MMP1: Succeeding in a World of Overwhelming Change

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Brian Niles: Thanks a lot. Well, thank you. Can everybody hear me okay in the back there? Oh, good. Trust me if, you take a pull back there, if you want to set any bets on me tripping over any of these stuff, feel free to, okay? We’ve got lots of wires here.

This session’s going to be a little different than probably most that you’re going to be attending because we’re not going to talk solely about technology. This session’s a little different. I’ve been talking about this subject for a couple of years now because it seems like it is appropriate for all areas of the institution. And as we’re dealing with change throughout organization, both certainly because of the economy, we can all talk about that. We’ll try and skip over that today. I’m sure you’ve heard enough about the economic challenges your institutions may have. But also about technology, and about management and leadership, cost, staffing, training; all those wonderful issues.

So today’s topic is about managing change. I will tell you it is not a plug because I’m not selling it. So I’m giving it out back there in the back of the room. If you leave, if you want to grab a copy of Chapter 2 of a book that we’re writing called Overthrowing Dead Culture, we published the Chapter 2 called The Change. Everybody asked me why didn’t you publish Chapter 1? We weren’t done in Chapter 1 yet, so we figure Chapter 2 will be the best one to publish the one that’s done.

Chapter 2 is called The Change. So it summarizes some of the things we’re talking about here today so feel free to grab a copy. I don’t remember how many I brought. Basically there’s enough for all of you that are interested. We’ll have the full book out in February. So if you’re interested in checking that out later on. So really what I wanted to do is talk about change and talk about how you manage change in your institution and how do you deal with that and what are some of the barriers to change that are going on.

But first, let’s just open it up for a conversation on a Monday morning, this early. Hopefully you’ve all had your coffee and are waking up. Let’s just talk about what is change like at your organization? What are you trying to change, what has to change at organization, and what are the road blocks to some of that happening for progress at your institution? What are you dealing with?

Okay. Be more specific. Sure, sure. What institution? Duke, okay. Of course. Of course not. Hey, we understand. All of you have ideas and this have nothing to do with your own institutions. So Rachel. Yeah. Does anybody run into lifers that actually are willing to change, that embrace change? Yeah, okay. You have problems with the new ones, really? Okay. The folks you don’t know well enough but things are different. Okay, okay. Oh, there’s in the back here.

Okay. I was going to tell the story about Carol Prosperity, my secretary at La Salle University when I worked there for about eight years. I walked in the door, it was 1993, 1992 or so, and sat down my first day right across from her desk and said, “Carol, so tell me about yourself. Tell me what goes on here.” Here I’m the Director of the MBA program. She had been there for at least 15, 18 years before then and seen lots of people come and go. And she looked at me and says, “Well, Brian Niles--we started out that way. We quickly changed that—just one thing I have to tell you is I just don’t like change.” Oh, great. So I’m the poster channel for change in her life right now and she’s telling me that. We got along great by the way. What else? Yeah.

Audience: Disintegrating budget.

Brian Niles: Okay, okay. Disintegrating budgets. How to do more with less, right? You hear that all the time.

Audience: Yeah.

Brian Niles: I’m glad you said the same work because that whole more or less thing always bugs me. Why do we always have to be more? Sometimes there’s—you can actually do it less with less but taking—ask you to do that, right? What else? Yes, in the back. Very good. I like that. Very true. Yes. Which institution? Iowa State, okay. Yeah, it depends on the institution. I’ve seen small institutions have a hard time with that as well. I’ve seen that whole graduate. How many of you oversee graduate or work with your graduate programs? Yeah, it means graduate programs either centralize, decentralize or some mix of all of that. None of them seem to work but we all try and get along, right? What else? Yes.

Yes. Got to pay a consultant. It’s amazing. We spend all this time and money, search committees, I’ll tell you about committees in a few minutes. Search committee is the higher this fantastic people pay you extraordinary salaries, right? Those are joke, okay, unless you all are making extraordinary salaries, I’m getting out of my business in—that’s right. But you’re asked to do 10% less, right? And then they hire a consultant. That’s amazing, isn’t it? Amazing we do that. Anybody else?

Okay. These are all good. So we got everybody in the same mind set. Anybody having a great time with change? Anybody want to tell a great story about, well, I had this miraculous idea and I actually got the institution to move forward with it? Oh, good. Well, that’s okay. Hey, what they don’t know won’t kill them. You want something with that. Anybody have a good stories? Come on, it’s time to brag. I succeeded with change.

Nice, nice, nice. Now why didn’t you do that while you’re working there? Why didn’t you do that while you’re working there? It wasn’t the fear of being fired? I know. I know. Okay. Couple of them you brought up.

First one is fear of the unknown. When somebody come in, particularly a new person comes in, there’s always this, oh, here comes somebody and they know better than I do, right? They know everything so they’re willing to change it. I must have been doing everything wrong. So sometimes we have a fear of the unknown, what’s going to happen here. Or we’ve been trained to do something and now—and we’ve gotten comfortable with it, we actually get very comfortable in our positions very quickly, who wants to have change? That was Carol. Who wants to have change? I’m very comfortable where I am. I come in in the morning at 8 o’clock and I leave at 4’clock, and I do my job and I go home. But I think, you know, business has changed from that model as well.

I found this great cartoon. Hopefully you can see this. When asked would you rather work for change or just complain, 81% of respondents—do I have to pick? This is hard. Change is hard. Was it Lewis Black that said the reason that we haven’t fixed global warming and having come up with new energy alternative’s because it’s hard? I won’t go on. It was offensive after that.

The second part is—take control. Losing control. We are very comfortable. We know what we know, right? The devil we know is better than the devil we don’t. Anybody heard that phrase before? It’s one of my favorites. I prefer to find the other devil by the way. But loss of control used to the way it has been that we don’t want to lose control of that. And we’re moving up, we have our own personal objectives, and we have our own professional objectives, and losing control may disrupt those.

To tell you the story about something you may know. We offer a CRM solution. I’m going to just trip over this one. This is going to move this one too. By the time we’re done I’m going to have all the chairs all moved up to the front left of the room. Target actually offers the CRM on sales force so it’s in the cloud, okay. You all know about cloud computing. We’ll talk about that. We had an RFP that we submitted to an institution. We went all the way down. They never said anything about that it had to be hosted on campus until we got there. And the VP of Information Technology said, “This is great. We love it. We need to investigate and search out and do an audit of your servers.”

And we all kind of looked around the room and went, “Oh, okay, but it’s in the cloud.” We used that phrase. Well, I was VP of Bell Atlantic and that was all part of the process that they had to investigate, they had to see them, they had to make sure our security was appropriate. And I’m like, I don’t think sales force is going to allow you to see their servers, you know. Maybe we’ll set up our dummy room and you can look at the computers and say, oh, look computer’s all good. But this was sort of that lost control.

Where is my data? And, you know, some of you may be here in the room but many of you may work with these folks. We ran to them all the time as we transition from campus-hosted solutions to the so-called In The Cloud SAS-model that there’s still folks out there that need that box right next to them, right; need that data. We even have clients that say, “Okay, that’s fine. We’ll put it up here in the cloud but every night we want to put it down to our—we don’t want to bring a copy but down to our servers and put it on a tape.”

When I worked at La Salle University, it was on the second floor ground but the second floor was where the information technology office was, and they had an only—anybody know La Salle University in Philadelphia? Northwest Philadelphia. Not the safest place in the world. Not as bad as some other places in Philadelphia but not the safest place brought in only. We had our IT staff on the second floor and they would have all the servers, believe it or not, underneath the window of 100-year-old building.

I never quite understood that. This building leaks all over the place. Why are you sticking the servers under that, that’s a whole another story. They would take the backup tapes and put them on the window seal. So here’s institution said, okay, we’re going to put everything up in the cloud but I want control of that data. So I want to see it, I want to know I’ve got a copy of it right here. And I’m going to put it right there on the window so somebody could take it. Security. Loss of control. I need control of it. And sometimes that’s a very difficult thing for folks.

Anybody deal with this? This is evil. This is progress. If you have people who are complacent about the institution, they’re so comfortable in their position that they can’t accept that I can’t—I can’t accept any change to go on, whether it’s big or small, they’re complacent, they just feel like everything is just fine, this is where you’re going to have the most problem in your organization.

And this is what you’ll always here: We’ve always done it this way. How many of you deal with that? We don’t want to do that, we’ve always done it this way and it seems to work. Well, I believe we’re at a tipping point right now, if not already passed that tipping point, particularly in your undergraduate recruiting offices. Those folks are freaking out. The financial aid folks, whatever comes beyond freaking out, they’re doing that, okay?

This last year—here’s doom and gloom. I’ll get doom and gloom out there when we move on, okay? This last year might not have been the worst year. It may be this year, okay? I have a 17-year-old senior, Julius. He’s looking at colleges. He’s a senior. He’s doing the whole thing. Believe it or not, I’m on that other side of the table watching this whole thing happen. By the way, he does not want any of my advice. Twenty-something years of doing this, he doesn’t want any of my advice unless he’s looking at a school and he goes, “Are they client of yours?” “Yeah, Julius.” Oh. “Julius, do you want me to call them?” “No, no. I don’t want you to do that.” It’s the only time he ever asked me for advice.

So here he is, he’s looking at this. Last year, you had folks who are already knee-deep in the process, hopefully had already saved up, hopefully had pulled out the money they’re at least going to need for their first year. They get paid for that tuition at this fall last month starting. It’s this next year. It’s people making different decisions. And I will tell you that—how many of you were at ED web conference at the key note. I see the show of hands; just a couple of you, good, okay. I had a picture of Julius up here before and I told you the story about Julius so it’ll only be a repeat for a couple of you.

Julius is looking at University of Miami, University of Virginia, James Madison, University of Florida, and University of Central Florida; very interesting selection of schools. Can you get the theme going on here? Julius likes warm weather, so does his mom, so they travel a lot to Florida. We’re in Philadelphia, by the way, so it’s not warm there. So he’s—and he plays baseball so he’s looking at all these schools.

If you got a school that’s $40,000-$50,000, thankfully, the girls that are walking around campus the day he was there were not influencing him enough to say I really want to go there, I won’t tell you what school it is; you can guess. But University of Florida, University of Central Florida, James Madison were great deals. And we’re making that decision not just that this would be the best place for him, but let’s look for the best place that we’re going to get return on our investment. And that’s the kind of discussion that’s going on in our family.

We’re at that tipping point and we can’t deal with we’ve always done it this way at the institution because families are doing it a different way now. 71% of families last year, students, with families, it’s a joint decision, skipped over their dream school for economic reasons; 71%, that’s the study by NACAC put out in June. Skipping over their dream school. So if you’re a dream school for a lot of place for a lot of student, they may be making different decisions.

We had a big event at NACAC, the National Admissions Conference in Baltimore last week and we did—we call it I Think. It’s a roundtable discussion of thought leaders and about 150 of your deans and directors of admission. And now that I’m talking about this idea is that what is next, what’s going to happen, what are the different decisions that people are making? We had an institution that stood up and said they had a 67% tuition discount. Now, if any of you are familiar with tuition discounting, when I was in undergrad admissions way back when, if we were approaching 20%, we were in trouble. Whereas as a trustee of an institution, I won’t tell you which one, wrote to me and said “we are in deep doo-doo.” They were up in the 50% financial aid discount. So they could bring the students in. Oh, and by the way, this same institution also had the largest freshman class in history, and yet we’re discounting at that rate. They can’t afford them, right? They don’t know where to put them either.

Tell you some good stories. Providence College. Anybody here from Providence College? I get to spend time at Providence College this summer at their staff retreat. They’re—financial aid staff retreat. And the discussion surround—this is after I took a tour—discussion surrounded how we’re going to deal with this idea that students who really are very effective that we can enroll them when they show up on campus. And they all like to show up in the fall. So it started a whole discussion among the admission staff.

Well, the problem is we’re out there recruiting in the road, high school visits, college fairs, how do we go about dealing with all these students who want to come here? I said, “Well, how many interviews do you do in the fall?” They said, “We don’t do any. We don’t actually offer them.” “Oh, what do you do?” “Sometimes we have information sessions but that’s about it.” I said, “Wait a minute, I just took two tours of your campus.” I always do two tours when I go on campuses. “And all the students told me was this is a very personal place; very successful, very personal. And you’re telling me you don’t even have a lab for interviews? It’s counter to your institution.” They said, “But we can’t. We’ve always done it this way. We’re on the road. We can’t be here and there.”

So they’re skipping recruiting to go out and recruit which is more effective. We all know it’s more effective than the students are in campus to recruiter them than go out to a high school fair. The story went on. Providence College, the VP for enrollment, sat next to me and he stopped the discussion. He said travel is off the table. Pretend we are not traveling at all this fall, now what do you want to do? He won the X award at I Think at NACAC last week. The X award is the award we give out every year, and the award was for revolutionizing the recruiting process; embracing change.

And he said we know travel isn’t as effective, so we need to just wipe it off and we’ll put some back. But what’s more effective is actually dealing with the students when they’re here and embracing. They now offer and encourage interviews for everybody, everyday. They have a special sessions. And they did that in a two-day retreat just wipe the slate clean. Okay. It kind of helps that they’re 20% down this year in enrollment, back against the wall, sometimes that’s what you have to do, right? It’s Providence College.

It’s not you, it’s me. I love that phrase. It’s not you, it’s me. It’s all about me is really what I’m talking about here. This idea of making decisions internally instead of based on market conditions, market-driven information. Knowing what’s going on in the market not too often, and some of you have heard this, some of you have even mentioned this earlier, is that we make decisions because this is who we are, this is the way we’re always going to be, and not what does the market need or what does the market demand.

I picked this one up. Actually Bob Johnson’s newsletter—anybody get Bob Johnson’s newsletter—it went out this morning and it reminded of University of Maine. And some of you have this. Oh, okay, so I have a couple of technology things, web. Web’s not technology anymore, right? You guys are way past that anyway. Web—this is their homepage. And what apparently has struck the attention of so many people here is an institution that put admissions front and foremost on their homepage.

Think about your own. How many of you admissions is—let’s say at least 50% of your homepage? A couple of your school. Central College? Xavier, okay. Now I say that because 80% of you here in the room are tuition-driven institutions. And if you’re not putting admissions front and center in your homepage, why not? What’s the opportunity that you’re missing?

I could but I don’t like to make too many people mad. Yeah, I couldn’t make that argument. No, please. Exactly. I’ll show you an example in a second here; one institution that is doing a great job. So are these folks. They’ve got students right up front. It is a little bit more about process and everything, and I’m more about stories. We’ll talk more about that in a second.

We have that institutions being all things to all people. Differentiation. I used to throw up here, differentiator dying. How many of you when you go to your homepage—I’m just going to focus on the homepage—don’t get me started on the other parts here, your website. We could be here, that’s a whole another three sessions. Just on your homepage, how does your institution differentiate themselves?

Let’s start first from your competitors and I do not call them peer institution. They’re competitors, they are the enemy, they are evil. How do you differentiate yourself right from the homepage? That’s a tough one because all too often we end up doing everything just because—well, you know, so and so are competitor, or we call them internally our peer institution, just offered this program so we’re going to do that. Now, at La Salle University, they wanted to start a masters and information technology, I said great, okay. So what’s going to make us different in this marketplace? They said, “Oh, La Salle’s the leader in IT”

And I sat there in the room and I didn’t go to La Salle and, you know, didn’t go to La Salle High School, I’m not even Catholic but I sat in the room there and I judge everything that went on around the room and this market-based discussion was completely lacking. They said, “Wait a minute. You guys ever heard of Drexel University? You ever heard of University of Pennsylvania? Temple? I don’t even have—this is by the way 1996—I don’t even windows on my desk, okay? I’m still running Dos. So folks, we’re not the IT

Being true to themselves. We call it authenticity. You’ve got to be authentic to your institution and that takes a leader who understands what makes us different; who are we. And sometimes it’s being able to say no. We are not this. We are not that.

I put this out to all of you. By the way, I find that this audience in particular—maybe because I know some of you and I’ve gone out drinking to some of you—that you tend to challenge the status quo as well. And I think that’s good. Sometimes it has to come from fruits of the institution.

Telling your organization and being in a discussion like that when somebody wants to build whatever, and you’re part of that campaign and say, wait a minute, is this really us? Is this who this institution is? So a leader being able to say no. And for your sales team, I’ll come back to that in a second, your admissions folks, what is their elevator pitch? What is that pitch? How can they describe your institution?

We’re a four-year, small, liberal arts institution in suburban whatever city. Okay, that’s about 75% of the institutions in the U.S. Keep going. Keep it going in as far as makes your institution unique and how do you display that—particularly, I’ll talk to these folks here, on the website. How do you display your elevator pitch on the web which has become obviously a popular place for students to go in search for information about you? How is that story told on your web? So let’s talk about stories.

I’m a big believer of stories just brought up. Instead of coming and learning about the process, which I find many institutional website have, I’d rather see more story. As perspective students, they want to understand what is really interesting about this institution. Many of you might have seen me. I always throw this slide up. It’s in every presentation I do. My execs and dean of admissions for Lewis & Clark, that stories not stats, people not program. Because all too often, when you look at your web, you look at your publications, you look at all the things you put out there to try and influence students, we see programs, we see stats.

Thirty-five thousand students on a 104 bucolic acres, blah, blah, blah. It’s just stats. It doesn’t really say anything about the institution. And if anything we know of this generation, they want to get at who are you to want to get away from the market and speak, they want to know who the institution is; stories not stats, people not programs, my alma mater, my undergrad alma mater does a great job of this now.

Big headline, big photo, only stories. In fact, they got rid of the view book. Now, it’s all about stories called Faces. Eight students or faculty in each piece just telling their story, linked to their social network, telling stories. All these people by the way are involved in their own campus programs and, of course, they’re linked on the website and its rotating graphic. All of that stories, get the process out of the way, that’s the easy stuff.

I also find that in most institutions, the most authentic thing about the institution, are not the stats and not about the programs but the people that go there or work there and the stories that they can share. So we need to share this more often. No surprise that blogs became popular and now, social network, and now they’re going on Facebook; that’s no surprise to all of you. But how well do you embrace it?

So another challenge to change, I think, called false urgency. How many of you just feel like you’re just running from one meeting to the next? You’re leaving meetings early to get to the next meeting? Leave them late and getting it later to the next—wow, I wish I would’ve known that one about eight years ago when I was dealing with that. I would leave for a meeting early in the morning. I wouldn’t even see Carol come in in the morning. I’d see her about three o’clock and I’d walk in the office and she’s about ready to leave. I let her leave early because she’d come in early. And she’d say well, nice seeing you.

And I used to remember that one day where that happened. I just sat in my office and it empty. I was in what was called the fish bowl. So it’s just me in my office and a glass window so I was just watching people go back and forth. And I decided just to put my notebook down and I said what in the world are we doing here? I’m just going from one meeting to the next. Did I get anything accomplished today? And for me that’s incredibly frustrating. I’m a list person. I’ve got to write stuff down and cross it off the list. And if I don’t cross anything off, it’s the worst day in the world. I only get half the things crossed off my list, either my list was way too long, and I’ll beat myself off for that one, or I wasn’t able to get anything accomplished, and that’s very frustrating for me.

So false urgency. So what are some signs of false urgency? One is that you’re running from meeting to meeting. The other is, well, there’s a bunch of them here to give you something to think about, you brought it up. What we’re doing is hiring consultants. We got all these great people. Let’s get out of their way and let them do their job, right?

You have a difficult time scheduling important meetings on critical issues? That happens a lot. Now, there are tools so that we can schedule meetings. I know some of you use Outlook. I’m not a Microsoft fan so I find everything that’s not Microsoft. I’ve been using TimeBridge. Anybody used TimeBridge? TimeBridge is such a cool tool. It’s sad because it’s sad because it is about scheduling meetings, but allows you to share and let people decide when they can meet and ‘boom’ suddenly—check it out if you want to know how it’s done. But if you’re getting rid of meetings, you don’t need TimeBridge.

Do you have committee on committees? Anybody have one of those? Yeah. And what did that committee do?

Audience: It talks about whether or not we were going walk...

Brian Niles: One of my institutions was to create the committees. They were given here’s the topic and they were charged with creating the committee and put the members on. That’s just messed up, I’ll use a nice word. Oh, see, thank you for doing that. I—this poor guy the whole day.

Oh, see, I like that. Committee to get rid of—yeah. See, the committee on committee should be recharged to get rid of committees, okay? We already talked about market-based decisions. But if your decision were inward focused, you got some problems there and failures of the past or stalling new initiatives. Does all of these sound familiar? It’s called false urgency.

Now, if you’re interested, I encourage you to pick up this book from John Kotter called A Sense of Urgency. It’s a fantastic book. Really talks about how to get passed some of these issues. Complacency and false urgency are too things that are going to kill progress. And while you’re trying to change whatever it may be that you’re changing, you’re going to have people that go along this curve.

So there is a progress to it that eventually, hopefully, you’ll get pass that middle point and people will go, wow, this actually is going to be beneficial not only to the organization but maybe to me as well. Some people will drop off, by the way. Some of these folks, they’ll either just drop off of the radar or they’ll just drop off.

It’s a threat. Sure, sure. New Yorker, you said. Okay. It’s going fast. We have 15 minutes so we’ll move this one along, right? Some solutions. This was thrown out actually last week at the conference I was speaking at, and I kind of like the point of this. Managers manage within paradigms. Leaders lead between paradigms. And if you believe we’re going between paradigms now, you believe we are at or pass the tipping point, are you a manager or a leader?

It sounds like a sports thing, like a coach would say in a whole—hey, are you a leader or a—what are you going to be? Maybe your title may be manager but—the title out of it, are you leading this change in your part of your organization? It doesn’t have to be big change, but are you leading it. If you see that you need to have something adjusted to meet the conditions, are you leading between the paradigms? So let’s bring up the leadership. By the way, it may not have impact development here, but I believe now the solution to higher education is going to be the leadership. It’s going to be the presidency. It’s going to be the boards.

I think we need—and you can do this in your own part of your institution—do you have clear vision? You hire great people. You get out of their way. And that last one, you hold them accountable.

How many of you feel like you’re held accountable at your institution? Okay. I thought like no one can ever get fired at the institutions that I worked at. They could do no wrong. And if you did wrong, it doesn’t really matter. You just keep going.

How many of you have annual evaluations? Okay, okay. How many of those evaluations are effective? Okay. Wow. What a waste there. Hold them accountable. Okay, what can you do? It doesn’t mean you have to worry about the whole institution. How about in your department? What can you do in your department to hold your people accountable? How many of you lead a staff? Okay, good. I guess I probably should ask better. What can you do to hold them accountable?

I think we already talked about this, death of the committee. I threw this up at the last time I did this. A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing but who has a group commitment beside that nothing can be done. Or those that keep minutes and loses hours. Those are committees. That’s what I think about committees.

I also think this concept of shared governance. Do we have any faculty here? Anybody that grew up as faculty? Okay. You’re going to hate me on this one. No offense to faculty. No offence to staff. No offence to administration. Leadership needs to embrace ideas, get everybody involved as much as possible, but I find that too many institutions, leaders cop out on this one in making a decision, in moving an organization forward.

Shared governance is a great thing. It was formed as a great concept and still is valuable at an institution. Actually it makes the institution very valuable. Corporations could learn from this. But institutions need to learn how to make decisions and shared governance tends to be the cop out. I did this—some of you might have seen this before. I went on Google images and looked for images for college conference rooms, nice cozy conference rooms; very nice.

How many of you have conference rooms like this where you meet? You’re all sitting down enjoying these; very nice. Okay. And if you’ve seen Target execs conference room—I don’t know if you can see that back there—that’s our conference room. Cables and all, a mess, skew, but we moved things around a lot. There are no chairs.

Unless you come to our conference room, then we bring in stools so we let you sit. We just want you to feel comfortable. I find—take the chairs away—it’s amazing how fast meetings will go. It’s amazing how those people that always need to say the same thing that has just been said two or three times earlier, that doesn’t happen at all. Suddenly stop repeating the same thing that was said two or three times already. Take the chairs away. It’s amazing.

We do our monthly staffing and we have one tomorrow. It takes about an hour-and-a-half and we do it in the same room. You have to move the table a little bit out so we’ve got about 20 people so it gets a little cramped in there. And you can see at about half-an-hour later, you have people leaning up against the walls, you had some folks sitting on the window seal, people leaning on the table, and suddenly realize, okay, let’s get the topic going. Keep things moving along. It’s a little trick but I find it works.

The ‘B’ word. What’s the ‘B’ word? Your business. I’m a big believer that higher education is business, and we got to stop thinking that it’s something else. It is the business of education. So we can all agree on that that we are a business, we take in money, we have expenses, we hire people. We may or may not make a—anybody here make a profit?

By the way the president, Dr. Papadakis, who just passed away this last year from Drexel University, I know he’s just brilliant. He said what’s the problem with the nonprofit having excess money in the end? Where did we ever get this idea that you can’t have surplus, okay? You can. You got to just an invested fact. Nothing wrong with that.

Okay, so get you comfortable with some new terms, some new words. Start using these. I remember when the term marketing is kind of taboo. And then we all get comfortable with marketing. Maybe because we are sick of other concepts that came around and we thought let’s use marketing. Cost-return investment. These are things that families are using now more than ever to determine whether they’re going to go to your institution or not. And what’s the ‘S’ word? Sales. Thank you very much, Caroline. You’re awesome.

I’m a big believer your admissions people are sales people. Anybody here work in admissions? Your folks that work in admissions. Are you an admissions people? Are you recruiters? Anybody think you’re a sales person? Yeah, yeah. You’re a web guy, okay. Good. I just want to know whether I have people who like me, people who don’t like me in the room. I just like to know. I’m not—it’s not a self-confidence issue. I just don’t want to be shot or anything.

I believe admissions people need to realize that or they need to get out. And I think once they realize that, they’ll do things differently. You got to get over this idea that sales is necessarily bad word.

We got over marketing. We got over business and got over sales. Not to call them sales people, I get that. But this is what they do in admissions. This is what we do. That’s sales. We even have this discussion last week at this roundtable discussion called ‘I Think’ where we discussed this idea that we’re really counselors. We’re counseling. And so you know what? I think a really good salesperson is also a really good councilor, okay?

If my product or service is not right for you, a good salesperson would say my product’s not right for you. That’s a good salesperson. The problem is, is we got this guy in our minds, right? This is Morty. I bring Morty along in all my presentations now. He’s not trustworthy, right? We don’t trust this guy. He’s going to sell us anything on the lot. Even if we don’t need it. That’s not a good salesperson. Sorry Morty.

Once we accept the fact they are sales people, we’re going to hire different people, we’re going to train them differently, give them different tools. Oh, I didn’t put the—I really wanted to put it in here, this out of office message that we got. We did a session on sales tips for admissions people. We did a webcast two weeks ago; half-hour session. We do this once a month. They’re free. They’re fun. You can go online and check them out if you want. We had about 600 people in this webcast watching this, and we had somebody write to us their out of office message. And it said something to the effect that I should’ve put in this slide because it’s precious. Something to the effect that I’m on the road recruiting, I have limited access to email, and when I get back I’ll have too many emails. So if you could email me again, that way I’ll get your message.

Are you kidding me? You’re too busy recruiting to answer an email? Your admissions people are sales people, sales people can’t use out of office message. Period. Give them the tools they need, give them the cell phones, give them the laptops, whatever it is, they’re required to be—they are on all the time. The only time they’re off is when they’re on vacation. And I’m a big believer of vacation, cut the grid, but they’re on all the time.

Set different goals and you evaluate frequently. I’m going to just skip through here. You got to ask the question what’s your college in business for? Start asking that question in your own department. What are you doing that is core to the institution, and what are you doing that you could outsource, that you shouldn’t be doing yourself? Somebody else has figured out how to do it better.

By the way, I know. I sit on that line. I’m a vendor so I sit on that line. I’m not saying Target X. I’m talking about—think about what you do, what if somebody figured out how to do it better, and let them do it. Do what you do best and outsource the rest. I know it’s cute.

I have a little video for you that I love. I’ll share this one.

[Video]

Speaker 2: Hi, is there a problem sir?

Speaker 3: Oh, yes. Question about the final tool.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 3: You see, we didn’t budget for this.

Speaker 2: Excuse me?

Speaker 3: This was marked 1999.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Well, I only got $7 set aside for this.

Speaker 4: So what do we do today?

Speaker 5: Well, I’d like the highlights but for now I can only pay for a trim.

Speaker 4: Okay, so today we’re only going to do a trim?

Speaker 5: No, the highlights. But I can only pay for the trim.

Speaker 6: I mean, what's with the taco stand. What was there?

Speaker 7: About $12.

Speaker 6: Yeah, right, right; $12.

Speaker 8: Sir, we’re not the tacos stand.

Speaker 6: You know, I had beef, same thing as I had.

Speaker 8: You had the fillet.

Speaker 4: Okay. Let me make a phone call, see what I can do. Maybe I can get you $850. Can you do $850?

Speaker 5: I’ll pay for the highlights next time. But for now, I need you to just go ahead and draw them in.

Speaker 4: So basically, you want me to work for free?

Speaker 5: No, I don’t want you to work for free. It’s just a test. That way I can see if my husband likes it and then you can roll the cost over until the next time I need color if he likes it.

Speaker 3: I went through and lined up some of the stuff that we can just remove.

Speaker 2: I’m not making any money on this either. You got to help me out.

Speaker 3: We got a discount bin.

Speaker 2: I know. I’ve checked the discount bin. But I want this one. We can do this. This is not a challenge. This is an opportunity.

Speaker 3: We try with—

Speaker 2: You ordered 300.

Speaker 3: We ordered but it’s order—

Speaker 2: What’s your name?

Speaker 3: Todd.

Speaker 2: You got to work with me.

Speaker 3: That one’s 1999.

Speaker 2: Mike, come on. Let’s do this.

Speaker 5: Well, I can cover your hard cost but that’s really as far as I’m willing to go.

Speaker 4: I’ll give you $850 today, I’ll come back next Tuesday. We’re going to make it up on the next one, what do you say?

Speaker 5: What?

Speaker 8: Oh, excellent. We’ll pay this time, but what we need you to do is show us how you made it so we can do it on our own in-house from now on.

Speaker 6: You do? It’s great dinner.

Brian Niles: Okay. So do what you do best, outsource the rest, but treat your vendors nicely. Treat your vendors as partners. If your vendor is not a partner, then pick another vendor. I truly believe that you get the advantage of working with vendors and the folks here that are exhibiting the hundreds of vendors that are available to you. They have that advantage of seeing across a number of institutions, and treat them very well. I’m just about done here so I’ll take some questions. But I want you thinking about how can you move change forward. I really enjoyed spending this time with all of you folks.

Any questions or comments? This is a quick 45 minutes. I’m going to be around today then I’ll be leaving this afternoon. So if I see you around, if you got any thoughts, please let me know. Pick up a copy of the book in the back there as well as, I believe, the evaluation. But I should hand it out first beforehand and made you thought up before we started; all that kind of stuff. So thank you very much folks.