The job of a thinking person is not to dismiss the numbers. It’s to dig beneath it.
The problem with outsourcing your judgment to external rankings… You let someone else decide what good looks like - and then you spend your life chasing their definition of it.
Whether in writing, education, healthcare, or dozens of other arenas in life, a consistent lesson keeps rearing its head…
Public rankings and public narratives routinely miss substance and quality that lives in places too small, too humble, or simply too unconcerned with visibility, to be captured by the machinery of public measurement.
Over the years, I have researched, visited, and experienced various organizations, universities, schools, hospitals, and more to support innovation projects, university initiatives, the education of young people, and aging community members. The same repetitive pattern and lesson always emerged.
Substance and quality lurked in places people had forgotten to look - the teacher no one talked about but whose life was the role model, the leader that lifted up and opened up untapped potential without a marketing budget, the culture of collegiality that had students rooting for each other instead of competing against each other.
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