I have spent the better part of two decades trying to do strategy work inside institutions that were not built to receive it. I learned to write the plans, map the processes, build the infrastructure, and make the case. What I could not do, and it took me longer than I would like to admit to underst...

Deborah Stone opens her book Policy Paradox with a provocation: policymaking is not a technical problem waiting for a rational solution. It is a contest over values, conducted through the language of facts. Efficiency, waste, return on investment - these are not neutral descriptions. They are argume...

On Overfunctioning, Urgency, and the Administrators Who Enable the System They Resent

This piece is the other side of a coin. In January, I wrote about the invisible labor that sustains academic departments; the unspoken contract by which research administrators absorb risk, compensate for structur...

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...