On Creative Construction
School leaders are reading about (or seeing) a relentless influx of new enterprises (organisations of all types) that are proposing new and innovative ways of doing things. These new ways of doing things result in challenging existing organisations with unanticipated business models, sometimes using new technologies.
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."
Competing Commitments
It has been a consistent narrative in education conferences for the past ten to fifteen years: "we need to become more agile, more innovative, more digital, adopt a growth mindset, and focus more on the user..." I have attended a fair number of conferences during this time period, and I think that all of them have featured speakers and workshop leaders who repeat either this exact mantra or something quite close to it.
Learning as a Core Competence
Paul Daugherty, H. James Wilson, and Nicola Morini Bianzino wrote in 2017 about jobs that, in their opinion, artificial intelligence would create. MIT Sloan Management Review recently interviewed two of the three co-authors to find out what they have learned since that article was published two years ago. For those of us in education, the interview is a worthwhile read, as we consider how learning (itself) is a core competence.