Persistent Innovation
How is your school designed, when it comes to the practice of innovation? Is resilience (of your talent, of your leadership) also part of the design of your school? How might you design for that, if you’re just now contemplating the journey? How might you course-correct, if you believe your design to be out of balance?
Accreditation as Elegant Fulcrum
In this way, the accrediting associations play an even more impactful role with their member schools--not just holding them accountable to a professional standards, but helping them to advance their missions and their impact in ways that will be beneficial to society as a whole--part of the public purpose argument for independent schools.
AI Fails to Understand Strategy
It has been my position for years that strategic plans are rarely strategic. In fact, following a review of over 100 strategic plans that I did in 2010, I came to the conclusion that strategic plans were dangerously formulaic. Some thirteen years later, having reviewed hundreds more, I hold to my earlier assertion. Key learning: if something is formulaic, it can be replicated easily by means of an algorithm.
Lack of Moral Courage Reaches Crisis Proportions
It is disheartening to see so many US independent schools, of varying sizes and histories, grappling with existential crises as we enter 2023. These crises were not necessarily born during the Covid era; although some were, in many cases, their roots can be found 20 years ago, in the lead-up to the Great Recession. The signs were there: a need to 'blend and extend' loans past their original amortization schedules (e.g., blending in other debt and extending a 10-year schedule to 30 years); write-offs of pledge payments that were never honored; reductions in enrollment; increased discounting of seats; fewer donors with the capacity to make large gifts (which masked underlying business model problems). The list goes on.
Value and Future-Ready Schools
Future-ready schools, it could be argued, exhibit three characteristics: (1) they know who they are and what they stand for, (2) they are fixated on speed and simplicity, and (3) they are obsessed with scaling up their ability to learn, innovate, and seek good ideas, irrespective of the origin of those ideas. So say co-authors Aaron de Smet, Chris Gagnon, and Elizabeth Mygatt in a recent article on future-ready organizations in Rotman Management. Although the co-authors were talking about companies, the characteristics of traditional hierarchies are to be found in schools inasmuch as they are found in companies, and the aforementioned characteristics could just as easily be in future-ready schools. Ultimately, this is about value: knowing what your families value, and obsessing about delivering that value.