After spending a few years consulting, now I’m back within the trenches of institutional viewpoints. While it feels good, there are things about it that I forgot. Most notably, the fact that you can’t institute widespread change overnight and even when you can, it’s not always advisible.

When you’re on a bit of a professional island, with no one institutionally who is tasked with the same role as you it can be lonely. But what’s worse than the feeling of being Tom Hanks and talking to a volleyball is the idea that you often have a lot of weight to your words. People look to you to be the zen master of all things web. While this could be nice for one’s ego if you’re into that, it’s the sort of position that I’m glad I’m equipped to handle after six years of doing this rather than when I first began because I feel far more equipped to deal with such things today.

So what’s to think about? Lots of stuff, really. How do you help an institution visualize itself different. I’ll say that it’s first and foremost not solely about “the web” but akin to looking at yourself in the mirror and trying to honestly assess what your suitors are seeing. That might be a weird way of thinking about it, but they’re very similar. There’s a widespread penchant no matter the size of the college or university to believe almost wistfully in what you’re doing and to imagine no matter how things might be perceived that your way is indeed the best way. Usually, we rely on outsiders — consultants — to tell us those hard truths. But when the hard work needs to be done, unless you have big-time dollars, all of the advice in the world won’t mean a thing. You’ll need to tie your laces and dig deep into your own institutional muck to determine where you are, what needs to be changed and how you’re going to do it.

As I reflect on my own glacial shifts in perspective over the years, I realize there is a time and a place for ambitious agendas. For one, I’ve found that it’s easy to propose bold ideas. Realism sets in and then you have to figure out to decipher coherence out of boldness. Once that’s happened, I find it’s truly about execution. If you can sell a plan to the moon and actually get there, that’s awesome. But without the full weight of a nation behind you, some luck and good timing…you’re not going anywhere. The parallels between a bygone era in our own country and now make this all the more relevant.

A lot of the conversations going on right now — and there are lots of them — in the field of higher ed strategy are about bigger, faster, bolder, better. These are important discussions and findings that need to occur if we’re going to continue to raise the bar. What I need to remind myself often is not to be distracted by these happenings while contemplating the realities of my own sites. Not every institution is positioned to do more now for a bevy of financial, personnel and strategic reasons. It doesn’t make our triumphs or struggles less relevant, it’s just an important reality to face.

I’m fond of warily approaching social media properties, because I realize that not every school really has the infrastructure to support some 3rd party tool. But give how copycat the highered industry can be at times, it’s hard to resist creating official messaging in unofficial places to counter what others might do.

If you spend a good part of your day blogging, tweeting and Facebooking on behalf of Ye Olde Alma Mater, it’s easy to forget that there are people struggling daily with figuring out ways to coax people to give a damn about content creation.

Sometimes, the buy-in doesn’t exist and it’s a matter of educating before you can get to the point of knowing what you want to do and how to get there. There are a lot of moving parts and pieces to the puzzle. When you’re like me, it’s a bit different. My professional career has been akin to the baseball player who signs with a new team. While there are differences in each place, I remember the first time I switched jobs and realized how similar it felt to what I was doing at my previous school.

I don’t let this lull me into a sense of security, though. Assessing the landscape is a good starting point, but at some point, you need to decide what you’re going to tackle first and establish a plan of attack. Here are some things to keep in mind as you develop it:

1. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Your site probably won’t be revamp that quickly either: Sure there will be lots of pages to rewrite, dead copy to replace and perhaps an entire site to revamp from its current state. It’s easy to get consumed by things you want to fix, but it’s more important to prioritize your plan of attack. Be careful not to bite off more than you can chew for your entire team.

2. Content management is really about content ownership: When you’re trying to convince wary people to help you help them with content, you can encounter all kinds of resistance. Some don’t want you involved at all, others don’t want to have anything to do with it.

Add in a bunch of variables like how your CMS is setup and you can see the recipe for disasters embedded here. Ultimately, I like to remind people that they are the subject matter experts of their particular arena and that working together, we can advance their goals better than if we stay in our individual silos camped out. Giving people a sense of ownership while establishing where you come in process is usually the most helpful.

3. Don’t be defensive, it’s (usually) not about you: If you’re inheriting a situation that’s less than pretty politically, design or otherwise; it’s usually rife with the ill effects left behind from whoever you replaced. Don’t take it personal if in the early going, people are less than receptive to your overtures (or you know, demands for help.) It’s not your fault you might have been handed a bad deal, but from the perspective of the end user, none of that matters. Computers are magic machines that make all of these things easy and thus, no matter how much your sitemap may be disarray or the number of times you mutter obscenities to yourself about what someone else might have been doing before you arrived; it’s probably not anyone’s fault. Just go with it and be a rockstar.

4. Educate. Educate. Educate. I had a long conversation with a friend who isn’t even a web person, but a counselor fresh out of grad school at a college. She was asked to give presentations and to do things that she wasn’t told she’d have to do when she was hired. This initially bothered her, because the request was a bit out of her comfort zone. But now? She’s really good at it and it’s her favourite part of the job besides interacting with students. My point? It’s your job to be an advocate everyday for the work you do.

Despite the ubiquity of websites & social media everywhere, if you’re working full-time in a job on the web, you’re doing a job that didn’t exist twenty years ago. (Note: I used to write that line and put ten years ago. Time flies…) People often need to be educated, even if they don’t realize it. To them, it’s either wizardry or child’s play that you get paid for. 

We’re just scratching the surface here. I’m tentatively planning to follow up on this topic through this week, because it’s on my mind. We’ll talk in more detail about these topics in a bit more detail. Naturally if you stumble here and have questions or thoughts, chime in and I’ll attack those topics as we go along.

Despite this, I’m always very reluctant to walk in the door with a slew of ideas with an agenda to change things. Not because I don’t come up with them, but rather, because there might be very established reasons for doing things how we’ve “always done them.”

When I walk in the door, I’m first concerned with assessing the landscape. It’s really important to get a strong handle on how things work. From workflow to establishing relationships, I’m adamant about being a visible presence rather than just the web guy in an office someplace that isn’t seen or heard from except when there’s a problem. This makes it easier to get buy-in when you want to do things that might veer off a beaten path, because people recognize and trust you more than they otherwise would.

The real key to any changes is that they can’t be about you. So often, changes are made to accommodate the person steering the ship at that time. I’ve encountered countless scenarios as a staffer and a consulting strategist where a redesign or a project went in a particular direction solely because the person responsible for managing it had skills in a certain programming language or were just more comfortable using something that might not have been the best solution for the school.

Change is usually good, but not for the sake of change itself. There has to be a plan, the big picture has to be part of the equation and I believe pretty strongly in advocating for policies that reflect that philosophy.

Everyone in the national media is buzzing about Cal Tech’s first conference win since 1985 last night, snapping a 310-game conference losing streak. It’s a feel good story, because Cal Tech is home to some of the nation’s brightest college students.

Naturally, some of the comments on news articles (still, the worst invention on the internet, ever.) say things like “why continue to fund a team if they never win? Why not leave the conference?” Not only does it reveal an increasing trend in our society that reflects a need to monetize every thing in existence, but in the constant rush to put a dollar sign on an achievement for a program that never gave up; these people forget the most important lesson of all.

Winning is not easy.

The CalTech coach spoke to this after the game.

About how hard they worked, the preparation and the talent it took for them to reach this milestone. Notice I wrote the word milestone. Should we put this into perspective? After all, it’s just one conference win in the last game of the season, right? It’s perspective that helps us arrive at this point in the first place. It’s the thing that reveals why this matters. No one would fault any student at CalTech who didn’t want to play basketball. The women’s team lost last night and finished the season without any wins, which was a footnote in a few stories about the men’s team’s victory. Yet, these students and their packed workloads show up practice after practice, game after game and put in their work to expect better results the next time than the time before.

For twenty-six years, it was the same result in conference play. Entire classes could play four years, graduate and never experienced the jubilation witnessed last night. Anyone who’s played a sport at any level knows, that no one wants to be the team to lose to a team that’s lost perpetually. Those are the sorts of games you get excited about if you’re losing, because you figure you can notch a victory. So the President’s alma mater of Occidental certainly didn’t giftwrap any one-point wins last night either.

I felt compelled to write because so much of our focus is often on wins and losses. The result is important, but life is full of scenarios that can’t be boiled down simply into wins and losses. There’s preparation that it takes to produce those results and even if they’re not reflected on the court, field or whatever else; it doesn’t negate the work that went into the other team showing up and playing until the final buzzer.

Last night’s victory wasn’t about “nerds” who play a sport that’s the province of jocks. It’s a triumph for perseverance, dedication and for doing what you love each and every day. When you do something people think is a waste of time, there are often times when it’d be easier to succumb to the pressure and move on with your life. But when you succeed — even for a moment — no one can take what happens away from you. 

CalTech as an institution afforded us an opportunity to revisit this lesson last night. So congratulations and thank you.

Despite the obvious comparisons between the age groups, this summer has been transcendent because it’s the first summer I’ve been in a management position at camp rather than just in a leadership role managing an activity and kids in a cabin.

Camp has been a big deal for me; I’ve done it for every free summer I’ve had as an adult doing it. I also have a very difficult time explaining my camp life to people. To the uninitiated, summer camp is something you see in movies but have little context for, but for those who’ve experienced the peculiarities of sleep away camp, they understand that it’s one part quirk and one part culture. Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner was so affected by his camp years that he wrote a book about it.

Just like I have a hard time conveying to friends who’ve gone to college but never worked in higher ed the strangeness of things like hiring cycles, the way offices work and so forth. Well, camps have their own culture with strange songs and dining hall practices, wake up schedules and activities that may or may not be understood to an outsider showing on a regular day of camp.

The most notable thing that summer camps have to teach higher ed is pride in being who you are. Take a look at the web site of any summer camp and see how they present themselves. Few are apologetic and most have no interest in trying to convert those who don’t want to be converted. They know who they are and have a history they can chronicle for you. 

Now I realize there are a variety of differences ranging from no faculty, only a summer to worry about rather than years and years. But with younger children spending what amounts to the entire childhoods in some cases away at camp, the influences and relationships they make in these venues can dwarf the college years.

This explains why so many campers end up as camp staff in the future and have such devoted loyalty to their summer homes years after they’ve left, send their children to their places for generation after generation. Of course, the hard work gets done on the recruiting trail during the year at conventions and conferences akin to higher ed. And imagine if you had to re-hire your entire faculty and staff each year from food services, to janitors, RAs, faculty and everyone else who ran your operation save for a few full-time staff? 

This is a topic that I’ll probably write more extensive about after the summer ends, but it’s taken me an entire summer to really wrap my mind around how much goes into making these places work season after season.