Updates

Long time no say nothing.

A big chunk of my time in last two weeks has been spent putting together a Priorities and Practices list and a Projects list for my staff for the next year.

One of the best things to come out of that, I believe, is an increased transparency that I’ve asked out of my staff. We started publishing our group’s Staff Notes in our wiki/weblog site the week before last. I have high hopes for that.

I’d link directly to the Keynote (version 2, which was my first try out of the program) — but I decided to pull in some movie captures from Field of Dreams and Contact that I thought were relevant to the themes within the presentation. So the resultant file is pretty big, not to mention that likely copyright thing.

In case you are wondering, the Field of Dreams scene was this one:

Ray, people will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say. It’s only $20 per person. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.

I included it as an analogy that our constant is our people. And when we stay the course and stick with the fundamentals and priorities, we will best serve our faculty/staff/students.

And along the way, last week I was reminded again about how much easier it is to be against something, rather than for something. But all the innovation comes from being for things.