Fifty years ago today – November 3, 1970 to be exact – a Tennessee election result shattered my dream and forever changed my career planning. That was the day Winfield Dunn defeated John Jay Hooker in the governor’s race. Final vote tally: Dunn, 575,777 and Hooker 509,521. So close but yet so far away. When…
Milestone Reached
My latest book project has reached a new milestone on the way to publication. Thanks to the expert guidance from my book coach, Karyn Henley, we have a 29,000-word manuscript in the final stages of development. The book, tentatively titled “From Backroom to Main Street: The Inside Story of How the Nation’s Report Card Came…
My Next Book: A Work in Progress
One blessing from being quarantined is the additional time I have had to focus on completing my second book—an insider story of how the George W. Bush administration took the Nation’s Report Card from the back rooms of education researchers to main street America. The book will chronicle my six years as executive director of…
If You Can’t Explain It, Don’t Do It
Leaders typically live in glass houses, subject to scrutiny on a daily basis. Effective leaders learn quickly that if you can’t explain what you are doing, you had best stop doing it sooner rather than later. A year after I became chancellor, legislative questions were raised about higher education administrative salaries in general. My counterpart…
Make a Difference
As a son of a life-long member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, I had personally benefited from the efforts of organized labor. As the head of the Tennessee Labor Council often stated when introducing me, “This is one chancellor who supped at a union table.” As Chancellor of UT at Nashville, I encountered…
Use Power to Influence Causes You Believe In, Part 2
During my first chancellorship, I was confronted with a significant problem. I was the leader of a campus knee deep in a federal desegregation court case at a time when our faculty and staff ranks showed a conspicuous deficiency of minorities. Despite my best efforts in my first year as chancellor to push deans to…
Use Power to Influence Causes You Believe In
Holding the levers of power that are accessible to a leader is a precious resource that must be used wisely and cautiously. I have observed over the years that some leaders go too far in pushing their agendas and lose their effectiveness, while others appear too shy or tentative to make a difference on issues…
Pick Your Fights Carefully in a Bureaucracy
Bureaucracy is the minefield that every leader must learn to navigate if success is to be achieved. It is the classic love-hate relationship. On one hand, bureaucracy is likely to be the bane of any leader’s existence. At the same time, a leader is largely dependent on the effectiveness of the bureaucracy to carry out…
Seek Ways to Make Others’ Lives Better
During the time I served as chancellor of the University of Tennessee at Martin, “A Nation at Risk” – an acclaimed national study report that launched k-12 reform efforts that continue to this day – had become the darling of the media and the reference point of choice for public school critics. Regrettably, the reform…
My Christmas Story
One of the often overlooked roles of leaders is the capacity to make a difference in the lives of other people. Too often, people on the way to the top or those striving to stay on top become totally consumed by the daily demands of the leadership role. There are always budgets to balance, turf…