Higher Education Leadership

The work of academics can matter and be influential on a public level, but the path to becoming a public intellectual, influential policy advisor, valued community resource, or go-to person on an issue is not one that most scholars are trained for. The Public Professor offers scholars ways to use their ideas, research, and knowledge to change the world.

On April 4, 1968, the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., shocked the nation. Later that month, the Reverend John Brooks, a professor of theology at the College of the Holy Cross who shared Dr. King’s dream of an integrated society, drove up and down the East Coast searching for African American high school students to recruit to the school, young men he felt had the potential to succeed if given an opportunity. Among the twenty students he had a hand in recruiting that year were Clarence Thomas and Theodore Wells....

This audio summary contains key takeaways of the original book A Higher Loyalty by James Comey. It summarizes the book in detail to help people effectively understand, articulate, and imbibe the original work.

When people are kept from moving - whether they're sitting through a presentation or stuck behind a desk - they become restless, and their attention waivers. Yet most training ignores the innate human desire for motion, resulting in participants learning less.

Business scholars C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel base their 1990 argument for a strategy change on a comparison of case studies. They note that some corporations are adept at inventing new markets, quickly entering emerging markets, and shifting patterns of customer choice in established markets. The authors suggest that the ability to identify core competencies allows companies to develop new products quickly, and they challenge managers to emulate these best practices

The IT world is fascinating inside and out. Every year, new technologies come to the market to much appeal and praise, from phones to computers to cybersecurity programs. However, what people do not see covered in the press as much are the IT projects that do not make it big. A realty of the technology world is that projects fail every year - many projects. Furthermore, government entities, who one would think had all tools necessary to launch a successful IT project, have a long list of failed IT projects.

Healthcare is a big business and is only continuing to grow. Because of this, technology must adapt and transform to meet the needs of the public. Failed healthcare IT projects are nothing new. However, they surely are something that can be learned from. In every failure is a lesson that can be used for a future project - a lesson that can help to save, or better, someone else's life.

A professor at Harvard Business School, Kotter spent years coaching organizations - large and small; successful, less successful, and nearly bankrupt - through their own change processes. Some worked; others didn't. Distilling wisdom from these experiences, Kotter identifies eight common mistakes managers make implementing change. He then uses them to propose an eight-stage model that he argues can lead to successful organizational transformation.

Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner is a new way to embrace lessons from the journey of learning. Many believe that one hires someone for their expertise. This is not quite complete. One hires someone for their ability to have learned from their failure to ensure that when they come to fix your problem with their expertise, they fix your problem the right way, the first time. If one wants to succeed, one has to learn how to fail in order to succeed more quickly, faster.