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Yet another reason administrators and ordinary faculty fail to understand each other: what administrators think is the essence of innovation, ordinary faculty think is the enemy of innovation.
Archive for the ‘Management’ Category
September 15th, 2010
September 12th, 2010
Intercollegiate athletics (IA) continues to be a sore spot at Berkeley and at other schools caught up in the positional arms race wherein school A spending on sports for a few scholarship athletes is determined by the willingness of other schools B,C,… in its conference to throw more educational resources on the pyre. For example, [...]
May 29th, 2010
As military DADT creeps to its unlamented end, at least one very senior officer appears not to quite get it. In this story, the commandant of the Marine Corps is reported to be advocating separate sleeping quarters for gays. We discussed this five years ago: no, General, unless you think heterosexual sex is so bad [...]
April 10th, 2010
For my sins, I guess, I’m a member of the Berkeley faculty Committee on Courses of Instruction. Things are looking up for this gig, though, because there’s growing interest on campus and at the university level in online instruction, and the committee is starting to seriously deliberate this very interesting issue. Not surprisingly, I guess, [...]
April 9th, 2010
Category: Management
The University of California is trying to cut costs. The Berkeley campus, for example, hired Bain & Co. for $3m (your tax dollars at work) to find savings. The project is called Achieving Operational Excellence, perhaps because absolutely nothing beyond the home-page blurb seems to have anything to do with it; the words value, excellence [...]
April 1st, 2010
Category: Management
and the whining coming from Rome and South Hadley is deplorable. It is a complete, inexcusable, firing-level failure to have been in charge of an organization of any size – church, diocese, or Church – in which children are being widely, systematically sexually abused and in which the perpetrators are regularly served new plates of [...]
April 1st, 2010
My earlier post about sexual predation and the Catholic church’s reaction to it attracted a remarkable number of comments. In reading them, I came to think that a sort of summary question to the hierarchy about transparency would be, “how many times have church officials at any level dropped a dime on known abusers, guilty [...]
March 27th, 2010
The slow drip of acid on the Catholic church, and especially on the pope, from the daily revelations of non-feasance, malfeasance, and active coverup is going to go on corroding the machinery, and burning the gilt off the façade, for a long time. We haven’t even started to hear the horror stories screaming to be [...]
March 26th, 2010
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Management
Two examples of understanding how to do business so customers come back, and having staff right down to the dirty-fingernails level that also get it. My text for this sermon is Leon Leonwood Bean’s immortal prescription: “A sale is not completed until the customer has worn out the item and is still satisfied.” I. My [...]
