James Drogan

Here's a handy set of advice courtesy of an e-mail from Magna Publications (November 7, 2011).

Academic administrators must learn their own conflict style and how they can work within this style to set boundaries of amount of time available to listen, the topics that are in-bounds for the conversation, and the boundaries of privacy and confidences within the role the administrator occupies.

There are ten key guidelines for handling complaints. These include:

1. Don't take it personally: Avoid the temptation to take complaints personally and become defensive. Find out what action the person making the complaint expects from you; perhaps listening is all that is required. Keep your demeanor calm and courteous.
   
2. Never act on only one side of the story: Many problems stem from differences in perceptions. As you collect information, keep your stance neutral and remind people you are gathering data in the face of a problem presented to you.
   
3. Nobody knows what "everybody knows:" If someone tells you "everyone knows" something, it is a good idea to drill deeper into the facts of the case. Often, things that some believe are common knowledge have little basis in truth.
   
4. When in doubt, leave it out: If you are thinking better of making a statement or putting something in writing, don't do it. Emphasize facts and decisions, not opinions and motives.
   
5. Never attribute to malice that which incompetence will explain: Most bad things happen not through nefarious intent but through inattention, inaction, or miscommunication. Ask for clarification of facts, and repeat back what you have heard until you get it right.
   
6. Say what you'll do, and do what you say: Just as giving a screaming child a candy bar trains that child to yell for a treat, you can also train adults to behave inappropriately if you break the rules out of pressure or desire to have the problem solved. Let the person know the plan of action and its timeline, and stick to it.
   
7. In the absence of facts, people make them up: If you leave people hanging for a long period of time waiting for the next step or response, they will imagine the worst. Stick to your time schedule to alleviate this kind of worry.
   
8. Keep notes: Your notes can serve as everything from reminders of your action plan to facts required for a lawsuit. Only four things belong in notes: the date, who was present, the facts brought to you, and the action you promised. Leave speculation, analysis, and thoughts out.
   
9. Trust your instincts: If you have an anxious or fearful feeling about a situation, don't hesitate to call in someone else to help handle the situation properly with the appropriate boundaries. Don't be afraid to ask for assistance.
   
10. Some problems require formal process: It is possible that most of the problems brought to you will require only a calm ear to listen. However, some situations, like reprimands, discipline, and terminations, will require formal action. The more complex the problem, the more likely it will require a formal process. Acquaint yourself in advance with the resource people on your campus.

Unfortunately, it is part of administrative life to have to handle conflict. But with a little advanced planning and practice, you will be ready for the situations that occur.

Periodically I google "james drogan" (quotes included) to more or less keep up with what's "out there" with my name on it.

A few moments ago up pops

Hhhhhmmmm, I wonder what this is?

It turns out that "Since 2003, UKEssays.com has been the leading provider of custom written essays, dissertations and coursework."

You can, by the way, order the essay in which I am cited.  I presume that you will get a discount based on the quality of this sentence: "Prof. James Drogan (n.d.) pointed out that distance learning and classroom learning has the same teaching objectives and subject matter."

This affirms the Ninth Law: Once it's out there, it's out there.

Incredible Things That Happen on the Intenet Every 60 Seconds

The Gleick to which I refer is Gleick, J. (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. (Kindle.). Pantheon.

See Who Will Fix the US Economy?  The remaining question is what should be done about the politicl misfts?

In How Do You Talk to Big Data? I take up matters of big data and analytics (BDA), ideas behind IBM's Deep Quesion Answering concepts (Deep QA), and their potential impact on what and how we teach.  On page 7 of that note I begin the description of a business problem that would seem to lend itself well to these two techniques.

The image to the left is from the front page of the December 15 Financial Times and represents a real problem.

If I were anywhere in the associated, complex, far flung supply chain I would want to know how these actions by China are likely to impact my business and what would be the alternative response I might be able to make to minimize the impact.

Of course, it would have been even better if I had prior information such that I could have more proactive in my response.

Resolving an issue of this nature is extremely complex requiring the availability of a diverse set of interrelating information and a symbiotic decision support system (man and machine) to provide assistance.  The key to this, I believe, is human capacity and capability.  Building that, of course, is what education is all about.

Hence, the First Law: Know what you know, know what you don't know, and know who knows what you don't know.

The title of this post comes from the Comment section of the November 30 Financial Times.  I urge a reading of the commentary in its entirety.

I've long remarked that the best job is one where you are doing something you love, that is useful to others as well as yourself, and where you can make money.

I have also wondered at some length, here and elsewhere, about the changing nature of work within a complex, rapidly changing global context, and whether, as a teacher, I am properly preparing my students for "out there where the cold wind blows."

This preamble leads me to Jobs in the Age of Watson, a very provocative post by one of my favorite thinkers and bloggers, Irving Wladawsky-Berger.  Wladawsky-Berger brings to our minds the challenges of finding that best job, on the one hand, and properly preparing for it, on the other.  Addressing these challenges requires our very best in imagining, and perhaps even making real, a set of possible futures and congruent commitment to an education that maximizes our opportunities to participate in these futures in meaningful ways.

It seems to me that to do this requires a different social and economic construct, comprising values and regimes, than we have in place at the moment.  Energies spent on ideologically-based turf wars and extension of the status quo are wasted energies.  The world will move on and a risk is run that many will be left behind.

"What am I teaching my students? Am I teaching them to think for themselves and to be themselves? Or am I teaching them to a perfect imitation of each other, or of some other idealized and emotionally cold model of humanity?" 

See more at Wisdom from Stanford's Jim March on the Numbing Effect of Business Schools.

I've spent some time over the last several months -- beginning with 2011 IBM Performance Event: From Insight to Foresight, an examination of big data and analytics, in New York in May 2011 and including another IBM event Transforming an Industry – Watson in Higher Education, at IBM's Watson Lab in June 2011.  Coincidentally, I presume, McKinsey & Company announced a report, Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity (Manyika, J., Chui, M., Bughin, J., Brown, B., Dobbs, R., Roxburgh, C., & Byers, A. H. (2011). Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. McKinsey Global Institute.).

The question that occurs to me is, “Should I (and others) better prepare my (our) students to survive, thrive, and make a difference in world awash in big data?”  If true, what is the impact on the curricula?

My musings on this question can be found at How Do You Talk to Big Data?

Sometime in the latter part of my career at IBM I began to understand and become interested in the nature of leadership.  One of my favorite commenters on the subject is Bob Sutton of Stanford.   See his blog, Work Matters.

Another of my favorite sources is the McKinsey Quarterly.

In particular I want to call your attention to How Centered Leaders Achieve Extraordinary Results (Barsh, J., Mogelof, J., & Webb, C. (2010). How Centered Leaders Achieve Extraordinary Results. The McKinsey Quarterly, 2010(4), 78-88).

The thumbnail to the left is the centerpiece of the article.

As I read the article I thought of it more as a diagnostic.  That is, one could view an existing organization through the Barsh, Mogelof, Webb lens and come to a set of hypotheses as to why an organization behaves the way that it does.  These hypotheses, essential to critical thinking, have the possibility of leading to recommendations as to what might be done to improve performance.

I like examining ssues from different points of view which doubtless explains why this has caught my eye.

The last paragrph in the article I find compelling.

Centered leadership is a journey, not a destination, and it starts with a highly personal decision. We’ll leave you with the words of one executive who recently chose to embark on this path: “Our senior team is always talking about changing the organization, changing the mind-sets and behavior of everyone. Now I see that transformation is not about that. It starts with me and my willingness and ability to transform myself. Only then will others transform.”