Blown to Bits

In this issue

• ON STRATEGY: BLOWN TO BITS
• ON THE NUMBERS: UNARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
• BOOKSHELF: BINGE

UPCOMING ONLINE SEMINAR—DOUBLE FEATURE: TOP 10 MARKETING MISTAKES COLLEGES MAKE & MESSAGES THAT MATTER

Please make plans to join us for our December online seminar. It is a double feature: Top 10 Marketing Mistakes Colleges Make & Messages That Matter. It will be held December 8, 2005 from 1:30-3:30 PM CDT.

Please go here for more details.

ON STRATEGY: BLOWN TO BITS

Evans and Wurster, in their book, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy offer some interesting perspective on how any organization must adapt to our rapidly changing information-based society. At the close of the book they offer some insights that are particularly useful for college and university leaders especially as they seek to manage, or better yet, lead between paradigms. Of special interest is how organizations are deconstructing and reconstructing themselves in response to threats and opportunities. Some of their guiding principles include:

1. No leader today can presume that the definitions in his or her business will still be valid a few years from now (consider, for example, how our definitions of student success and retention have changed over the past few years).
   
2. Deconstruction is most likely to strike in precisely those parts of the business where incumbents have most to lose and are least willing to recognize it (how many of us could have anticipated the impact the University of Phoenix-like institutions would have on higher education).
   
3. Waiting for someone else to demonstrate the feasibility of deconstruction hands over the biggest advantage a competitor could possibly wish for: time.
   
4. Strategy really matters.
   
5. The value of winning will escalate, as will the cost of losing.
   
6. The reconstructed business definitions will rarely correspond to the old.
   New businesses will emerge and agglomerate in accordance with their own competitive logic. Emerging information businesses will spill across the boundaries of the physical businesses from which they originate.
   
7. The hardest step for an incumbent organization is the mental one of seeing itself through a different, deconstructed lens and then acting on this insight.
   
8. The subtler pitfall is co-option and passive resistance by a skeptical and self-preserving organization.
   
9. Strategy in a deconstructing world has to be generally right, but need not be specifically right, as long as the organization maintains a capacity to learn from its mistakes.
   
10. The value of incumbents' best assets is all too often destroyed by the organizational, behavioral, and personal baggage that they insist on bringing to the new venture.
    
11. Incumbents can be the insurgents, if they choose.

The authors note that in a deconstructing world, the traditional, hierarchically defined roles of leadership become obsolete. But there remain two things that leader, and only leaders, can do.

The first is creating a culture. Common cultures obviously emerge from the environments from which the corporation is drawn: national, regional, and professional. But the unique cultural values that an organization builds on top of that are conscious and deliberate creations. They reflect the vision of a leader. They are established through incentives, through the selection of other leaders, and above all by example.

The second task of leadership is strategy. There are always small moves, experiments, improvements: things that an organization with the right capabilities and motivation will do for itself. But there are also big moves. Deconstruction screams out for big moves, just as it frees the strategist from the traditional limitations of business definition and ownership structure. In this environment, as in no other, the smart and the bold will outfox the slow and the cautious. It is the leader's skill in making those big moves, second only to her skill in building the right culture, that will make the difference between success and oblivion.

ON THE NUMBERS: UNARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

The November issue of Business 2.0 pinpoints 10 edge cities and regions that are primed for hypergrowth both in terms of population, but also business development and wealth.

Edge cities, remember, are those cities that border larger urban areas. The term was first coined by Joel Gurreau in his Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. Gurreau wrote another favorite, The Nine Nations of North America.

The edge cities are:

• Beaverton, Oregon
• Vacaville, California
• Victorville, California
• Buckeye, Arizona
• McKinney and Frisco, Texas
• Sugar Land, Texas
• Channahon, Illinois
• Moorefield Station, Virginia
• Palm Coast, Florida

The same article presented detailed information (demographic, growth industries, real estate) on 10 mega regions that will have unprecedented growth in the next decade and beyond. Those regions include:

• Cascadia (basically the I-5 corridor from the Canadian border down through central Oregon)
• Norcal (a blend of Sacramento and San Francisco)
• Southland (a blend of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Diego)
• Valley of the Sun (Phoenix and Tucson)
• Gulf Coast Belt (Houston through New Orleans [Rita and Wilma have likely impacted the growth projections for this area])
• I-35 Corridor (Ranging from Kansas City down through San Antonio)
• Great Lakes Horseshoe (Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh)
• Atlantic Seaboard (Boston through D.C.)
• I-85 Corridor (Raleigh to Atlanta)
• Southern Florida (Tampa south)

Colleges and universities that happen to be in or near those geographies will face significant enrollment as well as fundraising opportunities if they are able to plan ahead and respond appropriately.

BOOKSHELF: BINGE

Binge, by Barrett Seaman, is one of those books that you wish didn't need to be written. Subtitled "campus life in an age of disconnection and excess," the book chronicles largely destructive student behavior at a handful of campuses ranging from coast to coast. The table of contents aptly describes the scope of the book:

• Daily Res Life
• Hooking Up: Sex on Campus
• How Hard Are Students Studying?
• Emotional Troubles
• The College Alcohol Crisis
• The Date Rape Dilemma
• Is Diversity Working?
• Fraternities and Sororities Under Siege
• The Morphing Drug Scene
• College Sports and Res Life
• What's the Right Drinking Age?
• Who's in Charge?
• Improving the Undergraduate Experience

The book balances data with anecdotes and is a thought provoking and sometimes heartbreaking look at student life and behavior that is, in many instances, out of control.

While all the chapters caused a great deal of angst on my part, it is perhaps the chapter on alcohol that was the most disturbing because alcohol appears to be the root cause of so many other destructive behaviors. Seaman notes that while alcohol has always been a problem on campus the shift from drinking beer to drinking hard drinks, mixing those drinks with other drugs, and the overall ferociousness with which students are drinking is causing a dramatic rise in alcohol related issues, including deaths. Last year, for example, the author noted that there were 1,400 alcohol-related deaths on America's campuses. At one prestigious school in the East, he noted, there are three cases of alcohol poisoning each week.

Alcohol is a significant issue. So is the use of drugs, especially prescribed drugs. One interviewee at a school in the South said that when he went to school in '96 three to five percent of students were on psychotropic drugs. Now, just eight years later, that number is 26 percent.

For those of us not involved in student services, Binge is an eye-opener. The emotional, social, academic, and financial costs of the behaviors described in Binge are simply staggering and many believe will represent, collectively, one of the biggest challenges higher education has ever faced.

COMPREHENSIVE INTEGRATED MARKETING WORKBOOK AVAILABLE

An Integrated Marketing Workbook for Colleges and Universities, authored by Dr. Robert A. Sevier, is now available from Strategy Publishing.

The book is written for college presidents, administrators, and faculty who are interested in how integrated marketing can help them more effectively build an image, recruit students, and raise dollars.

Designed as a workbook—each chapter concludes with a series of discussion points and questions that will reinforce key themes and clarify decisions—the book contains the most comprehensive integrated marketing checklist ever published. In addition, budgeting, an often overlooked topic, is treated in-depth.

The book is available from Strategy Publishing at www.strategypublishing.com.

STAMATS ONLINE SEMINARS

Thursday, December 8, 2005 from 1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m. CDT

Double Feature:

Top 10 Marketing Mistakes Colleges Make & Messages That Matter
Presented by Dr. Robert A. Sevier

This online seminar is a double feature, two presentations for the price of one. The first session, The Top 10 Marketing Mistakes Colleges Make, will run from 1:30-2:30 PM Central and the second session, Messages That Matter, will run from 2:30-3:30 PM Central. You get both sessions for the single price of $249 per site!

Top 10 Marketing Mistakes Colleges Make
What are the 10 biggest mistakes made in marketing and recruiting? How do you know if your institution is guilty? How can you avoid making the same mistakes in the future? What are the most overlooked keys to success in recruiting and marketing efforts? This session will address these important questions and more. The top 10 will draw on some actual experiences and examples shared by colleagues at conferences over the last several years. The names, of course, will be changed to protect the innocent.

Messages That Matter: Strategies to Help Get the Word Out
Getting the message across to a busy audience in an overcommunicated society is one of the biggest challenges that colleges and universities face. This highly visual and fast-moving session reviews a handful of critical messaging tools that will help you communicate messages that are relevant, remembered, and repeated.

For more information about the online conference, please contact Brandy Huseman at (800) 553-8878 or brandy.huseman@stamats.com. You can also check out the Stamats Web site at www.stamats.com.

Register today at www.krm.com/stamats.

Cost: $249