Uncategorized
-
Walk the exhibit hall at any higher education conference this year and you will notice a peculiar uniformity. Booth after booth, banner after banner, the same promise rendered in the same sans-serif optimism: AI-powered engagement. The demo rarely varies. A rep in a quarter-zip pulls up a university homepage—usually a fictional school with a name…
-
Back in 1990, a group of Cornell economists handed out coffee mugs to half the students in a classroom. The mugs bore the university seal and retailed for about six bucks in the campus store. The other half of the room got nothing. Then, the economists opened a market, asking sellers to name their price…
-
When computer programmer Melvin Conway submitted a paper to the Harvard Business Review in 1968, the editors rejected it. He took his observations to Datamation magazine instead, where his central thesis quietly became a foundational rule of software engineering. Conway observed a simple, inescapable truth: any organization that designs a system will inevitably produce a…
-
Gather ten strategic plans from ten different regional universities. Lay them side-by-side on a conference table. The physical artifacts themselves tell a story of sheer compliance. Look closely at the typography, the paper stock, the photography, and the core pillars, and you’ll find an unyielding repetition. Glossy covers invariably feature a diverse cluster of students…
-
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…
