BFTP: Quit leading, start managing

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post June 2, 2008. Been tough finding time to write this week since I've been at both ISTE in San Antonio and am now at ALA in Chicago. I am pretty much conferenced out. I am looking forward to meeting one of my heroes, Jonathan Kozol today. 

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. Peter Drucker

You can't do the right things unless you know how to do things right. - the Blue Skunk 

I am getting a little tired of the emphasis on "leadership" in society and especially in education. For all the talk, all the theories, all the studies, all the exhortations, this push is getting us nowhere - and good management may be suffering as a result.

Here are some deadly warning signs I've noticed lately...

• Has your local grad school replaced its "administration and management" classes with "leadership" classes?
• Has your professional organization's standards become a "visionary" document instead a practical description of and guidelines for an effective program?
• Has your last administrator been hired based on his philosophy and not his track record of running schools well?

I will state right up front that I am better manager than I am "leader." The workshops and articles of which I am most proud tend to be "management" rather than "leader" focused. Budgeting, tech planning, policy-making, skills integration, effective staff development and program evaluation are among my favorites. It's pretty easy to sneer at sharing "how-I-done-it-good" stories rather than research or high-blown commentary. But those looking down their noses probably aren't the folks trying to make actual changes in the classroom or library. 

Let's face it - anybody can create a "vision" and cry loudly about all the things that are wrong and paint a utopian view that sounds pretty good (and it seems like almost everyone does). But what is usually lacking is any practical means of moving from Point A to Point B - especially within the parameters of working with real people, real budgets and a real number of hours in a day. I would contend that true genius is in finding ways to make vision reality - working where the rubber hits the road.

I've been wondering a good deal about what seems to be a round of recent political, economic and educational disasters - the Iraq War, the handling of Hurricane Katrina, the housing bubble, NCLB - and questioning whether it was a lack of leadership or piss-poor management that created (or exacerbated) the mess. Lets see:

• removing an evil dictator and establishing a democracy in the Middle East - good vision, poor execution
• helping the victims of a natural disaster - good vision, poor execution
• increasing the number of people who own their own homes - good vision, poor execution
• assuring that all children have good reading and math skills - good vision, poor execution

Where did we go wrong? Might it have been putting people who couldn't manage a one-car parade in charge? Leaders, not managers? Hmmmmm.

Pat a good manager on the back today...

The Blue Skunk sinks in the ratings

from Onalytica June 18, 2013

I am always shocked to see the Blue Skunk mentioned in any list of popular blogs. Being popular has never been the goal of this endeavor, but simply a tool for professional reflection, sharing, and amusing myself. (See Why the Blue Skunk blog.) I know I have a readership since I am known at conferences as "the Blue Skunk guy" rather than for any of the more professional pieces I've written, and I am not quite sure how to take that either.

I don't check any statistical data related to my blog, make any effort to "improve my rankings", nor worry about the number of followers I have on Twitter, never having been much of a competitor nor needing to depend financially on any of this stuff. My pleasure comes from re-reading an old post and thinking, "Hey, that's pretty good - did I actually write that?" and thinking it may have made someone chuckle or look at education a little differently.

I struggle with any "best of" lists in education. At the heart of most of them is some commercial interest, I'm sure. Too much attention to popularity discourages beginning bloggers. And somehow it just seems antithetical for any genuine PLC for any member to try to outdo the others.

Encountering outsized egos is pretty common here at ISTE. Perhaps that is what it takes to be listened to by the masses. But I hope attendees are also going to poster sessions and breakout sessions led by the quieter, more humble voices in the field - those that have children's, not self interests, at heart.

No matter how big the ed tech fish, we're all swimming in a pretty damn small pond.

Zinio the public library card hook?

I pretty much just stopped reading print magazines a few years ago. Not sure why, but when once we subscribed to half a dozen, we were down to just Newsweek at home and when that stopped coming out in print, that was it. Maybe it was because the grandsons stopped selling magazine subscriptions as a fund raisers.

But over the last couple weeks I've read Mental Floss, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Bicycling, Men's Health, Newsweek, and a couple popular computer magazines. But they were on the tablet, downloaded from my regional public library system.

All I needed to get them was a library card and some patience in getting things set up.

OK, for thousands, if not millions, this probably not news. But I find it exciting because it may become the hook that gets a lot of our kids and families interested in getting a public library card this fall when the schools and public libraries will make a big enrollment push. 

We've got a lot of iPads coming into the district this next fall and since these magazines are downloaded and can be read off-line, even families without home Internet access can use them. 

And who knows? Maybe, gulp, some of those kids may even wander into the public library itself!