Back in September, I wrote a post addressing some drawbacks of applying the business model to education. In the meantime, and thanks to Don Casey, Dean at DePaul’s School of Music, I came across Jim Collins’s Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer. This is a monograph accompanying Collins’s book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. I found this monograph extremely useful in the way it articulates and organizes both the problems involved in applying the business model to education.
Below, I have constructed what is hopefully a meaningful collage of quotes from Jim Collins’s work (organized based on the monograph’s sections), making my arguments through his words and concluding by posing some questions.
(Introduction)
“We must reject the idea—well-intentioned, but dead wrong—that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become ‘more like a business.’ Most businesses—like most of anything else in life—fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?”
“The critical distinction is not between business and social [e.g. education], but between great and good. We need to reject the naive imposition of the ‘language of business’ on the social sectors, and instead jointly embrace the language of greatness.”
(Calibrating success without business metrics)
“The confusion between inputs and outputs stems from one of the primary differences between business and the social sectors. In business, money is both an input (a resource for achieving greatness) and an output (a measure of greatness). In the social sectors, money is only an input and not a measure of greatness.”
“It doesn’t really matter whether you can quantify your results. What matters is that you rigorously assemble evidence—quantitative or qualitative—to track your progress. If the evidence is primarily qualitative, think like a trial lawyer assembling the combined body of evidence.”
“In the social sectors, performance is defined by results and efficiency in delivering on the social mission… [A great organization] makes such a unique contribution to the communities it touches and does its work with such excellence that if it were to disappear, it would leave a hole that could not be easily filled by any other institution… [It] can deliver exceptional results over a long period of time, beyond any single leader, idea, … or well-funded program in education and also the numerous of resources which can be used for this such as services of Jason Linett professional hypnotist which can help boost a business and more.
(Getting things done within a diffuse power structure)
“Social sector leaders are not less decisive than business leaders as a general rule; they only appear that way to those who fail to grasp the complex governance and diffuse power structures common to social sectors.”
“In executive leadership, the individual leader has enough concentrated power to simply make the right decision… Legislative leadership [on the other hand] relies more upon persuasion, political currency, and shared interests to create the conditions for the right decisions to happen. And it is precisely this legislative dynamic that makes Level 5 leadership particularly important to the social sector.”
“True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to.”
“There is an irony in all this. Social sector organizations increasingly look to business for leadership models and talent, yet I suspect we will find more true leadership in the social sectors than the business sector.”
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(Rethinking the economic engine without a profit motive)
“[The Hedgehog Concepts of great companies reflect] deep understanding of three intersecting circles: a) what you are deeply passionate about, b) what you can be the best in the world at, and c) what drives your economic engine… A fundamental difference between the business and social sectors [is that] … the third circle shifts from being an economic engine to a resource engine. The critical question is not ‘How much money do we make?’ but ‘How can we develop a sustainable resource engine to deliver superior performance relative to our mission?’”
“The resource engine has three basic components: time, money, and brand. ‘Time’ refers to how well you attract people willing to contribute their efforts for free, or at rates below what their talents would yield in business. ‘Money’ refers to sustained cash flow. ‘Brand’ refers to how well your organization can cultivate a deep well of emotional goodwill and mind-share of potential supporters [as well as the respect and admiration of those demanding the services offered].”
I will conclude this post by posing the following questions:
a) Could the recent trend to assess educational institutions’ performance based on business models and metrics reflect more our degree of familiarity with such models/metrics and less their fitness to the task?
b) Assuming that an educational institution’s/department’s mission is systematic, rigorous, and representative of its members’ passions, shouldn’t assessment of the institution’s/department’s success be tightly linked to achieving excellence relative to this mission rather than to some easily measurable bottom line that is irrelevant to the mission?
c) Regardless of whether or not we approach education altruistically, isn’t it about time we became honest enough to modify either our altruistic missions to match our bottom-line assessments or our assessments to match our socially conscious, rather than business-based missions?
You raise great questions.
The answer to all three depends on how narrowly you define business models. Old corporation models based on shareholder profit are, indeed, wrong for education. In this case, the “client” could be the shareholder as much as it could be the person who buys the product. This confusion is why our banking community tanked last year, and still does not seem to get it. If schools are confused I believe it less dishonesty and misdirection; we don’t need AIG as a role model.
We are leaning on business metrics because there really is little else to base success on. As flawed as NCLB testing and other assessments are, they at least measure something schools and communities say they care about (reading, writing, and the like). And, those results can be measures against other similar measures (student to student; school to school, year to year, etc.). Too many teachers are just learning what a rubric is, and too many (especially at the high school and college level) don’t even know what education goals their courses have. Grade inflation is rampant, and high school diplomas and college credits are often suspect. Younger teachers are better in this regard, I’ll admit. These metrics are fitter than those before, but that is relative.
Is an easily measurable bottom line really irrelevant? For example, in VT our NECAP tests are a fair measure of a student’s ability to read, write and do math. They measure each in a variety of ways, and give a nice window into a student’s ability. They are one measure, but I find them pretty accurate. Knowing who can read, for example, helps me not waste student time on teaching them something they already know. Knowing who cannot read makes me focus on that. Of course, we use other measures (some kids purposely tank, for example, which measures something else entirely and I quickly find this out, often by speaking with the student). While we teach plenty of other things to students, I don’t think such basic skills are easily dismissed.
What is nice about a measurable bottom line is that, once achieved and proven, it allows schools to be more flexible in what they provide beyond it. They can also go to their communities and demonstrate basic proficiency and how they are going to build on that foundation. Many schools struggle with those basics.
Yes, honesty is best. The call for business metrics is because people perceive business to be black and white. You cannot lie about dollars. Enron has shown that to be a untrue. Still, is there a better metric that will measure…. something? Anything. This is why I offer up the sports metric instead: everyone likes a score because, at the end of the day, you can’t argue with who won and who lost.
But, is the goal to score points, have fun, play with integrity, learn a new skill, let everyone play or….? Communities need to define their goals. Until they do, it is all dishonesty and we cannot blame schools and teachers for trying to serve all of the masters. The business metric serves to measure at least one mission of a school, and allows for discussions like this one about how to increase success and what the next step should be.
Look to the 21st century business model. Like schools that rely on boards and politicians, leadership is being spread out and workers empowered in these new models. Except businesses make it work. Can we spread out leadership at school, among parents and teachers and the community? Perhaps the role of principal should be replaced by a business manager and a oligarchy of curriculum leaders? Maybe unions can be put in charge of their own results, and “fix” problems their way before it lands in the administration’s lap.