Corporatizing the University of Iowa

November 17, 2009, 8:45 a.m.

If We're Going to Do It, Let's Do It Right
(brought to you by FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com*)
Ten days ago I was introduced to the writing of a business executive, Scott Westerman, and thought enough of his description of a profitable substitution of cooperation for competition to pass it along to you. "Cooperation vs. Competition, Conflict, Combat and Catastrophe; Peace as Process," November 6, 2009. I've now discovered his Web site, scottwesterman.com, and a series he's begun, "Monday Motivator." I want to share some UI-relevant excerpts from his comments yesterday, . . .

. . . but first, here are links to earlier entries on some of the other hot topics from the past week or so that are now getting the most direct hits, among which may be the entries you are looking for:

UIHC, Regents and UI.
Strategic Communications VP position: "Strategic Communications a Failed Strategy; Actions Speak Louder," November 13, 2009

Executives trip to Disney World: "Mickey Mouse Patient Satisfaction; UIHC's Troubles: Is Orlando the Answer?" November 8, 2009

"Contributions from patients" proposal: "UIHC: 'Sick Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?'; A Check-In and a Check," October 31, 2009, 7:00 a.m. (with numerous updates through November 4, links to additional, related material -- and now with over 30 of the Press-Citizen readers' comments on B.A. Morelli's stories)

Board of Regents and State universities' budget cutting: "Cutting Slack, Cutting Budgets; Regents, University Presidents, Deserve Some Thanks and Credit," October 30, 2009, 8:30 a.m. (with links to prior, related blog entries)

Spence break-in grand jury proceedings: "UI Spence Break-In: Gazette Scoop Illustrates Issues," October 27, 2009

School boundaries, school boards, and the ICCSD.
"School Board Election: Now Work Begins; It's Swisher, Dorau, Cooper; Old Board 'Starting Off Backing Up' With Consultant and Tough Decisions," September 9, 2009, 7:00 a.m. (with its links to 11 prior and related blog entries including, for example, "School Boundaries Consultant Folly; Tough Boundary Questions Are for Board, Not Consultants or Superintendent, Plus: What Consultant Could Do," and "Cluster Schools: Potential for IC District?")

Nicholas Johnson, "School Board Has Work to Do," Iowa City Press-Citizen, November 2, 2009 (and reproduced in blog)

"Boundaries: Only Board Can Do Board's Job; Drawing School Boundaries Made Easy," November 2, 2009

The issues confronting the University of Iowa to which Westerman's insights from yesterday relate are contained in the two prior blog entries, "Strategic Communications a Failed Strategy; Actions Speak Louder," November 13, 2009, and "Mickey Mouse Patient Satisfaction; UIHC's Troubles: Is Orlando the Answer?" November 8, 2009.

Here are excerpts from a comment [11/13/2009 11:43 a.m.] an anonymous reader put on the former blog entry ("Strategic Communications"):

It is obvious that the Univ of Iowa Corp is rolling on. Most of the comments [on the Daily Iowan's editorial about the new VP position] focus on how a corporation needs good PR. How a position like PR director is cost effective.

Did the academics all die over night to be replaced by the business majors en masse?

In the world of business ethics, it probably is more cost effective to hire a PR professional, than to hire a TA or a librarian.

[But] if this is really the new wave of academic higher education, let's just remove the veneer, and the sooner the better.

The anonymous reader of this blog is right. It's not just the University of Iowa; it's higher education generally that has been corporatized.

I can remember a different day. A day when "SUI" really was the public State University of Iowa, sufficiently funded by the Iowa Legislature, willingly and with pride, so that any Iowa family could afford to send here any child with the credentials to be admitted. A day when financial shortfalls were covered with additional appropriations, not increases in tuition to near-private-school levels. A day when students came for a liberal arts education, not "80 Hours" (the DI's characterization) of binge drinking every week at what's advertised as one of the nation's top "party schools" -- and we try to retain them for their tuition money. A day when the UI president, Virgil Hancher, answered his own phone, may have had a vice president of something or other, but certainly not an army of them in wagons circling Jessup Hall (or as it then was, the Old Capitol) -- least of all a "Vice President for Strategic Communications." A day of male professors in old tweed jackets with leather elbow patches (because the elbows really had worn out), smoking pipes, and writing with ink pens, or pencils kept in working order with the pencil sharpeners in every office and classroom. A day when medical services were provided to faculty families for free, as a matter of "professional courtesy." A day when parking was free rather than a source of revenue, University units served the needs of each other without internal billing, and there simply weren't enough administrators and their assistants to make reports, approvals and paperwork an issue (the notion of a "purchase order" and exchange of funds before "audio-visual" would bring a 16 mm film projector and film to your classroom would have been laughable). A day when Hawkeye football wasn't on television -- because there was no television -- the coach was not paid in the millions (one of the early coaches, before my time, was a math professor who just coached for fun), there were no $100,000 skyboxes for the wealthy elite, kids who were members of the "Knothole Club" could get into Kinnick for a dime, and football was just a sport instead of a subsidiary of the big business that is the entertainment industry today.

I don't want to get into an argument about whether those days were better. There were downsides I could itemize. My only point is that today's corporatized "University of Iowa" is decidedly altered from the public "State University of Iowa" of my childhood.

Today's UI more closely does represent, as the anonymous reader commented, a for-profit private corporation than a non-profit public "state university." The UIHC is one of the largest employers in the state, a multi-billion-dollar operation. The big business that is the football program is in many ways a farm club for the NFL -- with a coach capable of preparing players for its teams, and who could himself coach one of them if he chose. The UI president is paid (salary, benefits, bonus, housing, transportation, expense account, deferred compensation) something between $500,000 and $1 million a year, and is surrounded with highly paid vice presidents and their supporting staff members. Her job is of necessity, in large measure, fund raising. "Students" have become "customers," retained with their access to alcohol, the UI's largely unsupervised and unpunished party atmosphere, and the high grades resulting from grade creep -- customers who can produce the revenue stream that comes from charging "what the market will bear." Still enjoying tax-free status and the ultimate power of eminent domain against any who might protest, this 800-pound corporate gorilla, like GM in Michael Moore's Flint, Michigan, simply takes whatever property it chooses, destroying even adjacent residential neighborhoods that once housed faculty, removing homes from the property tax rolls and shifting the tax burden to the community's remaining homeowners.

This is the reality. There is no turning back the clock. The legislature and people of Iowa are no longer willing to pay for a genuinely "public" university. Football is the most popular thing about the University. The city's bar owners dictate underage drinking policy. The combined UI units demand a payroll that has to be found somewhere -- naming buildings for donors instead of scholars, increased tuition and ticket prices, taking patients' donations before taking their blood pressure, cutting employees' retirement benefits, and selling the right to park by the month and by the minute.

Now that we have, to borrow from George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, "ascertained what we are" and are "just haggling over price," what are we to do?

I suggest, so long as we are going to trade in our universities for corporations, that we should at least set out to find the most modern, creative and compassionate ways to run them, rather than relying on 50-year-old business practices.

All of which, at long last, brings me to these excerpts from Scott Westerman's latest:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” – Maya Angelou

It’s hard for large companies to be authentic and transparent. Size and scale are, by their very nature impersonal. You seek to distill the success formula to it’s essence and replicate it as fast and as profitably as possible. As you become more successful, the risk of failure is greater and the natural tendency is to hunker down and let someone else carefully do the talking for you.

Traditional public relations methodology is all about message management and reactive damage control. But in the Internet age, a new paradigm is emerging. The carefully crafted circular PR speak we all get from politicians, chief executives and their handlers, doesn’t work in the lightning fast, viral pace of the social media culture.

We want straight talk from real people. We want them to talk with us, not to us. We want them to listen. And we expect them to respond . . . fast.

And we’re starting to demand that they “relate” to us.

In the end, our ability to build a strong and personal relationship with our customers and business partners is the ONLY competitive advantage.

Just watch what goes on at Whole Foods, Disney World or Southwest Airlines and you’ll see that people will accept other inconveniences and sometimes will pay higher prices to enjoy a better customer experience.

And what distinguishes these guys from the rest of the pack?

You get the sense that these are real people who genuinely care about you. They use your name often. The ask questions and listen. Sometimes they guide you to another store, knowing that by getting you what you want somewhere else, you’re likely to come back. And they have personality.

Some of the best have the courage to be vulnerable. . . .

Earlier this fall, I had the singular experience of spending an hour and a half with the President of Michigan State University. Dr. Lou Anna K. Simon is running a major academic institution in a State with a significantly troubled economy. The funding model for higher education is evolving right before our eyes and Universities are having to re-invent themselves on the fly.

Lou Anna is everything Jim Collins’ Good to Great Level 5 Leader should be. She is candid, she is transparent – answering our straight questions with equally straight answers, she is genuine in expressing the joys and frustrations that face her every day. And she lives the famous Stockdale Paradox, directly confronting the unpleasant current realities, without losing faith that the Institution will ultimately prevail.

She won’t remember this, but I asked her during Homecoming weekend how she kept her attitude. “It’s something you choose to do,” she said. “I don’t like the alternative.” . . .

Not the answer to the UI's every prayer, perhaps, but a small dose of some of the more creative observations from within the business community of relevance to our proposed trips to Disney World and the new VP for strategic communications.

Westerman warns us against "the natural tendency to hunker down and let someone else carefully do the talking for you" (read "Vice President for Strategic Communications").

He advises that "in the Internet age, a new paradigm is emerging. The carefully crafted circular PR speak we all get from . . . chief executives and their handlers, doesn’t work . . .."

His advice to UIHC, searching for ways to improve "patient satisfaction"? "[R]eal people who genuinely care about you. They use your name often. They ask questions and listen. Sometimes they guide you to another store, knowing that by getting you what you want somewhere else, you’re likely to come back. And they have personality."

He gives us something to read: Jim Collins, Good to Great -- which explains how to reach a long-advocated goal of the University of Iowa.

And he even gives us an example of a university president elsewhere who is doing it.

Not bad for one Monday morning piece from corporate America.

If we're going to corporatize higher education, let's at least do it right.
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* Why do I put this blog ID at the top of the entry, when you know full well what blog you're reading? Because there are a number of Internet sites that, for whatever reason, simply take the blog entries of others and reproduce them as their own without crediting the source. I don't mind the flattering attention, but would appreciate acknowledgment as the source, even if I have to embed it myself. -- Nicholas Johnson
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Cooperation vs. Competition, Conflict, Combat and Catastrophe

November 6, 2009, 6:00 a.m.

Peace as Process
(brought to you by FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com*)
There will be time enough in future blog entries to reflect upon the impoverished UIHC "leaders and staff," with their need to shake down patients for "voluntary" contributions to help make up for a $17 million shortfall, now heading off to an Orlando resort to think about it [B.A. Morelli, "Politician questions UI Orlando trip; Officials say Disney Institute the best around," Iowa City Press-Citizen, November 6, 2009, p. A1], but meanwhile, this morning . . .

President Lyndon Johnson used to have a teletype in the oval office, so he could know about the latest AP news bulletins just as soon as they were "on the wire." My modern day equivalent is an iPhone with the AP "app," and a laptop, or desktop, with instant access to the New York Times and local papers' online editions.

As it happened I used the latter yesterday afternoon and saw the story that the Times said was then only one minute old: the shooting at Ft. Hood near Killeen, not that far north of my old stomping ground in Austin. This morning it's reported as Robert D. McFadden, "Army Doctor Held in Fort Hood Rampage," New York Times, November 6, 2009, p. A1. During the night the story took up nearly one-half of each of the BBC's half-hour newscasts, and I suspect was reported by most of the world's major media.

(And speaking of Orlando, 20 minutes ago the Times reported another, possibly copycat, shooting in Orlando: Sewell Chan, "Gunman Shoots 6, Kills 1 in Orlando, Fla.," New York Times, November 6, 2009.)

But yesterday afternoon also brought me some better news that I'm going to reproduce for you in a moment.

The Times story notes that these seemingly unprovoked, mass, random killings are nothing new to America -- not that any of us needed to be informed of that fact: "The rampage recalled other mass shootings in the United States, including 13 killed at a center for immigrants in upstate New York last April, the deaths of 10 during a gunman’s rampage in Alabama in March and 32 people killed at Virginia Tech in 2007, the deadliest shooting in modern American history."

In fact, it's not the first in the Killeen area: "In 1991, Killeen was the scene of one of the worst mass killings in American history. A gunman drove his pickup truck through the window of a cafeteria, fatally shot 22 people with a handgun, then killed himself."

Look, I'm no psychiatrist -- though it appears yesterday's shooter was -- but it would seem to me that what's probably going on here is that he, what's the scientific psychiatric term? -- "snapped." So it's probably not a valid stretch to draw any "American character" conclusions from this single incident.

Still . . . we do tend to value, almost worship to the point of a mantra, the idea of "competition" -- competition on the playing field and competition in business and politics.

And while there are undoubted benefits from competition, there is also a downside, as when it leads to the conflict and verbal combat between the Democrats and Republicans in Washington. It seems pretty obvious that, at least for many of them, their single minded focus is, first, their own re-election, whatever it takes (including their taking of special interest money), and second, a "win" for their "team" (party) measured by which team has the majority, and therefore control, of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives. And what "single minded focus" means is that if meaningful health care for the American people has to be sacrificed in the process, well, so be it. If it's necessary to handicap the domestic and international ability of the other party's president of the United States, well, that's just part of the "game."

(There is at least some speculation that an accumulation of the form of "verbal combat" we call "hate speech" may have played a role in triggering the action taken by the shooter yesterday.)

Even when the competition is in the relatively benign context of "sport," brawls occasionally break out -- regularly in hockey, occasionally in baseball -- and often among fans in the bars following the game.

Nor is it just verbal combat. We are at "war" in Afghanistan, with a vague and shifting mission (as was the case in Iraq), in a geographical area (it can't even be called "a country" in the way in which we think of that word) with challenges for which even the generals acknowledge there is no military solution. And yet we find it necessary to study for months, and debate, whether sending in even more troops will enable us to "win" (whatever that word might mean in this context). We're more comfortable with "combat," even when it is inappropriate and counterproductive, than the exploration of alternatives.

I'm not sure the case can be made that an exultation of competition leads inevitably to conflict and then to combat and finally to the kind of catastrophe that occurred at Fort Hood yesterday. But I do think there is some relationship, and I find it troubling.

We share the grief of the families of the 12 dead and 30 injured soldiers, innocent random bystanders all. And let us not forget the family and friends of the accused killer, and the other Muslims in and out of the American military who are as innocent as those who were shot, and yet may have to deal with some negative fallout from the incident.

And yet in the midst of the darkness brought on by competition, conflict, combat and catastrophe, there are those who light candles of hope as well as mourning.

There is another way.

You may be familiar with the training exercise in negotiation involving the "ugli [sic] orange." It's an effort to dramatize the difference between one's "position" and "interest" on the road to win-win solutions to conflict. There are many incarnations of the exercise. Here is one.

I don't think I can ever bring myself to believe, with Anne Frank, that "people are really good at heart." Many certainly are, but far from all, in my experience.

But what really helped me through the day yesterday was one example of the payback from "cooperation" as an alternative to competition, conflict, combat and catastrophe. It comes from, of all places, American business -- often seen as the most ruthlessly competitive institution in our society. Indeed, there are business leaders who would probably be tongue-tied if they could not draw upon sports analogies in heralding the virtues of competition.

It is an email received by a friend of mine from a Scott Westerman, a Comcast Area Vice President otherwise unknown to me, who is about to leave the position he currently occupies in order to apply for another. Here, with his permission, is the text of that email:

I got a call from a co-worker the other day. “Full disclosure,” he said. “I wanted you to know that we’re both competing for the same promotion.”

We’re friends. He said he didn’t want me to hear about it from someone else. I thought that was a classy thing to do.

Then I got a crazy idea.

“You know, both of us have strengths that could help the other during the interview process. Why don’t we prep each other so we can both can do our best?”

That sounds nuts on the surface. Why would you want to help a competitor win the job you desire? And why would anyone else who is competing with you even consider sharing his secrets?

My friend didn’t miss a beat. “That’s a terrific idea. Lets do it!”

We spent the next hour sharing nuggets from our areas of expertise, talking about how we would approach the job, sometimes debating the validity of an idea, but all the time trying to better understand the value that each of us brought to the table.

What followed was an email chain. I sent him the spreadsheets that helped me track progress, and explained sales strategies and my favorite management techniques. He sent me a blizzard of details on a section of the business where his expertise is nationally recognized.

We agreed that our joint goal was to help the company hire the best possible person for the gig and realized that, no matter how the chips fell, we would each enjoy working for the other.

I told my team members about the encounter. Some may have thought that their boss was crazy, but there was an interesting gleam in the eyes of others.

That gleam made sense to me two weeks later, when I learned that three of them were applying to succeed me in the role I was about to relinquish.

Naturally, I helped each of them prep for their first interview encounter. I know them well and shot tough questions their way, gave them feedback on their answers and tried to share the lessons I had learned in the role. It was enthralling to watch them work things through and gratifying to see that some of the ideas I had tried to teach them over our time together had taken root.

But the real surprise came later. I saw two of them heading out together at the lunch hour this week. When I asked what they were doing they said, “We’re sharing our knowledge with one another so that we can both be our best during the interview process.”

It turned out that all three of them had spontaneously agreed to help one another prepare.

Clearly, this approach only works if you’ve built a team who trust one another and are genuinely able to put the best interests of the group first. They have worked hard over time to build a unique bond. In our staff meetings, everyone pitches in to understand and assist with an individual’s challenge, even if its technically outside of their core competency. Sometimes, the best technical solutions came from our call center guy. And our marketing lead offered to off load some of the finance person’s work so that we could hit a forecast and customer communication deadline on time.

I can’t yet tell you who will get the two jobs that my buddy and I, and my three extraordinary team members are competing for. But my sense is that the likelihood of the right person being selected has gone up substantially.

Because we’re all in it together.

He got me to thinking -- about Senators John Kerry, D-Mass., Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.,trying to fashion bi-partisan meaningful support for a climate change bill; that cluster of law students I saw who were studying together rather than competing,"Paper Chase" style; the football player I saw reach down and give an opponent a hand getting up; and those corporate executives helping each other face-to-face instead of placing knives in the backs of their "competitors."

It brings to mind Robert Kennedy's line, "Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why'? I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not'?"

Am I making too much of a single email? Maybe. But I don't think so. Because cooperation, working together for the benefit of all, is something that's possible every day in thousands of little as well as big ways. Whether it's the mission of our foreign and military policies, Comcast, health care reform, military units at Fort Hood and Afghanistan, politicians in Washington, or law students in Iowa City, we are, as Scott Westerman says, "all in it together." And the more often we behave as if we believed it the better off we all will be.
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* Why do I put this blog ID at the top of the entry, when you know full well what blog you're reading? Because there are a number of Internet sites that, for whatever reason, simply take the blog entries of others and reproduce them as their own without crediting the source. I don't mind the flattering attention, but would appreciate acknowledgment as the source, even if I have to embed it myself. -- Nicholas Johnson
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