When my daughter was seven, they were on the knobs to the medicine cabinet, poised to make the nose dive into the toilet if my hand knocked them on the way to the aspirin…on the coffee table peeking out from under the magazines and books…on the floor under the couch…in the corner of the kitchen […]
Strategic Plans and Luxury Cars: They Look so Good on the Lot!
“Check out the new 2020 Strategic Plan—well-equipped, versatile, nodding to the past, styled for the future.” For a moment think of a strategic plan as a luxury car, comprised of elegantly styled components. It is flashy; the engine sounds great; the styling is sleek. It represents the best of the elements of other luxury cars, […]
Joining AAL: The Academy for Advancing Leadership
I have joined The Academy for Advancing Leadership (AAL) as a Senior Consultant. I believe I have much to offer schools, colleges, universities, non-profits, and businesses engaging in change processes.
Comforting Traditions and Stifling Bad Habits
Several years ago, I wrote a piece–“Differentiating Traditions and Bad Habits”–in which I argued that bad habits often masquerade as traditions (I have cut and pasted it below). I refer to this idea often in order to illustrate the need to spend time discriminating between these two forces that drive and govern so much that we […]
Heroes and the Imagination: A New Moonshot
My fascination was endless. And it obviously wasn’t just me…naming Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong as heroes was cultural glue for the United States at exactly the moment when we needed it most—it had been a rough decade to say the least.
The Increasing Relevance of Great Schools in a Technology-Driven World
Teachers have never been more necessary for young people, for we are moving into a time when the primacy of content delivery is waning, and the role of teaching skills, such as collaboration and synthesizing disparate pieces of data are ascending.