What Boards Really Want From the Next Director
Too many boards don't know what they want from the next director, when there is a transition. They aren't short on ideas of what they *think* they want, but one wonders whether what they think they want and what the school needs align in ways that are beneficial to all involved. Let's be honest: 100% success of the new director is never guaranteed. Sometimes things just don't work out the way that the board thought they would. There are also those boards which continue to be shocked and appalled when their director choices fail repeatedly.
Redefining the Top Leadership Position
In 2017, John Chambers (who was then CEO of Cisco Systems) was the guest speaker in an executive education class at Harvard Business School, where he delivered the following message: "A decade or two ago, CEOs could be in their offices with spreadsheets, executing on strategy. Now, if you're not out listening to the market and catching market transitions, [...] if you're not understanding that you need to constantly reinvent yourself every three to five years, you as a CEO will not survive."
Nine Lies About Work
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure…that just ain’t so.” This quote, which opens the tome Nine Lies About Work by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, frames an important issue—namely: we think that we know a number of things ‘for sure.’ Reality, however, may be otherwise. Nevertheless, we continue to insist that we know things ‘for sure.’
Of Ethics and Artificial Intelligence
Bias, privacy, and security issues are challenges that we already face in our very human lives, and they are mirrored in the development of AI. Strangely, it might give us a small degree of comfort to know that, although we don’t know exactly what AI will bring, it exhibits risk characteristics with which we are already familiar and against which we already strive to stay ahead of the game. Such risks will need to become part of risk management in schools, which includes the governance level as well as the senior management team.
A Flawed Question
I encountered a thoughtful comparison in a recent magazine article. A futurist had written about how difficult it had become to explain one’s job to one’s parents. He wrote, “I think you have to treat the world like one of those drone flights. Drones are small and, although quite feisty, can be blown about by the wind. Getting one to where you want to go involves setting a course, yes, but also reacting to the local conditions as you fly. Sometimes you’ll be blown one way, and sometimes you’ll be blown another, and you’ll never really ever be directly on course” (Business Life, June 2017, 26).