Reflections on research in progress, teaching experiments, and broader questions about how organizations work and why they sometimes don't.
Henry Rollins spent only one semester in college, yet he's spent decades educating himself. What can his intellectual curiosity teach us about the purpose of higher education?
Organizations divide work because specialization is useful, but someone eventually has to put it back together. Where that integrative authority resides shapes which priorities are treated as the starting point when competing claims have to be reconciled.
Enrollment pressure pushes universities to add what students want and remove what they resist. But individually sensible changes do not necessarily add up to a coherent strategy.
Mission statements often try to include everything an organization values, but that can make them nearly useless when real tradeoffs arise. A useful mission should help clarify what matters most when choices have to be made.
A five-hour strategy session about research excellence raises a harder question: Can brainstorming ideas substitute for deciding what an organization is willing to give up to achieve its goals?
Greenway Institute's plans raise a question about college costs and how curriculum, campus life, and paid work could be designed together.
A simple rule from Go Fish offers a useful lesson about matching an organization's capabilities to the opportunities around it—and knowing when the hand needs to change.
A kindergarten supply list reveals how public schools shift classroom operating costs—and the work of absorbing them—to families and teachers.
Dual enrollment can help students move through school faster and more cheaply. But what happens when accumulating credits becomes easier to measure than the learning and development those credits are supposed to represent?
Workers often discover better ways to do their jobs than the official procedures allow. When organizations make work more visible, employees may hide the adaptations that actually keep things running.
Organizations have become very good at collecting information from employees. The harder task is remaining capable of being changed by what those employees say.
A reflection on Xavier basketball, the new economics of college sports, and what happens when a university's most visible symbol begins to shape its sense of strategy.
More than three in five college students now see themselves as customers. The language is partly reasonable, but it quietly changes what students, faculty, and administrators are to one another.
Empowerment can give people real agency, confidence, and meaning. But when organizations use empowerment language to shift responsibility downward, it can also make structural problems feel like personal shortcomings.
Outlaw motorcycle clubs are usually seen as symbols of freedom and rebellion. But their durability depends on rules, hierarchy, ritual, symbols, and discipline.
Universities say they value breadth and interdisciplinarity, but their budget and curriculum systems quietly reward departments for owning students rather than educating them.
Benchmarking is supposed to inform strategy, but in higher education it often becomes a substitute for it, producing expensive sameness instead of distinctive choice.
America is not just underfunding higher education. It is shrinking its idea of what higher education is for.
Generative AI offers domain experts something far more important than productivity—a mechanism to reclaim professional control over their own work.
Exploring the unexamined assumption that business logic is a universal skeleton key for complex institutions.
Moving beyond the 'practical vs. inquiry' divide to create a more flexible, ethical, and integrated university experience.
A look at the 'Dog's Dinner' of higher ed strategy—where administrative bloat and consultant-led sprawl replace focused institutional choice.
How AI can be the catalyst for stripping away administrative sprawl and returning the university to its essential foundation: the relationship between faculty and students.
Reflections on presenting early findings from our Confidence Women project at Miami University's Ohio Entrepreneurship Research Roundtable.
An introduction to this site and what you can expect to find here — research, teaching, and reflections on entrepreneurship, strategy, and higher education.
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