Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is now fifteen years old. It has weathered financial crises, dramatic innovation in technology and science, and the inevitable backlash that accompanies success. For a while, it was what everyone talked about. You found it in airport bookstores and on magazine covers. The book was, in many ways, a tipping point for…
Tag: change
On College and On Colleges – DelBanco’s Ideal
Andrew DelBanco is a smart and accomplished man. Director of Columbia University’s American Studies program, he is an award-winning scholar, prolific critic, and critically acclaimed author and editor of many books. His works on Melville are outstanding. DelBanco would be at the top of any short-list of prominent American scholars of arts and letters, particularly…
Business and Technology Bring Continuous Innovation – But Will Higher Education Take Advantage?
Making sense of ever-changing conditions is one of the primary functions of the mainstream business press. Regardless of one’s line of work, publications like The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Harvard Business Review offer a lenses and perspective on the almost incomprehensible dynamism of human economic and technological activity. They are…
On Leadership and the Utility of Precepts
For several weeks have toted Michael Fullan’s Change Leader: Learning To Do What Matters Most, wondering what to make of it and what to do with it. It neither inspired nor engaged me. It is well-meaning and well-organized, written, one must surmise, from the best of intentions by an informed and intelligent man. It shares…
Innovation and Differentiation
Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s The Innovative University is an important book. Christensen is the Cizik Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Eyring is a long-time administrator at Brigham Young University-Idaho. Bringing them together are shared ties with Harvard and BYU-Idaho, two very different institutions who have charted different paths towards success. Despite a baffling…
Organizational Change in Higher Education – a summary review of the scholarship
Adrianna J. Kezar, an associate professor at University of Maryland and an ERIC higher education editor, summarized a raft of recent scholarship on organizational change in Understanding and Facilitating Organizational Change in the 21st Century: Recent Research and Conceptualizations. The title is a mouthful, and while accurate, an even more precise description would emphasize that…
Metaphors and Institutional Understanding
Change is a constant if an academic unit is going to stay active and engaged in the professional world, both within and outside of academia. Change does not come easy to higher education, however, as its benefits are rarely clear while its costs are all too apparent. As a dean, I do much of my…