Written by Dr. Melik Peter Khoury
Though Passion is not a Business Model, Efficiency is not a Mission either
A few months ago, I wrote that Passion is not a Business Model. The response was very positive, and most of it was agreement. A fair amount of it was relief, from leaders who had been thinking the same thing and had not found a way to say it without being accused of selling out.
A smaller set of responses stayed with me longer.
They came from people who had watched their own institution take the financial discipline argument and run it straight off a cliff. Their version of the story was not a faculty senate blocking a revenue initiative for eighteen months. It was a consultant deck, a portfolio review, a scoring rubric, and a dean announcing that a program with forty years of standing was being sunset because its contribution margin was negative.
They were not telling me I was wrong. They were telling me I had described one ditch and left out the other.
So here is the other ditch. An institution that runs itself like a fund will destroy its mission just as thoroughly as one that refuses to run itself at all. It will simply do it faster, with better dashboards, and with everyone in the room nodding.
And here is the part that took me longer to figure out. If you spent a decade fighting for financial discipline and you won, you are now the person least equipped to notice when it goes too far. Not because you stopped paying attention. Because you are still watching for the danger that used to be there.ific thing are we trying to make nonlinear, and what specific capability actually does that.” That is where the focus needs to be.
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