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The Hard Thing About Higher Education #changingtimes #ideas #leadership

What Ben Horowitz's survival manual teaches us about the moment universities are actually in

There's a genre of advice circulating right now aimed at university leaders scrambling to respond to federal funding cuts and administrative award delays. It goes something like this: diversify your revenue...

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Killing Sacred Cows, Part 4: The Research Enterprise Is Powered by Invisible Labor #career #ideas

Killing Sacred Cows — Part 4 of a series examining the unspoken norms, taboos, and protected assumptions in academic research that are rarely questioned, even when they undermine effectiveness and resilience. This series names those assumptions, puts them up for debate, and asks whether they still d...

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Capacity Is the Precondition for Innovation #ideas #leadership #operations

Peter Drucker's The Discipline of Innovation makes a case that has held up for four decades: innovation is not a matter of luck or temperament. It is a structured, systematic process rooted in observation, analysis, and disciplined execution. Drucker identifies seven sources of innovation opportunit...

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Strategy, Part 1: The Word of the Year in Higher Ed in 2025 #changingtimes #ideas #leadership

If you’re a regular reader of Community Insights, you know I’m not a fan of higher education’s obsession with “strategic planning” as a method for setting direction. If you’re new here, you may want to revisit our discussion on the difference between strategy and strategic planning. The distinction ...

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