Lucky firms

In the latest Harvard Business Review there's an article by a professor from UT Austin and a couple of Deloitte consultants that argues that luck has as much to do as anything with the success of the companies written up in various studies of "great" companies. This seems pretty obvious--I was looking at Jim Collins' Good to Great recently and it really hits you when he's talking about Circuit City after driving past the guy holding the Everything Must Go sign as I drive into Nashville every day.

Tennessee Higher Ed dodges a bullet until 2011

In his budget address last night, Governor Bredesen announced that the Federal stimulus plan may give Tennessee public higher ed a reprieve from the big cuts they are looking at. "More than most other areas, higher education has dodged a bullet and bought some time." He says that the stimulus money even restores $100M in cuts taken this year. But he points out that this money only goes on for 2 years, at which point Tennessee higher ed will find itself short $180M in State funding.

Now everyone will be looking to see how the campuses and the systems respond. MTSU and TSU have both been talking about serious cuts, and the MTSU proposal has generated protests and a lot of organizing (not sure if there's been similar activity at TSU). One of the points the organizers made about MTSU's proposal to cut $11M (with the ultimate target being $19M) was that other campuses were waiting to see what would happen with the stimulus program (APSU for one seemed to take this approach, as did Memphis). It turns out they were right, but it will be interesting to see what President McPhee does next. It sounds like it will be hard (impossible?) to avoid the big drop-off in 2011, which argues for making some cuts as soon as you can. Then again, higher education has a long history of dodging a continuing stream of bullets.

No Frills campus

I'm going to post more thoughts on this sooner or later, but for now I just wanted to grab a couple of links to a subject that is getting interesting in the context of various conversations I'm having about the funding for higher education: no frills campuses. Pennsylvania has announced a proposal to create a no frills campus: here's the Philadelphia Inquirer account and a notice on it in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle also pointed out that one campus of Southern New Hampshire University might be a model.