Joe Sabado – Higher Education & Technology Leadership

I have been reading a book called The Innovators DNA, and I find myself thinking about how the concepts related to innovation described in this book apply to student affairs. The book’s premise centers around the idea that innovative leaders lead innovative organizations. The book talks about delivery (questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting) and discovery skills (analyzing, planning, detail-oriented implementing, and disciplined executing) used by leaders to find new ideas and convert them to tangible solutions and products. While these discovery skills may be through genetics, they can also be learned by understanding and practicing them.  Innovative leaders, they found to possess more discovery skills, while other leaders (professional managers) have more delivery skills. Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen (2011), when they interviewed high-level executives, found:

“In contrast to innovators who seek to fundamentally change existing business models, products, or processes, most senior executives work hard to efficiently deliver the next thing that should be done given the existing business model. That is, they work inside the box. They shine at converting a vision or goal into specific tasks to achieve the defined goal. They organize work and conscientiously execute logical, detailed,data-driven action plans.” (p. 31)

This passage also notes the difference between innovators and managers.

“The key point here is that large companies typically fail at disruptive innovation because the top management team is dominated by individuals who have been selected for delivery skills, not discovery skills. As a result, most executives at large organizations don’t know how to think differently. It isn’t something they learn within their company, and it certainly isn’t taught in business school. Business schools teach people how to be deliverers, not discoverers.” (p. 36)

 In contrast to the professional managers as described above,  Dyer, et al. (2011) note that disruptive innovators are motivated by these two common themes, “First, they actively desire to change the status quo. Second, they regularly take smart risks to make that change happen.” (p. 24) In addition,  innovative leaders, like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) look to hire those with similar attributes they possess. They build their companies by hiring innovative people, establishing processes that promote innovation (experimentation), and having guiding philosophies that support a culture that encourages employees to try new ideas. These philosophies include 1) innovation is everyone’s job, 2) disruptive innovation is part of our innovation portfolio, 3) deploying lots of small, properly organized innovation project teams, and 4) taking smart risks in pursuing innovation. According to the book, these four guiding philosophies reflect the courage-to-innovate attitudes of innovative leaders.

While Dyer, et al. (2011) focus on disruptive innovators/companies and discovery skills, they do see the value of companies having teams that include members who have delivery skills. Ideally, these teams should consist of members with complementary discovery and delivery skills and those with business, technical, and “human factors” (behavioral sciences) expertise. Collectively, they should be able to view problems from multiple perspectives.

Reading this book with the themes described above led me to the following questions:

– Are student affairs graduate programs designed to prepare future professionals to be “deliverers” and not “discoverers”?

– Is student affairs designed to work within established boundaries (mandates, legal requirements, guidelines, etc.) and within “inside the box”? What are the incentives/punishments for going “outside the box”?

– Are SSAOs more focused on delivery than discovery, and do they hire people with the same philosophies?

– Are the guiding philosophies in student affairs like/unlike those mentioned above regarding innovation?

– Are student affairs professionals generally more “deliverers” than “discoverers”?

What is your take on this topic? Do you agree with the premise of the book?

Reference:

Christensen, Clayton M.; Jeff Dyer; Hal Gregersen (2011-07-12). The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.

There was once a time when I was a young kid in the Philippines when my family, four of us, lived in a one bedroom, probably no bigger than  a size of a typical dorm room. I remember my sister and I having to wake up early and take a bath outside, early enough, before our neighbors even wake up. But through it all, I never felt poor. I never felt as if I was deprived of anything in my life. We’ve always been a close-knit family and I think for me that’s what mattered the most. We didn’t have much money yet somehow my parents were able to give us things we needed. When my sister and I had to buy school uniforms, when I had to get a new boy scout uniform, they always seem to find ways. My dad, he’s very resourceful and a very hard worker. As far as I can remember, he always found ways to get side jobs. Oftentimes, he held more than one. When we moved to the United States in 1984, my parents immediately took jobs available to them at the local mall in Salinas. Throughout high school, my dad always worked two almost full-time jobs and still found the time to have his own janitorial service and mowed lawns during his time off. They never asked for anything from my sister and I. To this day, they have not asked for anything in return for what they have given us.

It’s times like this, three o’clock in the morning, when I get the time to reflect about my life that I realize how blessed I am. How privileged I am beyond belief. It’s all because of my parents’ sacrifices. Who would have thought I would have the career I have had to this point. I’m happily married to a wonderful partner. We’re enjoying life.

I’ve had challenges in life,feeling like an outcast at times, feeling like I’m not smart enough, like  I don’t belong but frankly, those challenges don’t matter as much anymore. I suppose, I can look back at them and in the bigger scheme of things, they’re trivial. I look at opportunities ahead of me and I’m just excited. Changes are happening and life is good. Life is good. I feel blessed. I feel privileged beyond belief.

Life is short. So cliche, but so true. A friend and colleague passed away just the other day and it’s during these times I am reminded of how valuable my time really is and where I should focus my time and energy. Some of the thoughts that came to mind:

• I can spend my time worrying about what I can’t control or put my efforts and enjoy towards those areas  I do have control.
• I can be depressed about things I don’t have or be grateful for the things I do have.
• I can think about how life is so unfair because I wasn’t given opportunities or just suck it up and move on.
• I can spend time criticizing others for their shortcomings or reflect on mine and work on improving them.
• I can spend my time getting frustrated about what happened in the past, which I can’t change, or focus my attention towards the present and the future.
• I can get mean people get to me or just ignore them.
• I can keep on talking about things I’d like to do or go ahead and do them.
• I can ask keep on asking for permissions or just ask for forgiveness later.
•  I can keep on making excuses or just do something about it.

Life really is short. Life has been good. I just need to remember how good life really is.

“We all have changed someone’s life – usually without even realizing it.” This is a message in Drew Dudley’s TedX talk on Everyday Leadership. The video resonates with me because 1) I work with and for students at my university, and 2) I don’t see myself as a “leader” in the sense that I don’t think I have made a significant impact in this world, not in the way of social activists, politicians, artists, educators, etc. I go about my daily professional and personal lives just by making a living, pursuing goals, trying to help others, and enjoying the company of those I care for. However, sometimes I’m reminded that even when I don’t realize it, what  I do and write impacts others. Generally, I do think about the potential impact of what I write. After all, I know my supervisors, students, and other folks in my professions do read them. But, it’s when others tell me in person, like a colleague did this week,  or via email and social media, how a blog post I had written gave them a sense they’re not alone in their thoughts, a sense of connection, or a sense of direction that reminds me what I write and what I do matter.

As I wrote in this post, my blog has become a place for personal reflections and a part of my identity development and exploration. It’s become a place to express my perspectives that I don’t often find represented in what I read. I don’t find many mainstream media articles talking about Filipino-American immigrants’ experiences and what it all means. But, if what I write positively impacts others, even just one,  I find that idea very humbling and gratifying.

There was a chat session on Twitter last week about blogging, and I tweeted that maybe I should look at my blog’s activities and audiences through Google Analytics to grow and shape my posts. Maybe, I should spend more time publicizing my posts. Still, I’m satisfied with knowing that even if my posts don’t attract hundreds of thousands of readers, if there’s one person who was positively impacted by what I’ve written, that is rewarding enough.

We can use adversities to open doors to opportunities, provided we have the right attitude when dealing with them. It’s easy to sulk and complain about how life is unfair when we’re going through hard times, but we can learn about ourselves, our resiliency, and capabilities if we just change our mindset and recognize these adversities may just be opportunities in disguise. As I look back at the major difficulties in my career, I realize these were the times when I experienced significant growth.

Some of my biggest professional growth and opportunities happened as a result of challenges I was presented with. These challenges became my catalysts to think hard about my future and what sacrifices I needed to make as well as skills I needed to develop to get to where I wanted to go. As I will share below, these three challenges gave me a “kick in the butt” to change direction and in turn led to opportunities I could not have even imagined.

My first significant adversity happened about a year into my first job, I had to deal with daily frustrations at work because of conflicts I had with a co-worker. For every web project I worked on, my co-worker took it upon himself to change my work before it went into production. We were peers so I did not understand why he seemed to have the authority to make the final decision and why he changed my work without asking my permission. I was inexperienced dealing with work conflict at that point in my career so I went home angry and frustrated. There was a couple of times when I was so frustrated I punched walls in my apartment and my work situation started to affect my relationship with my then girlfriend. After months of frustrations, I made the decision to leave my job as I didn’t think my relationship and health weren’t worth sacrificing. However, I knew I needed to build my web and database programming skills before I could leave. For about six months, I spent many hours almost every night, going until 3 am, learning how to develop and design web applications. I bought at least 50 books on Active Server Pages, Visual Basic, and Access database from a local Borders bookstore and went through almost every exercise in these books. This was a time when there was no remote access so I had to drive to work every night to use my computer. Interesting enough, when I was ready to start looking for work, my co-worker decided to leave and I remained with my job. The six months of intensive learning provided me with skills that led me to building more complex applications at work and led to consulting jobs as well.

My second major period of growth happened several years ago, our department had a major re-organization and my web development team was dismantled to fit the new structure. I was “asked” to switch position from a manager of the team to a new role of web architect. I had a close relationship with my team and considered them my family. This was one of the few times in my life when I felt depressed. It even came to  a point when I couldn’t concentrate and almost hit a pedestrian while driving to work. I did not enjoy my new position because I no longer met with customers and I had no interaction with my old teammates. I wasn’t also learning new technologies that were becoming popular at that time like ASP.Net and SQL Server. After long conversations with my wife and with her approval, I made the hard decision  to move to a new organization accepting a pay cut. I made the move because the new organization had the reputation of providing abundant training opportunities and I wanted to prepare myself for the future by getting formal trainings and experience working with ASP.Net and SQL Server. I went to several trainings and I was given opportunities to develop more sophisticated applications. However, after about nine months, my former department had another major re-organization and they had created a new unit that needed a manager. I was offered the manager position managing my previous teammates as well as new employees. The formal trainings and experience I gained in that short nine months proved to be beneficial in my new position.

The most significant challenge and growth I experienced started about three years ago. Our organization had a major project converting a legacy system. This project required most of my staff’s participation. It was a critical system so it had to succeed even if it meant stopping all other projects, which we did. It was the right thing to do. Unfortunately for me, I was not part of this major project and I did not have the resources to work on other projects. It was a frustrating few months because as much as I wanted to contribute to our organization, it became impossible. It was an order not to work on other projects and I was told not to meet with my staff. I looked for tasks to work on, but after a while, I even ran out of things to do. I started questioning my value and whether I had a future in the organization.With the prospect of an uncertain future, I began to spend my thinking and working towards my goal towards a senior management position in student affairs. My plan was to use my IT background and student affairs experience to work towards a senior student affairs administrator position like Dean of Student Affairs Technology. Typically, senior student affairs positions require advanced degrees, but as unconventional as my background may be, I was and still am convinced there’s a need for a technology strategist at the senior student affairs level. I hope my combined experience/interest in student affairs and IT knowledge will lead me to a senior management position somewhere in the future.

With the available time I had and driven in part by concern of not having a place in my current organization, I committed to spending as much as I can to learn about student affairs and IT management. I began to learn about student affairs and higher education history, contemporary issues, and the skills/knowledge taught in grad schools,  by whatever means available to me. It was during this time when I dedicated myself to reading many student affairs textbooks and becoming involved with NASPA to network with other student affairs professionals. I also became more involved on campus as a NASPA Undergraduate Fellows Program (NUFP) mentor and a planning member for a professional development program for new student affairs professionals. In addition to learning more about student affairs, I also spent a lot of time learning about IT leadership and management.

I also became more active on social media (twitter), specifically on #sachat and #satech which are virtual communities of student affairs professionals and graduate students. I began to write more on my blog about student affairs, technology, and leadership. Because of my active participation on twitter and my blog posts, I was contacted by a fellow student affairs IT director for a university in Texas to serve as an external review team leader to do a program evaluation of their IT department.

After the major project was successfully completed, fortunately, my worries about my future within my organization disappeared as my responsibilities increased, my leadership role in my organization became more significant, and the units I oversee also expanded with more staff reporting to me.

The last three years have been a period of significant growth for me. It has been a time of opportunities I could not have even imagined. As I look back at the career challenges I faced, I am now grateful for them. Without these adversities, I probably would not have had the motivations to make some hard choices and to commit my time towards preparing myself for the future.