Category: Uncategorized

  • Conway’s Law on Campus: Why Your Org Chart is Ruining Your Brand

    Conway’s Law on Campus: Why Your Org Chart is Ruining Your Brand

    In the late nineteen sixties, a computer programmer named Melvin Conway submitted a paper to the Harvard Business Review. The editors rejected his submission. Conway subsequently published his observations in Datamation magazine in April of nineteen sixty-eight. His central thesis eventually became a foundational rule of software engineering. Conway observed that any organization attempting to…

  • Institutional Isomorphism and the U.S. News Trap: Why Mimicking R1s Kills Regional Brands

    Institutional Isomorphism and the U.S. News Trap: Why Mimicking R1s Kills Regional Brands

    Gather ten strategic plans from ten different regional universities. Lay them side by side on a large conference table. The physical artifacts themselves tell a story of compliance. Look closely at the typography, the paper stock, the photography, and the core pillars. You will find an unyielding repetition. The glossy covers invariably feature a diverse…

  • The LUV Hangover: Why Southwest’s Corporate Religion is Tanking

    The LUV Hangover: Why Southwest’s Corporate Religion is Tanking

    For decades, Southwest Airlines has been the undisputed golden child of American aviation. They were the outliers, the rebels in hot pants who traded the stiff formality of legacy carriers for peanuts, “LUV,” and a seating policy that resembled a middle-school fire drill. They built a brand on a “Why” so powerful it became a…