Collaboration - Session 12

During the Global Site Directors' Meeting, I saw first hand the potential for collaboration to greatly improve the success of a project within an organization. NYU is currently working to assess the academic quality of the programs at its global sites. To do this, NYU has established a working group led by a Provostial fellow and faculty representatives from NYU's departments and schools in New York. This New York formed group will be responsible for conducting global site evaluations. When this process was discussed at the Site Directors' meeting (the directors from each global site gather for one week every semester to plan and collaborate) many of the directors were clearly uncomfortable with the whole process. They felt that their sites were looked down upon by New York. Despite New York claims that the evaluations were meant as a tool for self improvement and were similar to departmental evaluations often conducted here in New York, the site directors were not enthusiastic. The meeting became a bit heated, and the issue was not resolved when they broke for lunch.

Over lunch, the Provostial fellow leading the evaluation effort had a casual conversation with the site director from NYU Florence. They discussed how the global sites and New York could collaborate on the evaluations. They came up with the idea of introducing some global site faculty on the evaluation committee, so that it would not be seen as simply a New York investigation of the global sites and also so that the committee could be strengthened by learning some of the challenges unique to educating study abroad students. This idea was then presented to the rest of the site directors after lunch and suddenly the entire tone of the conversation changed. The site directors became very accepting of the idea of site evaluations and agreed to work in support of these efforts.

What the Provost's office must now do is ensure that this committee is truly collaborative, and not merely a cover to accomplish the original objective. The global sites must not only be represented on the committee, they must truly have a voice in the decisions and recommendations that it makes. The Provost's office should also clearly present the non-negotiables of what education should look like at the global sites, so that the committee does not spend time debating issues and making recommendations that the university will not help implement. If the site evaluation process truly is collaborative, it will be far more successful than it would have been, had it just been a New York only venture.

Strategic Engagement - Session 11

I found the prisoner's dilemma exercise we did in class today very interesting. It was interesting because while I've certainly read about scenarios like this many times, I don't think I'd ever actually attempted to act one out.

It was frustrating to have a complete understanding of how the game works and know what you all could come out ahead if only you cooperated, but that there is simply no way to know what the other teams will do. The other thing I found interesting was playing the game with multiple teams and seeing how much that affected the odds. Typically, when you read about the prisoner's dilemma it is with just two people, and even then it is hard to reach a desirable outcome. With multiple teams, it becomes really difficult. I thought that this was a good proxy for the real world, since the more players you have the more difficult it is to achieve collaboration, especially because it is hard to predict how many people will act.

My group was the first group to break everyone's trust, by getting everyone to agree to choose Y and then choosing X instead. We did this because we interpreted the game's rules to mean earn as much money as you can, meaning our team. What is particularly interesting is that we then went back to choosing Y in the final round; and I'm not quite sure why we did it. Going into the final round I thought we should choose X for sure, since we would be better off that way with every scenario except every other team also choosing X which seemed very unlikely. So why did we choose Y? And more importantly why was I one of the people to advocate for choosing Y?

I think in the end we choose Y because we felt bad for deceiving everyone the first time around, and felt like the rest of the class was quite mad at us. The fact that emotions can prevent you from acting completely rationally in a little classroom game I think really says a lot about situations of strategic engagement and negotiation in the real world. If our emotions affected us and caused us to act unpredictably in this setting, it is clear that emotions can easily affect people and organizations in the real world. While you can always hope that people will act rationally, and make decisions based on their best interests, you should be careful never to assume you know how they will act!

Stakeholders - Session 10

Shortly after our session on strategic assessment of stakeholders I encountered a situation where the stakeholder strategizer tool could be used in my work at MCV.

Malawi Children's Village (MCV) is now in negotiations with its retiring executive director over leasing the land that he owns. In a recent conference call for MCV, a board member proposed the idea, that since the negotiations were difficult, MCV should simply relocate down the road, and reinvent the core village based component of the organization as a new organization. I disagreed with this idea, primarily because I think this proposed idea was in need of a careful stakeholder analysis. It is clear that moving and reinventing the organization could be beneficial for the board of the organization, since they could potentially find cheaper rent, and have a clean break with the retiring executive director, ensuring that he no longer has any involvement with the organization. Before such an option could be explored however, I think a stakeholder analysis would be essential.

There are several groups which would have the potential power to either make an MCV move a success or a failure. One group would be the Village Volunteers that currently monitor the orphans. If these volunteers were not willing to continue with a reinvented organization, the strategy would be a failure. Their commitment would have to be ensured before such a strategy was attempted. While it is difficult to know whether or not they would be interested in continuing their support, one major cause for concern is that there is no clearly identifiable benefit to them in the move/reinvention of the program.

Another stakeholder that would need to be addressed would be the local community and clients served by the program. The families and orphans currently served by the organization have likely gotten used to visiting the clinic and schools at the current central campus. More importantly they are proud of the success the organization has had in the community. If part of the organization were to split off and leave the central campus, there is no guarantee that the local community would still support the program and have faith in its services. Once again, it is difficult to see what gain the local community would see in the relocation/reinvention of the core MCV program.

Since I don't see a clear benefit for either of these important stakeholder groups, and I think that both have enough power to derail the strategy, I would not support going forward with the idea. If the idea were to go forward, I would insist that a detailed stakeholder analysis be done, so that we could identify clear incentives for these stakeholder groups (and others) to ensure that they support the strategy and would work to ensure its success.

Alignment of Values - Session 9

I found the values exercise we did in class to be very interesting. When we were first asked to select our most important values after simply rating all of the values as high, low or medium, I wound up with one set of values. Many of my most important values then changed after we were asked to give each value a score based on our answering of the specific questions about how having more or less of each value would affect our happiness.

I think that this personal experience is important to keep in mind when getting feedback from individuals in the future - whether this feedback is on values or anything else. Having guided questions which force you to think about an item or decision and weigh the pros and cons before answering seems crucial to generating more reliable feedback. This seems like it would be an especially good activity to do with employees or board members on a retreat before revising the mission statement, vision statement, or core values for an organization. I think, in the same way that the guided questions helped me refine my own most important values, the entire exercise may help individuals to refine how they feel about their work at an organization, and the values they think are essential for that organization to have. Learning what values drive each individual, and aligning these values with the organization to the greatest extent possible clearly enables employees to work better together towards a common mission. I think that the exercise can also be helpful, in that it reminds us all of the differences people have when it comes to which values are more important. This can help people work better together, since it reminds us there may be a valid reason for a colleague's differing opinion. Rather than just dismissing a colleague's opinion as ill informed, people can understand that a colleague's actions may be driven by a different set of values.

Anticipating & Minimizing Resistance - Session 8

While improving assessing & improving readiness can help reduce resistance, it is rare that change can be brought about without facing some resistance. In my work at NYU's Office of Global Programs (OGP), I have seen many examples of resistance to change. In many instances, I think this resistance can be attributed to the simple fact that all change involves the "loss of what was and a transition to what will be" (Spiro, 2011, Loc. 274). Many of NYU's study abroad centers have been around long before NYU's centralized OGP was created. For example, the NYU Paris program was founded by the French Department back in 1969. NYU Paris was later taken from the French Department by the OGP. Since the program was originally run by the French Department, the traditional leadership has often resisted changes made by the OGP.

Over the coming year, the OGP leadership hopes to ensure that all Global sites' academic calendars are meeting Middle States accreditation standards. Since the NYU Paris calendar is currently well short of the required 14 weeks of classes, their calendar will have to be changed. Even if proper steps are followed to maximize readiness, the OGP leadership should recognize that resistance from the traditional NYU Paris leadership in the French Department will be inevitable.

A couple of points from the chapter "Step 4 - Minimizing Resistance While Maximizing Your Tolerance for It" seem especially relevant for this situation. In particular, OGP leadership should take care not to assign blame for the current calendar, or focus on what is wrong with it. OGP should acknowledge that there were good reasons for the current calendar set up, but that closer scrutiny of the academic quality of the Global Network University makes it necessary to ensure all calendars meet certain standards.

Another key things OGP leadership should consider is to not try changing too many things at once. If they would like to change NYU Paris's calendar for future semesters, it should not try to initiate other changes at this time. There will definitely be resistance to changing the calendar, but it can be minimized if it is not accompanied by other changes, which would make the NYU Paris leadership feel that their successful program is being completely changed for no reason.

Lastly, OGP leadership needs to assess their tolerance for resistance before embarking on this effort. I think that without a doubt their will be resistance to this change. OGP leadership should anticipate this resistance, and be prepared to work hard to overcome this resistance if they wish to accomplish change.

Revisiting Readiness for Every New Action - Session 7

As the Academic Support Coordinator in NYU's Office of Global Programs, I help our leadership develop and expand the curriculum at our Global Academic Centers. In order to introduce a new course abroad, we need to work with departments here on the Washington Square campus who ultimately "own" their department's courses. I have seen our office fail to win a department's support in the past due to inadequately assessing and improving a department's readiness.

Our Vice Provost recently wanted to add chemistry and biology courses to the curriculum at NYU Tel Aviv. The departments were reluctant in supporting this effort however, and as a result, we still have not added these courses to the curriculum. The departments have not completely fought against adding these courses, but they have dragged their feet, and slowed the process down significantly. It is clear to me, that our office could have had much more success with this project, if we had focused on improving readiness beforehand.

We currently offer Biology, Chemistry, and Physics at NYU London. The departments here in NY that sponsor these courses are currently worried about the quality of these courses offered abroad. While it is not completely clear whether these concerns are justified, nothing has been done to thoroughly evaluate whether or not there are problems with these courses, and to address these problems should they indeed exist. Our office recognized that these concerns should be addressed, but wanted to first push forward with adding these courses to the curriculum in Tel Aviv. I think this was a major mistake, as we should have recognized, readiness is essential for each new action. If the departments were not ready to support a study abroad initiative, the initiative cannot succeed. We need to first address any concerns the department may have about NYU London, and ensure that they are ready to support efforts at NYU Tel Aviv. Only then, with full readiness, can we hope to achieve success.

Early Win - Session 6

I was really drawn to the idea of an "early win" in this week's reading/class. It was something I hadn't really thought about before, but made immediate sense. Part of the reason it makes so much sense to me is that I think it can be a useful strategy to use in one's personal life. I sometimes have difficultly dealing with stress in my life, especially the kind that comes from having too much work to do. When faced with too much work to do or a particularly difficult task, I've occasionally had the bad habit of shutting down and simply putting off the work. This of course only makes my stress worse and leaves me less time to do the work. To combat this tendency, I've tried to concentrate on giving myself an early win. If I have a variety of tasks to complete, some of which are easier than others - which is normally the case - I try to tackle the easier less time consuming tasks first. Completing one task boosts my confidence and decreases my stress enabling me to move onto the next task.

When thinking about creating a strategic plan for organizational change, it seems obvious that securing an early win is even more important. Organizations are made up of people, and can be helped by the momentum created from an early win just like people. When I've thought about getting Malawi Children's Village to create and implement a strategic plan, the task definitely seems daunting. I think of so many things that would need to be considered, and major changes that would need to happen in order for the organization to succeed. I now realize that whatever strategy the organization seeks to use, we should make sure that it includes an early win. I'm not quite sure what that would be at this point. I'm also a little confused with how an early win would match with a divestment/retrenchment strategy. One of the things I think MCV might decide to do would be to close down its clinic and form a partnership with the clinic down the road. It's hard to think of this as an early win however. Won't people be disappointed to see a long standing program shut down? Perhaps it could be turned into an early win by having some sort of signing ceremony with the partnering organization? As I said, I'm not really sure what the early win would be at this point, but I'm glad I now know to keep this in mind if we go forward with a strategic plan.

The importance of changing Behavior & Culture - Session 5

I think that the section "The Real Goal - Change in Behavior and Culture" in Leading Change brings up a really important point. Changes in programs, policies and procedures have very limited effects if there is not a real change in the behavior and culture of an organization. My previous experiences have shown me how important an organization's culture can be. I spent a couple of years as a NYC public school teacher. One year, my school on the Lower East Side had an inexperienced principal that made some poor choices, and upset some of the teachers. The teachers (myself included) responded to this poor leadership with lots of complaining and negativity. Later on, when certain our administrator tried to introduce new programs or strategies, they failed because teachers did not make enough effort to get behind them.

When I look back at my time at that school I really blame a lot of our struggles on the negative culture that we let set into the school. While I think most of the teachers were individuals that would generally consider themselves as motivated to work hard and focus on the kids, we all found ourselves instead focusing on the parts of our job that we didn't like, and complaining whenever we thought that some new policy was going against the union contract. When I look back at some of the things I fought against, I don't think I agree with some of my actions at the time, and I attribute that to the culture that had settled in at the school. It's clear to me that if any real improvements were to be made at that school, more effort first needed to be made to try and change the culture.

Portfolio Analysis - Session 4

I really enjoyed Kearn's chapter "Analyzing Your Organization's Portfolio" this week. In my Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations class this summer we spent a lot of time going over how to do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats), but we did not talk specifically about doing a portfolio analysis. The portfolio analysis instantly appeals to me, because so many non-profits (and companies in general) have lots of different programs. If you don't separate the programs out and analyze them one by one, it is much harder to analyze either the internal or external environment. Separating out the programs and examining them one by one makes it easier to see the different competitive environments your organization operates in, and also allows you to be more critical and decisive in your analysis. By analyzing things one by one it is much easier to see exactly what programs are working well, what programs need to be improved, and which should be discontinued altogether.

As usual, I found myself thinking a lot about Malawi Children's Village (MCV) as I read this chapter. Before, if you had asked me to identify MCV's competitors, I would have a hard time saying who they were. When I look at MCV's portfolio on a program by program basis however, it becomes very obvious. MCV's health clinic competes with Koche Hill Clinic down the road, MCV's secondary school competes with other schools in the area, MCV's village out reach program competes with organizations that care for orphans in orphanages.

The various portfolio analysis matrixes that Kearns describes seem like they would be particularly useful in doing a portfolio analysis of MCV. I like these matrixes because they take into account things like social value and program attractiveness in addition to financial or competitive success (p. 119 & p. 124). For MCV, these things are critical to keep in mind when analyzing our programs. For example our outreach program has been struggling lately, but the fact that it would rate highly on "program attractiveness" and "social value" would eliminate suggesting it as a program that we should divest. On the other hand, MCV's health clinic doesn't necessarily rate as highly on "program attractiveness" because it isn't essential to our mission, so we could think about ending this program and instead relying on a partnership with another organization.

Thinking about program attractiveness helps you to remember an important thing to keep in mind when doing a portfolio analysis. That you need to tie it all back together at the end. As Kearns says "all of [your programs] should work in concert to support the organizational strategy." (p. 111) This makes a lot of sense and helps make sure that you stay focused on your mission when conducting your portfolio analysis. For example it wouldn't make sense for MCV to discontinue the health clinic if we decided as an organization that the mission should focus primarily on the health needs of the orphans.

I hope to encourage MCV to do some strategic planning in the future, and I will definitely advocate that we analyze our internal strengths and weaknesses one program at a time by doing a portfolio analysis.

External Environmental Scanning - Session 3

I think that the external opportunities and threats in the technology industry are particularly interesting right now, because it is easy to see organizations succeed and fail based on their ability to adapt. For example, Google seems like an organization that does a particularly good job of environmental scanning since they seem to be ready to respond to a constantly changing external environment. The organization's purchase of Android and emphasis on the mobile phone industry was a very smart move that turned a potential threat into an opportunity. Google has always made almost all of its profits from companies that pay for advertising on its search engine. Smart phones have changed the way people use the Internet, and today there are many more Internet users on mobile devices than on computers. This change in the external environment could have caused serious problems for Google, but instead they saw this change coming and bought Android. Google then scaled up Android and made it the most common operating system on smart phones. The interesting thing is that Google doesn't make any money on these phones, but it knows that every Android phone out there is another phone using Google for mail and search insuring that the organization's original product could survive and thrive in the new smart phone dominant Internet environment.

I think the key to environmental scanning is that you want to identify opportunities and threats in the external environment before they become obvious. Clearly Google did this with mobile phones. It bought android before anyone realized just how important that purchase would be for the company. In the same way, Google is currently being threatened by Facebook, and the shift to social networks away from traditional search engines. Google is reacting to this change as well, with social network attempts of its own, but I think they may be less successful here because they did not identify this threat as early, and thus are now forced to be more reactive than proactive.

As the readings point out, non-profits compete in a constantly changing external environment just like Google. Before any organization can determine an appropriate strategy, it must analyze the threats and opportunities that exist in the external environment in which it operates.

Distinctive Competency - Session 2

I was really struck by the term distinctive competency in this week's class/readings. It seemed an excellent point to me that an organization should only do things in which it has a distinct advantage over its competitors. It caused me to reflect on both my work at NYU and on Malawi Children's Village.

NYU's Office of Global Programs competes against other schools and third party study abroad providers to recruit students for our study abroad programs. I think we have some clear distinctive competencies. One is that our programs are academically rigorous and offer students to get credit from a fairly prestigious institution while studying abroad. Another is that we make it very easy for students to study abroad. Our study abroad counselors walk students through the visa process, we provide pre departure orientations, and have well staffed academic centers abroad that help meet students needs. We are able to do these things because we don't try to compete in other areas. Our programs are very expensive; we do not try to compete on cost. We limit our study abroad sites to major world cities so that we can be assured of getting high quality faculty and offering our students lots of services. NYU will not attempt to run a program in a small city in a developing country, because that would not utilize our distinctive competencies.

Malawi Children's Village (MCV) on the other hand does not have clearly defined distinctive competencies. I think that our village volunteer program has the potential to give us a distinctive competency, but I don't know that it is easily defined anymore. It gave us an advantage in delivering village based care, but how does it give us an advantage in running a school or health clinic. If it doesn't give these programs a distinctive competency, what does? I'm not sure I could say, and I think this is a clear sign that our organization is in need of more strategic planning. In our newsletter last year we had a volunteer that was quoted as saying "MCV is great because it is so many things." Since we help with food, health care, and education we try to meet all of the needs of our orphans. Perhaps this comprehensive approach is our distinctive competency, but I think that it's a bit of a stretch. I think that I will be bringing this up at our next board meeting as the fact that we don't have clear distinctive competencies seems a big problem to me.

What is Strategy? - Session 1

I was particularly struck by Porter's explanation that the essence of strategy is deciding what not to do. I knew that it was important for an organization not to try to do too much, but had never really considered just how important deciding what not to do is. Porter's description of Continental Airlines failed attempt to imitate Southwest Airlines was really interesting because brought home this point. Southwest doesn't just succeed in providing cheap no frills flights because they are simply better at doing this than other airlines. They succeed precisely because that is all they do. When Continental tried to imitate Southwest, but also tried to provide their traditional services they were unable to imitate.

I have definitely seen other organizations struggle because they did not decide what not to do. Malawi Children's Village (MCV), an nonprofit I am on the board for has definitely become less effective because we have not decided what not to do. I was originally attracted to the idea of MCV because it focused on village based orphan care, relying heavily on orphan's extended families and village volunteers to deliver cost effective care. While this part of the project remains intact it has become less effective because other projects have come to dominate MCV staff members time. The village based care was the core of the program because there was no central campus with other projects. By taking on other projects such as schools and clinics, the project stopped being extremely cost effective since extended families and village volunteers no longer provide a large proportion of the program's care.

MCV now runs a wide range of programs, and I believe that all are well intentioned and many provide valuable, quality services. However, it is difficult to identify anything we have decided not to do, and even more problematic, I am not sure that I could say what our distinctive competency is. Surely, when the program started the village volunteers seemed to provide the program with a unique advantage over other nonprofits, however I don't think this is still true if a majority of the programs budget goes to support activities that are taking place on campus and thus do not utilize the efforts of the volunteers. I am not sure what the solution is right now for MCV, and I think that the organization is in need of some serious strategic planning for the future. In this strategic planning MCV should definitely decide what it will not do, and perhaps even decide to stop doing some things it currently does.