Weekly Intelligence
for Campus Leaders

I want to say something that will get me uninvited from a few conferences this year: the calmest cabinet meeting in your building this month was probably the most dishonest one.

Fluent. Confident. Wrong. In that order.Every cabinet meeting I've sat in since the second week of June has opened with some version of the same sentence-

Three Convos Hiding Inside Every Hard One

Your graduates aren't struggling because they're not smart enough. Smart was never the whole test.

Here's a pattern nobody names out loud in the corner office: the leader who insists they've “got it handled” is usually one enrollment cycle away from finding out they didn't.

Why your best TEAMS keep producing average results — and the seven-force system underneath it.

K-12 or higher ed — same grave, same fight, and where we actually stand on it. Every August, someone in a lanyard stands in front of a room full of exhausted adults

Why the seven forces driving burnout in your cabinet move exactly the way a piano does — and why the room adjusts to the wrongness long before anyone names it.

Your best cabinet member is running on a parking brake nobody's ever named — and everyone, including them, is calling it dedication.

Think back to tenth grade for a second. The B+ in Chemistry. The C in Algebra II from the teacher who clearly had a grudge against fourth period. The A in gym you didn't earn through anything resembling cardiovascular achievement.

It's July 5th. You're reading this the morning after fireworks, probably with a cup of coffee you actually had time to finish for once.

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