Dartblog

A successful alumnus wants to have lunch and hear a report on the development of the College over the past ten years. Where to start? As a veteran manager he’ll understand if I point to the effects over time of both drift and rot.

Organizations can survive for a surprisingly long time in the absence of leadership: inertia is a tenacious force. But when nobody at the top is making the necessary decisions, and when the incentives that are put in place are the wrong ones, then any entity begins to head south at an increasing rate.

At the College, lock-step raises in salary have been the general norm for many a moon: the weak performers see their salaries rise at virtually the same rate as the strong. Over time, given Warren Buffet’s miracle of compound interest, the weak become over-paid relative to their merit, and the strong underpaid. The final result: the weak are locked into their local jobs by golden handcuffs, and the College’s stars become ripe for poaching by merit-minded institutions.

Nobody is ever fired in Hanover (save disruptive rate-busters like Tom Crady and Andy Harvard), a policy stemming from a misguided sense of justice and personal timidity. Professor Peter’s principle then works its magic, too, with employees rising to their level of incompetence (or higher!), and remaining at that level — clogging the College’s arteries.

Add to that a premium on loyalty to the top man, and swift punishment for dissent — neither related to the quality of work done — and you quickly get an environment where the apologists rise and the meritorious lose their devotion to the institution.

Throw into the mix a besottedness with public relations at the expense of any true engagement with the challenges facing the institution, and in fact, punishment for anyone who attempts to point out those challenges, and despair/disdain will debilitate, and even drive away, the hardest-working employees.

Then reward with vocal praise only the loyal, and starve the high achievers of appreciation — the latter only incite jealousy among the leaders anyways. Business studies over the past century uniformly confirm that appreciation and respect are more important to employees than cash; this observation is as true among faculty as among groundskeepers.

Finally, be wary of change. It involves the risk of failure, perhaps public, that can muddy the public relations message. So sit still and sing the praises, however unmerited and untethered to reality.

Just as Orwell knew, without ever going to Russia, that the Soviet experiment could lead only in one direction, my experienced business friend will understand where Dartmouth stands today simply by looking at the forces that have had their way with her for more than a decade.

President Kim, à vos marques…