Big Questions for Appleby

Last week I attended the Canadian Accredited Independent Schools (CAIS) annual conference of Heads and Board Chairs, held in conjunction with the business officers’ conference. I usually count on at least one “dud” session per day for conferences I attend, but this one was very good and   “dud-free”.

Perhaps the best part of it was the opportunity to spend time and compare notes with principals from schools across the country, as well as a couple of international ones. I was surprised about how many (at least 20) of them I knew from past lives, and how collegial heads are, even with competitors. I was touched that, in the months leading up to my start at Appleby and over summer, I was treated to lunch or dinners with seven current or former principals and I was shocked to receive flowers and gift baskets from another half dozen in my first month. I count many of these people as good friends and some as extraordinary mentors and role models.

Education has an uncommon range of complex relationships between both people and institutions that are at the same time both competitors and partners. For example, Appleby has that kind of relationship with many outstanding feeder schools with whom we also compete for Grade 7 and 8 students. It takes a great deal of nuance to make these work, but effective relations are more the rule than the exception.

The conference had a great range of presenters including: a panel of senior Canadian leaders from the finance sector moderated by Steve Paikin; Roger Martin, Dean of U of T’s Rotman School of Business (who announced the previous day that he will stepping down); Kendra O’Donnell,  retired Head of Phillips Exeter; Susan Wright a popular governance and strategy consultant in the Canadian independent school sector, and Fred Dust, a partner of IDEO ( a superb design firm focused on organization change, optimization and human dynamics – in my previous post about Tony Wagner and Innovation, he uses IDEO as a model for creativity in action.)

There were lots of takeaways, but Roger Martin was the most provocative in his presentation on strategy, and how educational institutions are often not sufficiently laser-focused on it. While he uses an eight-stage approach to strategy definition, he believes that the key revolves around only two questions:

·         Where should we play? For schools, this relates to student market (geography, student profile), program niches, and school culture niches.

·         How will we win? He was emphatic that saying “we will do what others do, only better” is not strategy and very rarely works. It is far more about differentiation. Clarity in strategy is often found by defining what an organization is not … what we do not do relative to our competition.

Roger also feels that management teams, boards and other stakeholders should all be clear and in agreement about what the succinct answers to these questions are. At Appleby, we have very strong programs that have changed remarkably in the last couple of decades. Moving forward, we also have a large range of priorities in our Strategic Refresh. Having said that, I would like to know what employees, students, parents and alumni think the answer to these questions are today. And more importantly, how do you think those answers should change as we look out five years?