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...

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...

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...

Why Thought Partnership Is Not a Luxury in Higher Education Right Now

This is Part 2 in a series on strategy, planning, and organizational design in higher education. Strategy vs. Strategic Planning: Why Winning Requires Deliberate Choice establishes the distinction between strategy and planning th...

Killing Sacred Cows — Part 3 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...

Killing Sacred Cows is 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 deserve pr...

This is the first in a series examining structures and assumptions in academic research that have gone unquestioned long enough to feel permanent. The last several years have stress-tested a lot of them. Some didn't hold. This one is worth naming directly.

I want to be clear up front: this is not a...

I recently shared thoughts on applying the principles of High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) to research administration, framing our work as an adjacent high-reliability function. But what happens when you’re operating within a highly decentralized institution, school, or college where sweeping ch...

For years, research administration has been stuck in the same unproductive debates—centralization vs. decentralization, administrative burden vs. compliance, homegrown tech vs. third-party. We argue over structures and approaches as if one model will solve all problems when, in reality, the ground b...

Research administration is bogged down by outdated, manual processes. While other industries embrace innovation, universities and hospitals have lagged in tech solutions and hesitate to adopt third-party tech due to [valid?] financial data security concerns. But this caution comes at a cost: adminis...

This is the first in a series of essays on strategy, planning, and organizational design in higher education. It is intentionally diagnostic by naming the problem and sets up the question the subsequent pieces work through. If you want the framework first, start with Sequence Is Everything and retur...

For many academic departments, centers, and units with a research mission, focusing on their core objective can be frustrating, messy, and exhausting. Research administrators often deal with complicated email threads discussing changes in project effort, managing reporting requirements, questions ab...