Numb About Numbers

I have enjoyed the past three months, dipping my toe into the still pool of academia. Although my experience has only shown me what teaching and instructing feel like at a for-profit institute, I have seen life from the other side of a student's desk, which gives me the writing material I need to complete a novel that has tumbled around in my head for years, waiting for the instructor's personal viewpoint to coalesce.

I have sketches of fellow instructors ("In Duluth, we did it differently"), department chairs ("I have FOUR degrees!"), a dean ("nobody leave - this is a tornado watch"), a director and others. I have reams of material on students, all of which gets mish-mashed together so that not a single student stands out - if you only knew some of the stories I heard - I don't even know which ones are true but does it matter, anyway? I can't/won't repeat most of the stories due to confidentiality.

And to think it all started because a person performed an in-class review of an instructor the night I was a guest speaker and invited me to submit my CV. Not once did I express an interest in teaching - the whole time they seemed to pursue me, a person with a business degree, to teach at a technical institute. Who knew I was so special? [Or at least a warm body they needed to fill in for another instructor. lol]

It's like what I've told my students - enjoy your life because you never know what's going to happen. I was sitting here happy in my mid-life retirement, writing about philosophical issues and thinking about business successes, wondering if I'd ever step into the corporate world again when all of sudden, WHAM! I walk into a half-corporate, half-academic environment headed by a dean who seemed out of control (and who's no longer there). Today, I saw a new sheriff's in town (or two of them, I can't tell) and the law's been laid down - it's all about the numbers.

My life is beyond complete. Now I'm reaping rewards for my lifelong journey, spending every day in a tropical paradise where sunshine never ends and 24-hour meals last indefinitely. Humor, mirth and merriment fill me up - my cup runneth over with laughter. I've seen all there is to see.

Never work because you have to. Never become an expert in a job that's easy for you to perform. Those two lessons have shown themselves to me repeatedly through my coworkers these last 10 weeks or so.

I will miss the people I've met and hope they learn their own lessons about success. It's not about hard work or getting good grades - it's about lifelong learning. We can all work hard at jobs that aren't fulfilling. In fact, most humans do just that. And many times they feel satisfied that they've done a hard day's work. But what if the job you're performing is ultimately unsuccessful because of leaders who focus on the wrong objectives?

I am lucky. In my first fulltime permanent corporate job, the CEO of the company, Jack Welch, had cajones and showed me what success was all about. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, my boss had me post above our conference table six rules of successful leadership from Jack Welch:

• Control your own destiny or someone else will.
• Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
• Be candid with everyone.
• Don't manage; lead.
• Change before you have to.
• If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.

[One more rule we had to follow - be number one or number two in your business or add 15% to the bottom line; our aerospace division rarely made more than 5% or 6% profit, often bleeding the other divisions to stay alive, and thus was sold by GE.]

The for-profit education business is just as cut-throat as any profitable organization. It's in the details of a company's vision, when daily practices hit the pavement, where one finds leadership that shines.

I am still getting over the warm buzz of the instructor's life and haven't yet decided the ways that the institute's leadership shines. Perhaps the newness of the particular location where I worked does not give me the full picture I need to make a balanced evaluation. Sometimes I felt like I was in the henhouse with the other chickens waiting for the farmer to come in with his axe. But you get feelings like that in other places, including mature businesses in decline and brand-new startups with very little funding - nothing new there. Sometimes I felt like I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, but then again the local leadership was still getting formed, with holes in the organizational chart, so I can't say that the absence of direction was attributable to poor leadership skills.

There's something else I can't quite put my finger on about this job...time will tell. Before I write my novel, I'm going to compare notes with friends of mine in the nonprofit/government education world to make sure my observations are unique enough to be worth writing about. Otherwise, why bother? I could just as well spend my time fishing, hiking, biking or just sitting on the deck drinking a beer and pondering the many ways that humans find to needlessly occupy their time, watching dragonflies and birds use my backyard as their playground.

One last observation for the evening. Do you know the acronym ETDBW? Easy To Do Business With. Not exactly catchy but true! Simplify, KISS, you name it. All of these mean one thing - giving your internal/external customers what they want/need when they want/need it, nothing more or less. Thanks to my father, I have a knack for business process analysis. Had I felt a burning desire, I would have constructed a business process analysis report for the institute, identifying where the institute had overcomplicated their processes. Instead, they were more interested in my performing the repetitive and unnecessary tasks of the teaching job for which they hired me. So be it. My business analysis becomes part of the novel, transformed from one place of employment to another, another satire in my collection of stories.

It's not always about the numbers. It is always about the customer, both internal and external. Products and processes change but the customer is always the same: a human being operating inside the concept of time. We use words like "multitasking" to give human capability a feeling of depth but humans operate rather linearly, albeit with multiple stimuli affecting the senses. If you treat customers as something other than human animals in linear time then you've missed the opportunity to serve your customer well.

Enough said. Time for bed. A former mistress of mine confessed to me today that she made the mistake of getting emotionally involved with me again and I admit I'm rather worn out, having spent the last four days thinking about her, knowing I'll miss her even though she'll always be a part of me. I'm not completely a robot. Not yet.