Month: February 2006

The rise and fall of Lawrence Summers

As expected, Lawrence Summers, the former U.S. treasury secretary who took the helm at Harvard University in 2001, has announced his resignation, effective at the end of this academic year.

Best known for his comments last year in which he suggested that gender differences between the sexes might explain why few women pursue studies in science and math, Summers was also under seige by the faculty. The Harvard faculty were expected to give Summers a vote of no-confidence next week — a vote that stemmed as much from his leadership style as from his comments about women in science.

The Boston Globe‘s coverage of Summers’ announcement points out that his management style may have helped elevate Harvard’s reputation in the eyes of many. As the Globe reports:

The boldness and bluntness that contributed to Lawrence H. Summers’s downfall as Harvard University’s president also enabled him to alter the course of an often self-satisfied institution, prodding it to make changes that were long overdue, said many of those who observed him up close.

When the Harvard Corporation chose Summers to lead Harvard in 2001, there was a sense among its members that the nation’s most prestigious university had become complacent. Summers was brought in to shake things up, and he didn’t disappoint.

Among other initiatives, he jump-started the university’s expansion into Allston and decided that the new 200-acre campus on the other side of the Charles River would focus largely on science. He called for a new emphasis on undergraduates and argued that their curriculum should focus more on actual knowledge and quantitative disciplines and less on ways of thinking. And he took bold steps to make a Harvard education more accessible to low-income families.

Summers was also outspoken in his belief that Harvard and its scholars should be players in the public arena, not just intellectuals in an ivory tower. That belief led him to step into thorny public debates such as divestment in Israel and a perceived lack of patriotism among university professors, but it also led him to push Harvard to elevate disciplines such as public health and education with a direct impact on people’s lives.

But, as Lawrence Summers found out, leadership in academia presents its own set of thorny issues.

RSS feeds? What are those?

According to a recent MarketingSherpa report, some 75 million business people in the U.S. and UK use RSS feeds to get information. “However,” says the Sherpa, “depending on which study’s stats you believe, only 17-32% of RSS users actually know they’re using RSS.

“That’s right — roughly 50 million regular RSS users would say, Huh? if you asked them what RSS was.”

To find out how to get people to pick up your RSS feeds, read on.

Hat tip to Emergence Marketing for the link.

Managing (filtering) choices

A few years ago, Bruce Springsteen sang of the agony of too much choice — and suggested a Luddite response — in the song “57 Channels (and Nothing On).” These days, as Little Judy points out on the Media Center blog, 57 channels ain’t nuttin’. We’re drowning in choice. MySpace alone is fast approaching 57 million channels (personal websites), each one contributing some microscopic piece of data to the online mediasphere.

“There’s so much entertainment to choose from,” writes Little Judy, “that once in a while I miss the days when my viewing options were Combat!, Daktari, Gilligan’s Island and a hockey game, and I listened to music on a transistor radio.” The proliferation of online sources just adds to the muddle.

Judy goes on to ask: How do we manage all this information?

In a word: filters. We’re becoming experts at filtering out information and honing our web searches. But in so doing, are we missing out?

Breathing life into online communications

What a big difference spending a little bit of time to truly communicate with customers can make. Seth Godin recently shared a real-world example of how lifeless much emai from a corporate service department can bel, and then shared a possible remedy to that far-too-widespread problem. It involves spending a few minutes to compose a simple note that sounds as though it comes from a human being — because it does. And that can make all the difference.

Welcome, CASE ‘Currents’ readers

If you have any thoughts about my article on new media in the latest issue of CASE Currents, feel free to share your thoughts here.

I haven’t gotten my copy of the magazine yet, but I am assured it’s on the way.

Also, once the issue is online, I will post excerpts from it here.