Insights

This article previously appeared in Inside Higher Ed and it is posted here with permission of the author.   “Our university has been around for 150-plus years, but that doesn’t mean we’re immune to these threats.”   This comment, reflecting a tenor of the times, came from a discussion with a vice president for marketing…Read more

When helping an institution answer critical questions about marketing structure and staffing as part of an organizational assessment, I often think back to my time as a unit-level chief development officer early in my career. Please join me for a brief trip down memory lane to explain. I recall that formative experience well, because it was…Read more

“When we get back to Normal…” I recently saw someone flail their hands in front of their mouths after saying those words, as if trying to grasp the utterance out of the air before it could land in our midst, flaunting its elusiveness. That little moment illustrated for me the larger reality of This Moment.…Read more

Anthropologists can drive people crazy (I’ll be telling you more about why an anthropologist is working at RHB soon!). People will ask us a question they imagine has a straightforward answer, and then we respond, “Well, it depends…” We respond that way because it’s true. It does depend. For my first Insight, I’m tackling something…Read more

I often refer to that classic story of the man who spent his life in search of riches only to discover that his own home sat over a diamond mine. The lesson from the story popularized in the late 19th century by Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University, suggests that what we seek, particularly in…Read more

An enduring brand strategy requires more than just stakeholder buy-in. But is buy-in enough?