A straightforward question is sometimes the best way to understand an issue – not because one might find an easy answer, but because the question opens up doors to complexity and helps with broader comprehension. In 2007, Duane E. Leigh, an economics professor emeritus from Washington State University, and Andrew Gill, a professor of economics…
Management By OKRs
John Doerr is a smart and wildly successful businessman, a billionaire and tech leader. An engineer who went to Rice University and then to Harvard for an MBA, Doerr joined Intel just as the microcomputer industry was taking off. He was one of the company’s most successful salespeople. Doerr’s impact and success was much more…
Explaining Economics
Academic disciplines are more than collections of scholars, faculty, classes and majors and graduate students. They are people bound together by like-minded questions and processes, pursuing shared ways of asking and answering difficult questions that can inform who we are and what we do as educated human beings. Sometimes, amid all the bashing of higher…
Expectations of Busyness
“Time is our most precious resource.” I’ve heard it, said it, written it and discussed it again and again. On consideration, time is a funny kind of resource. We don’t really know how much of it any of us have over the long term. Over the short term, everyone has the same 24 hours in…
Building a Better Hispanic Serving Institution
Latinos in Higher Education and Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Creating Conditions for Success is an ASHE (Associate for the Study of Higher Education) report from 2013. It’s concise, well-written, grounded in research and scholarship, and an extraordinarily handy guide. It helps provide an understanding of better and best practices across HSIs (Hispanic Serving Institutions) and other MSIs…
Thinking Through Anchor Institutions
The Obama presidency ushered in many educational initiatives, including a more comprehensive look at what role universities and colleges might take in strengthening communities. The idea of an “anchor institution” has been in play for several decades as scholars, politicians, activists and others considered the many ways that placed-based nonprofits impacted their surrounding communities. Institutions…
Learning from Southwest
The airline industry, in its many permutations, is fascinating. Not only is the very idea of flight amazing (How many tons of equipment get up in the air?), but equally so is crafting a business that can profitably move masses of people around the world safely, inexpensively, and in a timely manner. When one flies…