Three Takeaways From 2022
Ken Schenck
Dec 20, 2022
3 Takeaways From 2022
The end of the year is a great time to stop for a moment and reflect on the previous twelve months. Inflection points in general are potentially very helpful in this way. When we are endlessly pushing forward with no pause, we are prone to miss opportunities to improve or redirect. Without reflection, we can just rev our engines without realizing it. We can waste needless energy because we never stopped to recognize, well, we were wasting our energy.
1. Focus
I am a generalist by nature. I like everything. I’m a “Jack of all trades.” I want it all, and I want to offer it all. Jim Collins would say this is a problem, from a business perspective. [1] To be honest, I think some organizations use his “hedgehog” principle as an excuse to double down on losing strategies. “We just sell underwater basket weaving kits… it’s our hedgehog.” Nevertheless, I will begrudgingly admit that he is right about the need to focus.
Campus Edu is trying to change the paradigm of higher education. This is the land of innovation. Innovation requires trial and error. It requires constant self-examination and refocusing. The adage, “Fail fast, fail often, but always fail forward,” is often the name of the game. Sometimes you have to throw the net in more than one place before you start catching fish.
One of the biggest challenges for innovators is having too many ideas. But you cannot do everything at once. Without moments of focus, ideas just evaporate into the air like a space heater outdoors.
2. Persistence
Over the years I have frequently used the image of a running back trying to find a hole in the defensive line. Sometimes you have a general sense of the goal, but the path is sometimes blocked. Not everyone has the same vision. You keep looking and trying until that gap appears, and then you run through.
In our case, we are trying to make education appealing, accessible, and affordable to digital natives. Believe it or not, the academy often isn’t really wired for such strange concepts. To be frank, sometimes it seems the mottos of the academy are “Liver is good for you,” “The more friction, the more valuable,” and “We’ve dug our financials into such a hole we have to charge this much.”
Time and time again, we are finding that our first intuitions were right. Learners like the personal storylines we weave into each course. Digital natives like the visual appeal and intuitive navigation of the courses we build. Young learners aren’t going to pay for what they used to.
Our persistence is paying off. More and more schools are coming to us wanting to advertise their courses on our Discover platform. More are coming to us to help them design next-level courses, and collaborate to build new programs.
3. Communication
In an age where people sometimes work from multiple locations, communication is more important than ever. On the one hand, I reject any thought that it cannot happen at a distance. From Slack and Discord to texting, sometimes you can have more interaction with someone across the country than the person in the next room!
But communication is essential to an effective organization. It’s human nature to silo. We like people like us. We like people who think like we do. So we communicate with our group, while other essential players aren’t in the loop.
Obviously, this dynamic can cause problems. A project is full steam ahead until you bring in other essential players at the last minute. Suddenly there is a wall that is hard to climb. The right hand isn’t too pleased to know that the left hand has been shaking other hands. For example, the dreamers in an organization need the implementers at the table if the dreams are to become a reality.
There are other polarities where both ends need to be in communication with the other. Individuals who know how to convince others of a vision may not be as in tune with what it takes to make that vision happen. Similarly, individuals who know what it takes to manage a project may not be as in tune with the predictable illogic of real people.
I don’t mean to stereotype. Each individual is their own concoction of strengths and weaknesses. My point is that, as difficult as it may sometimes be, the different poles of an organization have to communicate with each other if something is really going to happen and happen for a long time.
So those are my big three takeaways from this year’s projects. Focus is almost always necessary for success. Similarly, ventures generally won’t cross the finish line without persistence. And better to communicate appropriately throughout a venture than to try to sneak projects by. That often ends in disaster.
[1] Jim Collins, From Good to Great (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 90-119.
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