Honest and Respectful

You know, one of the greatest compliments I can recall receiving came from a man who was about 5 foot 5 inches tall.

Not that his height had alot to do with it, I'm not tall myself, but it does add color when you realize that this unassuming fellow founded an entire national-level, top-tier university in 2002. The story only gets more interesting when you learn that as of the beginning of the 2008-2009 academic year it had grown to 5,500 enrollees.

It would be silly to suggest he did it all on his own, but there can be no doubt that it was hugely due to his tremendous force of personality that this institution came into being. He is Canadian and so founding a university is a not just a matter of influencing academics, finding funding, and setting curriculum - it is a supremely difficult political act involving the provincial government.

The compliment he paid me resulted from a major report I'd written. As the President of this university he hired our firm in 2005 (about 2 years into its operating life) to have a data-driven look at how it was going, how the new institution was being percieved, and how it was structured internally. It was a good time for this and we interviewed some 60-70 people on campus individually and in groups. We poured through data on admissions and fundraising, and I wrote about an 80 page report detailing the situation and providing a set of recommendations.

Now, I tend to think 80 page reports are much too long. And, they certainly are in a corporate environment - probably too long by 10 times. Indeed, when I was doing strategic auditing for RSA, our rule was no more than 10 pages, delivered no more than 10 days after completion of fieldwork. No one would read more than that anyway and after two weeks the findings and recommendations get stale.

But, in higher education (even Canadian higher ed) there is value to demonstrating the completeness of the analysis. To some degree, the more like a dissertation, the better.

So we were in his car speeding to the train station... you begin to get the picture of how dynamic this man in his middle 60's was, when you realize he'd paid to have us come all the way from Denver and this was the best time slot available to go over the report... when he turned to us and said, "well, I've read it." It was clear from the way he said it that he was rather picky about what he chooses to read.

Then he said, "I was very impressed. I only found two typos."

And then the compliment came. He said, "I found it honest and respectful." He went on to describe that it had just the right balance of solid analysis, hard-hitting recommendations, and respectful tone that would help him use the report to effect significant change on his campus.

You see, in higher education, for as impressive a fellow as he is (he has recently retired), President's don't wield the power they do in corporations. Universities operate a "shared governance" model, that requires Presidents to be influencers, never autocrats.

He was saying, with that one phrase, that we had given him an invaluable tool to influence his organization.

I have never forgotten that compliment, because it sums up in three words what a great audit, analysis, or study MUST be to effect meaningful change.

- Prescott Coleman, CIA, CISA