#lallyschool

The blog, “Leadership Insights for the 21st Century,” by Dr. Thomas Begley, dean of the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has moved to: http://lallyschool.rpi.edu/blog.

Anxiety seems to be a constant of modern life.  We lead such busy lives that we frequently encounter conflicting responsibilities or simply lack time to do everything.  Our phone rings, someone pokes their head in our office, a computer ding signals a meeting to start in 15 minutes, before long we are riding high with anxiety.  As well, life is full of uncertainties and nothing generates anxiety like not knowing what to expect.

It is easy to see why anxiety might affect decision making, but how?  Experimental research* examined whether being anxious makes us susceptible to bad advice.  In short, it does.  In the study, people in a neutral mental state listened to advice, accurately assessed its value, and chose accordingly.  Anxious people had difficulty distinguishing bad advice from good.  My guess is that the anxiety reduced their ability to see the whole picture and think it through.

The authors pointed to a particularly dangerous combination.  In earlier experiments, anxious people more willingly accepted advice than calm people.  So anxious people are more willing to accept advice but unable to determine whether that advice is any good.  The first thing that comes to mind is the behavior of investors in response to a rapid drop in the stock market.  The herd mentality prevails.  Welcome, panic, the extreme form anxiety.  From the outside, you wonder why investors don’t just take a deep breath and think sanely.

In essence, anxiety makes us receptive to bad advice which leads to a poor decision which leads to a negative outcome.  What’s next? Of course, more anxiety.

F. Gino, A.W. Brooks & M.E. Schweitzer, “Anxiety, Advice, and the Ability to Discern: Feeling Anxious Motivates Individuals to Seek and Use Advice.”  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102: 497-512, 2012.

There are support groups to help people who have addictions to alcohol, drugs, video games, eating, and more.  There should be one to help addicts to email.

You know them.  They check their email constantly at their desks, interrupting anything else they are doing.  They listen for the ping that signifies a new email.  They check their mobile devices during meetings.  They always seem to be absorbed in cell phone activity.  One way to identify a potential email addict is to see how fast they can type on their cells.  Fast thumbists are suspect.  

They send emails, nervously await a reply, and grow distressed the longer one does not arrive. Another warning sign is how fast they reply.  Fast repliers are suspect.  This trait, though, needs to be evaluated over time because it is a pattern of quick replies that allows us to detect them.

In restaurants, they eat with one hand while reading the cell phone with the other.  Two people at the same table hack away at email rather than talk.  You suspect that if they have something to say to their companion, they will email – can you please pass the butter?  They experience withdrawal symptoms when separated from their email delivering apparatus.  On a plane, they stay on up to the moment passengers are asked to turn off their devices and are the first to check while the plane taxis to the gate.

Other addiction groups have ten-item questionnaires to determine potential addiction.  We need one – it may offer the first step to recovery for our suffering emailaholics.

Protest movements often produce a symbol that captures their essence in a simple phrase or image.  Symbols offer a phrase or image to rally around.  In protest movements, they carry high emotional appeal.  Symbols are important in organizational life as well. 

Company identity is usually less evocative than protest movements, but the most effective symbols have both intellectual and emotional appeal. 

Apple, for example, in its early days positioned itself as David to IBM’s Goliath. A young Southwest Airlines pointedly promoted humor as a way to illustrate its friendliness.  The casual dress ethos in Silicon Valley very consciously stands in counterpoint to the suit and tie uniformity of traditional corporate hierarchies. 

To paraphrase a well-known saying, a symbol is worth a thousand words.

As with almost any high-profile issue in our lives, discussion of the cost of a college education is filled with statistics that can muddy the water as often as clarifying it.  Statistics can be deceptive but in this case they are central, so we need to rely on solid sources and understand exactly what they are saying. 

The gold standard for statistics on college costs is the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), collected by the National Center for Education Statistics, a unit within the U.S. Department of Education.  All higher education institutions that participate in any federal financial aid program – and almost all do – must report data annually on a host of dimensions.  We rely on this data base whenever possible.  Even here, however, we need to be precise about what the data is telling us.

The most eye-catching statistics examine the runaway cost of higher education.  For example, according to an article in Forbes (March 22, 2012, “College Costs Out of Control”), inflation has increased 115 percent since 1985 while the cost of a college education has jumped nearly 500 percent.  We are acutely conscious of the high cost of medical care, but U.S. News and World Report informs us (October 23, 2013, “Just How Fast Has College Tuition Grown?”) that between 2003 and 2013 the cost of a college education grew twice as fast.  Total student debt from financing a college education is now estimated at over $1 trillion and rising.  These figures are accurate and striking.

Many colleges and universities are in a tough spot.  The calls to reduce the cost of education grow louder by the day while the cost of delivering that education keeps increasing.  Many parents of college students and applicants are in a tough spot.  They see the importance of a college degree to their children’s futures while they take a sizable hit to finance that degree.  These clashes are especially true for private schools, where the sticker price of an education is generally much higher.  However, public higher education tuition has grown faster than private as state legislatures cut back on their allocations to universities and these universities look to replace the funding elsewhere. 

We read about recent graduates who are $100,000 in debt and can’t find a decent-paying job.  Anecdotes can distort reality and the average debt of a college graduate, reported at $29,400 this past year, is considerably smaller.  Nevertheless, the figure does not count the hits parents take to savings accounts and retirement plans to minimize loans.  Some media outlets reference the ‘college debt crisis’ and the ‘crippling cost’ of tuition and report that students are being ‘priced out’ of the higher education market.

At the same time, we increasingly read of financial difficulties at some universities.  I wrote a previous blog about it (“Economic Forces on Higher Education”), so I will not dwell on it again here. 

There is a need to dig beneath the headlines to understand some of the forces, large and small, at work.  In future entries, I will explore some of these other layers.

This October another terrific event, the William F. Glaser ’53 Rensselaer Entrepreneur of the Year Award, was celebrated.  We recognized three alumni, John Delbridge ’91, Jeff Stewart ’91, and David Uyttendaele ’91, fraternity brothers who founded Mimeo.com, a very successful business-to-business on-line document management and on-demand printing company. 

They met as freshmen dorm mates and quickly became friends.  After each initially worked for prominent established companies, in the late nineties, they enacted Jeff’s idea to start Mimeo.com.  While they experienced many of the trials and tribulations of running a start-up, they did it as a team.

In popular mythology, a solo entrepreneur braves the storms of founding a company.  Steve Jobs and Bill Gates immediately come to mind.  But Jobs had co-founder Steve Wozniak and Gates had Paul Allen.

Mimeo was truly a three-headed start-up.  In their acceptance speech, our honorees emphasized the importance of their complementary roles.  Jeff was the ideas and energy guy, John was the organizer and hard-headed appraiser, and David handled the technical side.

The business never would have emerged if Jeff had not brought the creativity and enthusiasm, John had not harnessed and refined Jeff’s imaginings, and David had not overcome the many technical hurdles in need of jumping.  Possibly, one person can perform all three but not likely.  Even if the talents are there, the time to do all three and do them well will not be. 

Possibly the most remarkable thing about Mimeo.com’s trio is that despite the tensions that eventually lead so many co-founders to entrepreneurial divorce, they are still friends and partners today.

Dr. Thomas Begley is dean of the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Professor and author, Clayton Christensen, argues that major change does not disrupt an industry through slow evolution.  Rather, after several indicators have signaled a changing environment, a tipping point occurs where the flow turns into a flood.  He created a stir when he predicted that in fifteen years half of U.S. universities may be in bankruptcy, though he hedged this bold statement with a “may be” rather than a “will be.”  Since the prediction is a year and a half old, I guess we are down to 13 and a half years.

A prediction that higher education will undergo major change is not bold.  It is the only sector of the economy that has not experienced such turmoil.  Thirty years ago, the two remaining relatively unaffected sectors were health care and education.  If the changes wrought to health care since then are any harbinger, then higher education is in for a ride.

While most discussions on the university of the future try to envision a prototype, Christensen’s service is to question the structure of the higher education industry itself.  His percentage can be disputed and a more complex dynamic is likely in which some schools fail, others scrape along, some merge, others form close alliances where each specializes in delivering education in specific disciplines to the students of all members, and some private universities seek to turn into publically funded ones. 

To take a step back, future blog entries will examine the higher education sector’s current state as the basis for imagining its future.