• Relatedness - "In the brain, the ability to feel trust and empathy about others is shaped by whether they are perceived to be part of the same social group. [...] In terms of workplace implications, this means that teams of diverse people cannot simply be thrown together. They must be deliberately assembled in a way that minimizes the potential for threat responses to arise." (31)
• Fairness - "The perception that an even has been 'unfair' generates a strong response in the limbic system, stirring hostility and undermining trust. The cognitive need for fairness is so strong that some people are willing to [...] commit themselves to an organization they recognize as fair." (31) In terms of an example of a threat, "the 'old boys' network provides an egregious example: those who are not a part of it always perceive their organization as fundamentally unfair, no matter how many mentoring programs are put in place." (31)

The reason why I find this SCARF model so interesting is because, when people experience a rewarding SCARF system, they are considered to be deeply engaged.  Engagement is challenging to measure, but, aided by the SCARF model, I am certain that we could devise a way to measure it through a fairly straightforward survey that would provide us with some constructive/useful data points.

In this climate, not only do we want to see students who are deeply engaged, we want/need to see faculty, staff, and leaders who are deeply engaged. Success in this realm will beget success.

Are you deeply engaged?

Making the Case for Investing in a Learning Culture

Poignant piece in Chief Learning Officer magazine (online version) today. The topic is talent development + learning, and the excerpt is below (it's "business-y" in terms of feel, but the principles apply to schools). Of particular interest to me is the second paragraph. In order to be impactful vis-à-vis strategy, though, schools would benefit from a greater number of folks with broad experience rather than siloed experience. Otherwise, how does a school anticipate needs in the various areas? Professional development shouldn't be just about faculty, it should be about all adult learners in the community...and that would look fairly different from most models today.

One of the most important factors in building the workforce of the future is how organizations develop and train the skills needed in the workplace. This goes beyond formal training and learning; it extends to how to build a learning culture, learning on the job and using technology to deliver embedded learning experiences. In this context, the critical role of learning and development professionals in driving impactful learning strategies becomes clearer.

To increase impact, learning leaders need to understand future business strategy and skills needs. Learning leaders need to up their game in understanding and measuring the impact of learning on performance outcomes, so that they can make the strategic business case for investment in learning programs, tools and capabilities.

 

The Hardest Innovation

I'm a fan of Andrew Hill's "On Management" weekly column in the Financial Times. This morning, I was delighted to come across his piece on "the hardest innovation."

Q: What is the hardest innovation?

A: Killing off projects.

As anyone in schools knows, it is tremendoulsy challenging to sunset projects that really ought to fade away. Hill states that the struggle involved in persuading any company [school] to stop doing certain things is downright painful. We tend to use nice terms, such as "concentrate our focus" to refer to the notion of stopping a project. His point, quite simply, is that we cannot become more strategic by focusing more on something; an increased focus in one area means cleaning up another area and moving it off the radar screen entirely. Focus demands it.

I like one paragraph immensely:

"Why is it so hard for companies to kill off projects? Many leaders think it is more courageous to advance, expand and aquire than to retreat, shrink and divest. At a recent strategy meeting I attended, executives' warm enthusiasm for new ventures was inversely proportional to the chill and doublespeak that filled the room when they were challenged to take the axe to longstanding initiatives. [...] Yet when organizations stop to scrutinize themselves, the accretion of unheeded strategy visions they find hanging around them is extraordinary." [emphasis mine]

Strategy is very much about choice, in other words.

Does your school avoid the hard work of choice?

Abductive Reasoning Regarding Online Competition

Abductive reasoning, i.e., imagining what might be, is something that most schools have never been good at, for years and years. We tend to operate in the camp of deductive and inductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning is anathema to us. And so, even as online learning continues to gain traction in the larger K-12 market place, we continue to espouse our traditional business model of ever-increasing tuition for a product ("education") that is delivered (no, I don't like that term, either...) in the same way.

As Vasant Dhar, a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, writes in the January 7 (2013) 'soapbox' column of the FInancial Times, "Top-branded universities may soon find themselves competing on price with lower-tier brands and potentially losing the battle. Their edge has been solid reputations and knowledge, honed over decades, which until now has been paid for. IT has changed that forever. Information is fluid and once separated from its source can be easily copied, modified and even improved. Top-branded universities have reason to worry over the long term." (11)

Substitute "top-branded independent schools" for 'universities,' and you can begin to see what I'm driving at.

I'm not about curtailing school as we know it. I'm not about tearing down buildings or retro-fitting them to be cyber-cafés. I tend to disagree with Prof Dhar about how easy it is to copy, modify, and improve information, primarily because I believe that how we learn is not in synch with how our society wants to test kids (standardized tests); in other words, testing/assessment is its own issue that is hurting real learning.

Having said that, I think that schools do have to worry if our instructional models continue to be command-and-control, wherein we do straightforward lectures and one-way delivery of content, expecting it to be regurgitated on exams (assessments). If we continue down that path, we will be in trouble.

We do need to consider the value of abductive reasoning, a type of thinking that allows us to say, "Hey, wait a minute. If online learning continues to be this disruptive, how might we alter our learning environments so that we cannot be replicated, so that we can increase our value proposition?"

Some schools are doing that, but too few. We need to embrace abductive reasoning that encourages us to use the phrase "how might we" as a means of imagining the next steps of our own evolution. In other words, imagining how we might transform our business models.

If we choose not to innovate (business models) when we are capable (i.e., now), what will we do when we are forced to innovate, but cannot (diminishing resources and enrollment)?

Innovator's Paradox and Schools

Scott Anthony's work in innovation interests me very much. Recently, I've been pondering the notion of "the innovator's paradox," which goes something like this: when they are in a position to innovate, most organizations don't; then, when they find themselves needing to innovate, they cannot do it.

Some schools got slammed by the financial crisis | economic downturn; others have continued to muddle along, with a slight decline in enrollment. There is a third group, as well: those schools that have either maintained their enrollment or grown it during the last few years (call it a flight to quality).

A few schools in the latter group have begun to talk about innovation, but are trying to figure out how to do it. Others in the same group are eschewing innovation altogther; why bother if we're doing just fine?

I'm wondering how many schools in this group might find themselves stuck in the innovator's paradox in the next two to four years: "We had a chance to innovate, and didn't. Now that we have to (i.e. enrollment is on the cusp of slipping), we're finding it terribly difficult to do."

I like Anthony's idea of writing a Pre-Mortem: a letter to yourself (i.e. the school), highlighting how things have unfolded over the next five years. Then, use that as a way of defining a strategy for what you might undertake within the school in order to avoid that scenario (i.e. the result of having done nothing when you could have...).

With the continued explosion of "free" educational options, how do schools NOT engage in wondering "how might we....?"