Jim Salvucci, Ph.D.
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3/25/2021

What If the Way We Think about Higher Education Is All Wrong?

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Part one of

​Product
Consumer
Customer

Distorted university building
​Every organization needs to understand how its processes function, but in the world of nonprofits and other mission-driven organizations it can be difficult to maintain perspective on how that works exactly. What are the most important pieces of the operation, and how do they perform together? How do you maintain transactional relationships while fulfilling a transformational mission? Developments in nonprofit higher education in the US may offer insight.

For decades now, nonprofit and public higher education has endured an ongoing paradigm shift that reimagines students as customers. This shift ostensibly offers some considerable improvements over older models that assumed college to be primarily a meritocracy, such as a focus on providing students more access to college services to help assure their success. In practice, though, it has tended to displace the focus on academic matters in favor of concerns about student satisfaction, with decidedly mixed results. It also has contributed to more intensive attention to college marketing and pricing, which in turn contributes to a trend of students making initial college selections or even transferring from school to school in search of the best deals and not necessarily the best fit. 

While finances are critically important, of course, and have always played a role in the choice of college or whether to go to college at all, decisions based solely or largely on fiscal anxiety seldom benefit students in the long run. Nonetheless, the conceptualization of college has gone from an overemphasis on academia as a transformational meritocracy to a predominantly transactional model.

Worse still, culturally and politically, this new model has recast higher ed primarily as being a benefit to individual college students rather than as a collective good, a perspective that is reflected in US education policy. From the individual student standpoint, college pricing and costs (which are discrete considerations) have risen precipitously as government subsidies dwindle. Furthermore, this shift has wrought an epistemological crisis that arguably can be seen playing out in our politics today where speculation and fabrication hold nearly the same status as a fact-based understanding of reality. The new perception is that college no longer exists primarily to make you better informed and even smarter. College is just there to get you a better job.

Meanwhile, simply going back to the old model of higher ed as a meritocracy for the select is not a desirable option either. That system tended to treat students almost as interchangeable or even disposable commodities. The individual student’s success mattered little to an apparatus that basked in its own sense of inherent value and entitlement and touted a supposed transcendental potentiality. Under those assumptions, if you struggled as a student, you deserved to struggle. The system itself could not be at fault or offer relief. Meanwhile and in sharp contrast, the scions of the privileged class were treated as though their parentage and social stratum were merit enough to for them to succeed no matter how inept they actually were. We can see this assumption still playing out among the most elite institutions.

Therefore, we need a new paradigm. What if, as Yan Dominic Searcy, a dean at California State University, Northridge, has proposed, rather than customers or end purchasers, the students were regarded as the consumers of what the college offers? In this formulation, the student is not involved in a purely business transaction but is simply an ancillary beneficiary of a transaction that the college conducts with its real customer: society itself. While the student may still (or not) contribute tuition, the people—usually via the government—significantly funds and benefits from the individual student’s education and its contribution to the growth of an educated populace. This public funding is clearest in public higher ed, but even private nonprofit institutions do and have long received a variety of both direct and indirect government and charitable subsidies. 

​A Digression on Customer vs Consumer

mug
​For clarity on the distinction between a consumer and a customer, you can do a simple Google search for the terms. Shockingly, dig a little deeper and you may find that there are many discussions in higher ed literature, including peer-reviewed research papers, that seem to use the terms interchangeably, which hampers full understanding of the matter within higher ed. This seems particularly the case with UK studies for some reason.

A simple way of thinking about this distinction is to consider a gift. If I purchase a mug to give to you, I am the customer (the purchaser), and you are the consumer (the end user). If I keep the mug for myself, I am both the customer and the consumer. 

Think of all the cheesy gift shops you have ever seen, particularly in tourist areas. Many of these are filled with products you would never buy for yourself but will still readily purchase to fulfill some need to return home laden with memorabilia to give others. 

Recall just about any trip you have taken to a tourist site. No doubt, you have seen store that sells mugs or other trinkets as souvenirs. Perhaps you have no need of a new mug. Perhaps you have no desire to possess a chintzy reminder of your trip. Or, perhaps the mug is just plain awful. Whatever the case, imagine that you do not want to own this particular mug. Still, at the right price, it could be a suitable gift your neighbor who has been dutifully chasing kids off your lawn while you were on vacation. Thus, you may purchase this artifact and, in so doing, become the satisfied customer. For her part, your curmudgeonly neighbor may, out of guilt, out of a love of kitsch, or out of a need for an extra beverage container, keep the item. Your neighbor is then the satisfied, or at least gratified, consumer. 

Thus, an entire industry—the cheesy tourist gift shop—exists in no small part due to this distinction between the customer who wants to buy but not own the product and the consumer who is not the buyer but is content to own it. And I bet, like me, you have no end of mugs, magnets, and other such tchotchkes from places you have never visited and never would visit cluttering up your house.

​An Educated Society Is a Healthy Society

diploma
​The economic, cultural, and epistemological advantages of introducing college-educated citizens into society are evident. College is a public good even as it benefits individual students. Ergo, the old dichotomy between the public good and private benefit is and has always been false. In this formulation with the student as the college’s consumer and society as its customer, we can see that the product a college offers is in fact its very mission. Alternately, if you prefer, the mission is a process or a service offered by the institution. However you conceive it, fulfillment of the mission is the desired outcome of institutional success. Importantly, a product, be it the college mission or the souvenir mug, only has value if it benefits both the consumer and the customer. If one is not happy, the whole process is a failure. 

This new paradigm allows us to perceive the value of college education to society at large, which would serve to induce that society, via the government, to increase its support of higher education as it once did. Meanwhile, since we can then dispose of the false dichotomy between the societal benefit and the private good of higher education, individual student success can remain an important focus as students gain career and life skills—certainly the most valuable outcome from the student-as-customer model.

Furthermore, understanding this new paradigm for higher ed can inform how other mission-driven organizations regard and present themselves in the world.
NEXT WEEK, Part 2:
​     How this paradigm plays out in other mission-driven organizations.

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3/18/2021

Pointing Fingers Is a Fantastic Way to Avoid Solving Problems

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A TRUE Tale with three morals

Sign of man point at other man
J'accuse! = Gotcha!
Years ago, when I was a university dean, I was given the additional job of overseeing our study abroad program. How I ended up saddled with this extra duty is fodder for another day, but my only compensation, aside from the warm-and-fuzzies gained from knowing that my efforts enhanced student learning, was the fact that I got to travel to a few cool places. 

One May, we sent 36 students and faculty to South Africa for five weeks. We were very familiar with this trip and its ins outs, and I had twice traveled there myself, once with students. This time I delayed my departure to handle some business stateside, but I planned to join them mid-trip. The second day of the excursion, a phone call awakened me with the horrific news that our travelers had been highjacked at gunpoint on a bus and robbed. They were now all safe and sound, but they had been in real danger.  

To compound the situation, one of the students texted home to tell mom, and mom then contacted the media for whatever reason. Since one of the faculty chaperones on the trip was the recently retired police commissioner of Baltimore, media interest was piqued, and so we were off to the races.

I won’t distract you with the details, but I convened with a group of university vice presidents to decide what was next, and we agreed it was best to bring everyone home. 

None of these vice presidents had any experience with study abroad, and some of them had never been abroad themselves. In fact, I am pretty sure, one had never even been on plane. Their inexperience confounded their ability to assess and anticipate distance, geography, logistics, and the basic protocols of international travel. Study abroad professionals typically visit student destinations in advance to preempt just this sort of disorder. Since as a mere dean I was the lowest-ranked person in the room, my perspective was dismissed out of hand despite my personal knowledge of the travel conditions, the topography, the people, and the local challenges. Thus, arrogance and power, as always, proved a noxious combination and hampered our ability to reach conclusions and communicate clearly. As a result, we missed several opportunities to resolve the matter expeditiously, alleviate parent fears, and manage the media. 

Since the press had taken an interest in the story, the VP for communications, the only VP who was not using this crisis as an opportunity to posture and preen, arranged a press conference with the four local television stations for the next day and tapped me as the university’s spokesperson, a job I neither sought nor had any training for. Even as we worked to extract our travelers, television reporters and news crews arrived on campus and lined up their equipment in a designated area. 

While all this was going on, we were having trouble making arrangements for our travelers to get from Pretoria to the Johannesburg airport in part because of the VPs’ antics. Their stupidity peaked with someone’s suggestion that the Pretoria police should use their vans to transport our travelers and all their luggage to Johannesburg. “I looked it up. It’s only 30 miles,” this VP boasted, the one who had never flown. I had to counter that in my experience, the police in any country are generally not willing to commit their vehicles and officers to transport tourists unless it’s to the pokey. He, in his infinite arrogance, was not convinced.
​
movie still of accused man
Maybe thirty minutes before I was to make my press debut, three VPs, including my boss, called me into an office in what was, for all intents and purposes, an ambush. They decided that they were now angry at the trip leader, who was one of my department chairs, and by extension me, because he did not respond to an email that was sent regarding a flight arrangement.
​

No matter how much I explained that the trip leader was at the police station armed with only a flip phone and had no access to email, they would not relent in their anger at him. They were looking for someone to hang, and he would do nicely. (I don’t hesitate to point out that he is Black and they are all White.) 
​
They also were furious that he had not already secured a bus to get everyone to the airport at a moment’s notice. I pointed out that even in the U.S. he would have been hard-pressed to have arranged a bus so quickly and to have it wait on-call. I also explained that, although the Tambo airport was only thirty miles away, it is a large and difficult airport to navigate, that it often had long lines, and that clearance to fly to the States included individual pat-downs of every passenger by security. All this delay would have to be factored into the timing of any departing flight.

The VPs were having none of it. One of them speculated that given the special circumstances, the airline would certainly suspend security checks! I just cannot make this stuff up. The three kept hammering away as I tried to reason with them and protect the trip leader. Our words grew heated. At one point, one of the VPs, the one who was afraid of flying, yelled, “You sound defensive!” To this day, I do not know how I refrained from yelling back, “And you are being highly offensive, you ignorant racist jackass!” Anyway, that’s what went screaming through my mind.

All the while, through the window I could see the camera crews outside adjusting their equipment. They were almost ready for me. The VP for communications came to the office door several times to get me ready, but the other VPs shooed her away. Eventually I realized that the only way for me to get out of this was to let the bully VPs take it out on the Black employee in South Africa. As we called his cell by speakerphone, I anticipated that they would rip right into him when he answered. Instead, they all looked at me. Cowards. They expected me to do their filthy work. 

I greeted him and then sternly but without raising my voice, chided him for neither magically arranging for a bus to appear nor somehow commandeering all the police vans and drivers in the city of Pretoria. He and I were friends, and he knew me well enough to read my tone and put on a show of indignity to make it sound good. The VPs were satisfied, or at least that is how I read their smug expressions. That deplorable task out of the way, I was free to go talk to the media now without any preparation.

Later on, when I was done with the press, I called the trip leader to apologize for my earlier sternness. He knew the players and had grasped the situation but appreciated my call nonetheless.
montage of finger pointing images
I tell this story as an example of the peculiar propensity to point fingers overwhelming the need to solve problems. We had to resolve a crisis, a real crisis. “Crisis,” by the way, is a word I never use lightly because it is deployed far too readily to describe even routine challenges. With the additional strain of the press breathing down our necks, having three VPs chew me out and then compel me to chew out my colleague (from 8,000 miles away) was not a good use of our time or energy. Even if he had screwed up (and he most certainly did not) or I had screwed up (nor did I), there was no reason to indulge in this little power play cum game of gotcha. I suspect much of this nonsense was because I was chosen to be the spokesperson and not them—pathetic jealousy. Also, they were all veteran bullies and could not pass up an opportunity. The remainder of their motivation, though, seemed nakedly racial to me.

Whatever their excuses, it was unreasonable to point fingers when a problem was at hand. On rare occasions, assessing blame may be necessary to solve the problem, but, almost always, doing so is a massive distraction. Furthermore, I have often found that, after the dust has settled, the need to assign blame becomes blunted anyway.

In this case, the immediate stakes were particularly high. Not only did we have to get our travelers home, but if these arrogant VPs had been successful in rattling me, I may have flubbed the press conference and created a new mess. Perhaps that was their goal all along, to set me up for failure. If so, they blew it. 

green troll under bridge
Fortunately, the press conference went fine—almost. For the broadcast, one TV station juxtaposed my statements with contrary claims from a lying secret source whose voice was electronically distorted (cannot make it up!), but I was later able to correct the record during a post-return press conference. The journalistic malpractice on display was astonishing. We eventually got everyone home safely albeit several days later than necessary due to delays spawned by finger-pointing tantrums. As for the bullying VPs who ambushed me, they just crawled back under their bridges to troll another day.


​Moral 1: The more you are pointing fingers, the less you are solving problems.
     Solve problems first. Point fingers later--and then only if doing so serves some useful purpose.


Moral 2: Just because you have a big title does not make you the expert.
     If you think that is the case, you are dead wrong.


Moral 3: Avoid the press if you can.
     The press, like the troll, is not likely to be your friend.
Salvucci with faculty after press conference
Salvucci with faculty after 2nd press conference

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3/4/2021

​Soft Skills Are the Hardest Skills of All

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ON HUMAN TOOLS+PARADIGMS

jeweler working with soft hammer
My first administrative position at a university was as the founding dean of a School of Humanities and Social Sciences. My education and professional background is in the humanities, so I had much to learn about the social sciences and how they relate to the humanities as I stitched two disparate academic areas together.

​For those whose have not been anointed as academic cognoscenti, the humanities are fields such as philosophy, religion, English, and often history. The social sciences consist of such fields as psychology, sociology, economics, political science, and sometimes history. This being academia, there are many other fields I could list as well as more overlaps, underlaps, interlaps, metalaps, and burlaps, but you get the idea.


Academic fields can be surprisingly territorial and unaccountably competitive. Take, for instance, the sometimes factious relationship encapsulated in the common phrases “soft sciences” and "hard sciences." The behavioral or social sciences are designated "soft" (read: inadequate, facile, insubstantial) while the natural sciences are regarded as "hard" (read: formidable, challenging, consequential). As strange as such hierarchies may seem to nonacademics, there are more. The humanities are often dismissed as not serious (read: just plain soft without even the patina of scientific hardness, mushy). Further down the pecking order, you may find the fine and performing arts, which are cast as softer still, (read: squishy). These are just some examples of the disciplinary caste system that bedevils  academia.

Despite these distinctions and hierarchies, commonalities among these fields are evident. The natural sciences and the social sciences share research methodologies and even terminology. Meanwhile, although humanistic methodologies allow for far more fluidity than do the natural and social sciences, the social sciences and humanities share a common set of questions and inferences regarding the human experience. For their part, humanists themselves sometimes look down upon the arts as not being serious or scholarly enough even as they rely on the arts for much of their subject matter and much of their way of knowing, among other things.
Picture
For those keeping score, then, the traditional and entirely unreasonable pecking order of academic disciplines in the liberal arts is
     1. Natural sciences (hard)
     2. Social sciences (soft)
     3. Humanities (mushy) 
     4. Arts (squishy)

To be sure, most competent academic professionals eschew this silly disciplinary caste system, which is largely the stomping ground of the arrogant and the ignorant. Solid academic professionals readily bridge the gaps between fields, capitalize on their similarities and synergy, and exploit their differences in order to collaborate on better serving students and scholarship.
​
woman with bottle labeled soft skills
What Are Soft Skills?

I recount all this as an oblique approach to the question of softness. Just as the social sciences were dismissed by some as soft sciences, the arts, the social sciences, and the humanities are sometimes dismissed as basic training in mere soft skills. There is a pronounced pliability at play in these fields that is allegedly not so important to other fields such as the natural sciences or business.

Soft skills, though, involve a mastery of the plasticity of human nature while hard skills are needed to perform particular tasks in a specific field. For example, the ability to persuade would be a soft skill in the workplace while the ability to utilize a database would be a hard skill. Both skills can be learned, but soft skills can be quite slippery while hard skills are often (not always) more readily grasped. 

Importantly, despite the negative implications of the term “soft skills,” when employers are surveyed about what abilities they most value when hiring, the response invariably focuses on these very soft skills, such as communication, critical thinking, leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, creativity and on and on, with the implication that hard skills can be mastered on the job. Note that all these skills are difficult to define and yet are transferable across most professional fields. 
​
​
What Are Human Tools+Paradigms?

I prefer to think of soft skills as “human skills" or “human tools and paradigms,” which, by a wild coincidence, is almost the title of this very blog, where I develop and offer a kit of tools and paradigms for leaders to understand their organization’s mission, their employees, their colleagues, and their role in the whole scheme. My essays don’t simply recite and describe the skills that need to be mastered. For that, just Google "soft skills" to get lists of "The 7 Soft Skills," "The Top 10 Soft Skills," or the 120 soft skills. Each of the tools and paradigms I elucidate, being rather challenging, demand contemplation, analysis, and sometimes demystification.
​
tools with lampA kit of tools
​On my website and blog, I use a header image of mechanic’s tools, which most immediately evokes the hard skills but suggests that the soft skills I tout, the human tools and paradigms, are at least as materially relevant as the hard skills. They also require the most training, practice, and maintenance. This differentiation is represented by the glowing lamp that lies on top.

Those who possess and have mastered the use of an array of these human tools and paradigms, a fulsome kit, set themselves apart from the herd of the merely competent. They stand out as the extraordinarily accomplished among their peers and, not for nothing, make the most successful managers and leaders.

Continued proficiency in these skills requires ongoing development, improvement, and refinement. No matter the context, these human tools and paradigms have proven to be, again and again, the hardest skills of all, the soft ones.

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2/25/2021

Bags o' Money Had I Once

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man with moneybags
A number of years ago I left a university where I had served for 15 years to take a position as the chief academic officer at a different school. Not long after I had started at this new place, some faculty and others darkly wisecracked about the “bags o' money” that resided under my desk. I heard this quip frequently enough that I have to admit that I did take a peek once. Nothing there but three paperclips, an old pencil, and a multigenerational family of fluffy dust bunnies.
Dust Bunny Graphic
​I called maintenance.

​Despite my disappointment, I have to admit that one of the nice things about this particular school was its solid endowment, and the fact that I did indeed have a decent sum of funds to distribute to students and faculty to meet relevant expenses. Virtually all of the funds were restricted, though, meaning their usage was predetermined by the donor for such purposes as student study abroad trips or professional development for faculty.


The burning question, then, was how to disperse these funds equitably while assuring that they would be put to their best use. Some faculty committees existed for just this objective, but they had been given control of only specific funds. A few gifts were controlled by school deans, who reported to me. The bulk came under no one’s jurisdiction in particular and therefore defaulted to my authority.

You may be thinking, “Well golly, Jim, that sounds like a good problem to have, big bags o' money under the desk,” but I found the situation most uncomfortable and not just because I value legroom. I did not want to be in the position of playing Solomon with gift funds—deciding who would receive them and who would go wanting, having to divvy up moneys, split the occasional baby, and undoubtedly tick everyone off. As unlikely as it seems, I just did not want moneybags under my desk, howsoever metaphorically.
money bag
The whole moneybags rumor stemmed from one of my predecessors who was known to dispense funds directly without going through the committees. To be clear, I am not implying that there was something illegal or even untoward about his practices. Both he and I were well within our rights to dole out the funds as we saw fit so long as we adhered to any restrictions the donors had imposed. Still, I did not like the potential inequity of such a practice, nor did I enjoy the responsibility of making such calls.

money bag with sprout
My predecessor, though, reportedly had few such compunctions. I am sure he had the best intentions, but what necessarily resulted was a perception of arbitrariness among the faculty that gave me the willies. Some faculty complained that only a select few had ever benefited from my predecessor’s largess. Whatever the reality, the mere perception of a specific in-group necessitates the conjuring of a corresponding out-group and fosters the growth of resentment. Moneybags, as it turns out, make a great fertilizer for sprouting suspicion and dissent.

The fact was that a few people were simply not shy about requesting funds, not that there is anything wrong with that. Others, though, were more reluctant to do so or not aware that funds were accessible upon request. I also learned that some of this second group habitually covered work expenses out-of-pocket, which was absolutely unacceptable.
I chose instead to avoid the appearance of inequity and aspired to see to it that the committees that already existed to distribute money fairly had access to most of the gift and endowed funds available to faculty and students. The moneybags under my desk were officially empty. 
hand over money held back by red tape
The problem with this scheme, though, was that it introduced a threat of equal but opposite potential, the unwelcome boogyman of bureaucratic decision-making. Instead of informally pitching requests to the chief academic officer, all faculty and students would now have to formally apply to the committees. They would have to fill out forms, mind deadlines, and earn approval. Plus, even after navigating all this seeming red tape, they still might not receive funds. The natural result: those who had previously had ready access to the erstwhile bags o' money were displeased by my decision while everyone else was chary of the new process.

Worse still, these funding committees had a fabled history of being too tight with the money, perhaps to counterbalance my predecessor’s relatively loose approach. They had demanded detailed applications and enforced deadlines without compromise, which did not always reflect the reality of student and faculty needs. They also had a reputation for rejecting requests on fairly flimsy grounds and with a hint of personal bias. One thing was clear. The prevailing mindset on the committees assumed that their charge was to “save money” by finding reasons not to approve applications.
I worked with the committees to assure that the application process was not onerous. My attitude, one I probably shared with my predecessor, Dr. Moneybags, was that the funds were donated for a reason, and it was our job to see that they were spent wisely and to great effect in support of the university’s mission. I made sure the committee members knew that spending the money unwisely or not spending it at all were two outcomes to be avoided. Donors donate because they want to see their money do good, not because they want to have it simply roll over to the next year.  For additional clarity on this point, read the Parable of the Talents, a basic primer on philanthropic expectations.
cartoon of Parable of Talents
Put those bags o' money to work!
It did not take long for the committees to get their acts together and change their mindsets. Faculty and students who needed funding for travel, study, equipment, books, and so on were able to access what was available while the committees balanced oversight and equity with minimized friction. Committee members made decisions strictly on the merits of the applications and did not penalize for petty errors. We had to have deadlines, but we also had provisions for retroactive decisions where necessary. The default position shifted so that the committees understood their charge was to distribute funds, not to horde them. In other words, I convinced them to always start with yes, one of my core principles.
The Lesson of Emptied Moneybags: The Arbitrary Is the True Enemy
In the process, I learned something about the nature of arbitrary decision-making. Lurking on the extreme edges of the old system were two enemies of equity. On one side, was my predecessor’s reputed predilection for handing out funds pretty much upon request with scant discernment. On the other was an overly bureaucratized committee system that did not allow for uncertainty.
​
I came to embrace a truth that has guided my building of processes and systems ever since. Higher ed, like most industries, is rife with laments about the unwarranted impositions of bureaucracy, and rightly so. Bloated bureaucracies, with their proscriptive and prescriptive unreason--the proverbial red tape--can be oppressive. 

Nonetheless, I learned that the enemy of efficiency is not bureaucracy, per se. Nor is the enemy the executive officer who directs activities with few checks (even while cutting a few checks). The true enemy of efficiency is the arbitrariness that invariably accompanies extremes of overly bureaucratized or overly capricious administration. No matter the size of the organization, the governance system needs to be carefully calibrated to be both benign and helpful in order to eliminate the inequity and arbitrariness of both extreme bureaucracy and extreme capriciousness. The task of a system-builder and leader is to find that sweet spot in the middle, build upon it, and maintain it.

Having control of bags o' money may sound swell, and it really is, but relinquishing control to a rational process is even sweller.

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    The Purpose of Tools+Paradigms

    Leadership Approaches to Make Management work

    Each Thursday I post my thoughts on a variety of subjects in hopes of encouraging readers to challenge their received wisdom and cultural assumptions. I offer Human Tools+Paradigms that are designed to appeal to shared values and guide readers as they make decisions, solve problems, and just navigate the daily world. While these pieces are aimed at leaders and managers, I hope that others will find benefit in them as well. I welcome comments and responses to my posts via the comment section at the end of each on or, if you prefer, directly to my email. Also, please use the social media links to share and comment.

    Jim Salvucci, Ph.D.

    I am a former English Professor and academic administrator with experience at several institutions in the U.S. and Canada. I have a broad background in management and leadership and have mentored countless faculty, staff, and students, by offering them Tools+Paradigms to help them rethink their assumptions and practices. The Human Tools+Paradigms I present in this blog capture what I have learned from working with them and from my experience and research. You can read more about me here.


    I am inspired by the conviction that the best mission-driven organizations are designed to spend their time and effort focused on mission because they have figured out how to work well together.
    Jim Salvucci, Ph.D.

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