• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Bob Emiliani

Leadership for the Digital Age

  • About Bob Emiliani
  • Speed Leadership
    • Overview
    • About
    • Book
    • Workshops
    • License
  • Books
  • Improvement
  • Blog
  • Contact

Leaders Still Not Leading

January 3, 2014 by Bob Emiliani

After decades of mismanaging costs and tuition pricing, university leaders have been forced by macroeconomic conditions to finally take action. These two articles on cost cutting (WSJ, 25 December 2013) and tuition pricing (NYT, 25 December 2013) outline the typical roads taken.

Sadly, when it comes to tuition pricing, university leaders rely on expensive consultants to figure out what to do, not realizing that a professor of retail marketing in the business school can provide the three available options in 15 seconds. Sadly, when it comes to cost cutting, university leaders do what everyone else does, including laying off the lowest paid staff – those who actually do real work.

The gap between what leaders know how to do, and what they should be doing remains wide, driven in part by a failure to do a little bit of research to find out if practical alternatives exist to the usual zero-sum cost-cutting routines.

Big-name consultants (Accenture, Bain, etc.) see higher ed as an untapped source of sales for their zero-sum solutions to university finance problems. University leaders, suddenly in need of quick fixes, are easy marks for the consultants.

Complacency is the mother of quick fixes, which pushes away the process, kaizen, that leads to the learning that generates non-zero-sum improvements.

Filed Under: Continuous Improvement, Conventional v. Lean Thinking, LeanProfessor.com

Primary Sidebar

Blog Categories

  • BobEmiliani.com
  • Continuous Improvement
  • Conventional v. Lean Thinking
  • Funny Stuff
  • Kaizen
  • Lean Leadership
  • Lean Practices
  • Lean Principles
  • Lean Teaching
  • Lean Teaching Q&A
  • Lean Tools and Methods
  • Lean University
  • LeanProfessor.com
  • Question & Answer
  • Real Lean v. Fake Lean
  • Respect for People
  • Shared Learning Resources
  • The Back Story
  • Time Machine
  • Voice of the (Student) Customer

Footer

Contact Bob

[email protected]

Providence, Rhode Island

  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube

Goodies

Amazon Author’s Page

YouTube Channel

Faculty Home Page

Sign Up For News

Search Footer Widget

Cubic LLC
© 2021 · Bob Emiliani · Website by Ella J Designs