Riches of Embarrassment
There has been much consternation as well a strong, negative emotional response among CSU faculty to the Board of Regents opening proposals for the AAUP contract. Faculty, who once viewed the Board of...
View ArticleHigher Learning and Lean Management
Conflict between management and employees seems inevitable, but that is not always the case. When I worked in industry, there was near-perpetual conflict between senior management and labor unions, but...
View ArticleTop 2015 Lean Higher Ed Blog Posts
Thank you for reading my blog! Here are the most viewed blog posts in 2015: Methodological Errors in Lean for Higher Ed Lean Higher Ed Conference Presentation How To Get Started With Lean In Higher Ed...
View ArticleHigher Ed’s Big Lie: Academic Excellence
It seems there isn’t a university administrator anywhere, and most faculty too, who claim the mantle of “academic excellence.” What is “academic excellence?” The words typically connote the span of...
View ArticleLean MBA or Conventional MBA?
Below is a video in four parts of me giving a presentation to a business school faculty in which I make the case that Lean management should be taught to MBA students. The video was recorded on 28...
View ArticleThe Trouble With Tenure
The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute recently published a report titled: “The Trouble with Tenure” (February 2016). Click here to view the report. In the Executive Summary, page 5, the authors...
View ArticlePersonalizing Discovery and Learning
One of new things that I have started doing in my graduate courses is to challenge students to determine what answers they are seeking from the course, which in turns ask them to identify questions...
View ArticleImproving How Universities Improve
Universities have come under much criticism in recent years from business leaders, political leaders, and the public for being slow to change and improve. There is truth to this because the method used...
View ArticleBreathtaking Higher Education Innovation!
Breathtaking Innovation Sure to be Used Throughout Public Higher Education! As you are no doubt well aware, I am internationally recognized for my many teaching innovations in higher education. Now, I...
View ArticleLean Professor Top Blog Posts
Here are the top blog posts for the first half of 2016. Scan the list to see what you missed. Enjoy! Lean Higher Ed Conference Presentation Why Professors Can’t Teach Personalizing Discovery and...
View ArticleEvolution in Lean Teaching
I’ve written a paper titled “Evolution in Lean Teaching,” which describes my recent work to expand and evolve the application of Lean principles and practices to teaching. The focus is “grading inside...
View ArticleSmart Leaders, Dumb Decisions
“In music, a standard is a tune or song of established popularity” among listeners. In business, a standard is a decision of established popularity among leaders. Namely, raising prices without...
View ArticlePerformance-Based College Funding
In May 2016, the Century Foundation published a report titled: “Why Performance-Based College Funding Doesn’t Work” by Prof. Nicholas Hillman. It is a good analysis of why performance-based funding is...
View ArticleFlipped Classroom? Yawn.
Flipped classroom? Who cares about that? The big news is that the marketplace for higher education flipped from a seller’s market to a buyers’ market starting about 15 years ago. The transition is now...
View ArticleUnbundling Higher Education
A recent article, “If Colleges Are Dismantled, Consider the Impact on Their Cities” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 October 16), makes a good argument for the negative effect that unbundling...
View ArticleDo University Leaders Care About Teaching?
Since my books Lean Teaching and Lean University were published in June 2015, Lean University has sold at 2.5 times the pace of Lean Teaching. What might these sales results suggest? Sales of Lean...
View ArticleWhy Universities Don’t Improve
It’s not that universities don’t improve, it’s just that they improve far too slowly and therefore are not in step with the times. What causes that? There are many factors, of course, but let’s...
View ArticleNew Mindset for Higher Ed Leaders
Higher education has been steadily moving from it’s long-term position as a sellers’ market to a buyers’ market. College and university leaders seem slow to grasp this fact. They, as well as those who...
View ArticleEvidencing Improvement
In my view, the United Kingdom has led the world in the advancement of Lean management in higher education (click here to learn more) – but with two important qualifications: Application has been...
View ArticleImprovement in Higher Education, Circa 1912
One of my great interests is reading books from the early 1900s that describe the troubles in higher education and the means by which people thought to eliminate problems and improve processes. The...
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