This week on Navigating Change we’re recording live from the Cheers Lounge at the EACUBO Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Howard Teibel has gathered the regional presidents for a conversation on the state of higher ed after a day of learning in sessions. For our time, we take on how the regions are equipping their members to take back the dialog on the value of higher education in a media landscape that has not been so kind.

Special thanks to WACUBO President Lynn Valenter, SACUBO President Ben Crutcher, and EACUBO Chair Mike Gower for their insights this week, and for taking their time to join us live in Philly!

Disruptive Innovation, the concept that new — typically inferior — products have the tendency to crowd out better products that are more costly, has been doing it’s own crowding in higher ed leadership. This week in the Chronicle, Evan Goldstein does his part to unravel the mystique of Clay Christensen and the DI landslide, a fascinating article in and of itself.

There is clearly disruption in higher ed. Does it fit the model of Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation to the letter? Perhaps not. But today on the show, Howard Teibel and Pete Wright talk about the role of disruption, and the power of leading from a position that embraces it as part of the engine of change.

Next month, eastern business officers and university representatives decend on Philadelphia for EACUBO’s 2015 Annual Meeting. Howard Teibel will be there, this year joining incoming EACUBO chair Lynne Schaefer hosting a conversation on Facilitating Strategic Conversations. How do you engage your team to take on complex projects? How do you rally around objectives that are handed down to you? How do you adjust your course when you realize your group is mired in old thinking? This week on the show, Lynne joins us for a conversation on all this and more as we gear up for another terrific conference.

The EACUBO 2015 Annual Meeting takes place October 11-14, 2015 at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown. For more information, visit EACUBO.org.

On September 28th the NACUBO 2015 Planning and Budgeting Forum kicks off in Austin, Texas and Howard Teibel will be there, joining Sue Menditto — NACUBO’s director of accounting policy — in a presentation on leadership and change and getting the organization you want. We’re thrilled to have Sue join us for our conversation today.

Sue kicks us off with some background on the conference and makes a fantastic case for attending. This is the fourth year for the Planning and Budgeting forum and 2015 is already at capacity.

From there, Howard and Sue walk us through a concept not entirely new to listeners of this show, but one with a unique new spin. Central to it is this idea that technical skills are a given, but soft skills have become the new differentiator in the best leaders. The twist is all about permission that leads to a new way of thinking about the work. For that, we hope you’ll dive in and listen to this week’s show!

This week on Navigating Change we welcome Manu Narayan to the show. Manu is a truly renaissance man. He’s an actor of stage and screen. He’s an accomplished musician. He’s a writer and producer. And for all his professional creative talents, he joins us to discuss his role of Young Alumni trustee on the board of Carnegie Mellon University.

Our conversation is broad in scope, but the lessons are important. Manu’s experience and youth at the table of senior leadership reflects more accurately the body of students the university educates, and the role of young alumni trustee serves to celebrate the critical importance of diversity of thought and experience leading our institutions.

Hard skills and soft skills. We’ve certainly discussed them before. Your organization is likely full of competent leaders, managers, and team members well qualified to perform their functions, expert finance leaders, marketing and enrollment specialists, academic leaders, and beyond. This week, Gail Gregory and Howard Teibel share their insights into the challenges they’re seeing across institutions. Our sensationalist headline aside, the not-so-surprising key learning: institutions replete with technical talent may be facing a shortage in the soft skills that can keep people working together and delivering results!

Last week’s conversation on turning leaders into guides inspired us to revisit the Teibel Decision-Making Model in the light of helping guides facilitate decision-making without authority. How do you help those empowered and accountable for change move through difficult decisions without skin the game yourself? This week we walk through the model through this lens and post the key question plaguing so many teams focused on change: Do you really understand the conversations you’re in? The projects you’re accountable to deliver? Why your institution needs you where you are, doing what you’re doing today?

This week on the show, Howard Teibel and Pete Wright revisit the Decision-Making Model with an eye on those charged facilitate change, without authority or accountability to make change themselves.

Making the transition from leader to guide, from administrator of your own institution to agent of change for others, is a complex effort both personally and professionally. At this year's AGB Conclave, new and seasoned administrators alike came together to learn and share as they work to turn their experience into support for others. This week on the show, Howard Teibel shares his experience leading a small portion of the Conclave, and offers insight into the challenges and opportunities ahead of us as we work together toward a strengthening higher education environment.

NACUBO is currently developing a body of research and series of tools to help business officers and their institutions assess their place in the economic landscape of higher education. Changing demographics and a decline in students, decline in state funding, decline in philanthropy, and an increase in tuition and fees above CPI are just a few of the factors impacting higher ed operations and the public impression of American institutions.

Thanks to research led by Senior Fellow of Finance and Campus Management Bob Shea, NACUBO is taking the lead in creating a definitive set of factors and a common language around the way institutions exist in the economic landscape. This week on the show, Shea joins Rutgers CBO Mike Gower and Howard Teibel to share how this project and it’s targeted outcomes will impact institutions in their drive toward sustainability and growth.

Today we’re talking about bottlenecks in project implementation, it’s a sort of spiritual follow-up to a conversation we had just a few weeks back, (The Danger of Thinking in Projects — Ep 101), and we have an expert with us to share the load with keen experience in rolling out large institutional software installations.

Joining us on the show this week, we have our special guest Brian Sweeney. Brian is the head of US Operations for Unimarket, providing procurement solutions to higher ed institutions around the world. Brian offers unique experience in software project implementation in higher education and shares his insights into the cultural change that comes with technological innovation across campuses.