Navigating Change is a platform for understanding the complex and uncertain waters of change in higher education. Each week, Howard Teibel, Pete Wright, and guests dissect issues facing institutions and teams in transition and offer solutions for the most troubling process challenges
Somewhere this weekend, someone who runs a university finance office will spend their Saturday rebuilding a set of trail steps they'll never climb. No one's paying them; the hikers who use those steps in three years won't know their name. They do it anyway — and they'll tell you it's the clearest thinking they do all year. That instinct runs under this whole conversation. Robyn Pennington — Chief…
In 1997, Garry Kasparov lost a chess match to IBM’s Deep Blue. The easy story was that the machine had won and the human had lost. The age of human superiority in chess was over. Kasparov saw something different and asked a more useful question: What if the future of chess was not human versus machine, but human plus machine? He called it advanced chess, or centaur chess. And when skilled amateurs…
In a moment when higher education finds itself pressed on all sides—demographics, policy shifts, the financial realities of running institutions—this live conversation from the EACUBO Annual Meeting offers something increasingly rare: clarity grounded in humanity. Howard Teibel invites Bill Guerrero and Nico Washington to reflect not on strategy alone, but on the personal philosophies that have…
At first glance, the idea seems almost too ordinary to merit investigation: every workplace has a layer of tasks no one celebrates. Coordinating committees. Taking notes. Ordering refreshments. Keeping the machine running. These responsibilities rarely lead to promotions, and yet they quietly shape careers. Laurie Weingart, Carnegie Mellon professor and co-author of The No Club: Putting a Stop to…
There are moments in a career when a small interaction—almost forgettable at the time—reshapes how a person thinks about leadership. For Mitch Wein , one of those key moments came during a meeting about selecting an architect, where a simple vote turned into a lesson about transparency and the value of explaining the reasoning behind our choices. That experience became the backbone of how he…
Leadership inside a professional community rarely looks like leadership on an organizational chart. It’s quieter, more relational, shaped by volunteers who balance full workloads with the desire to support their peers. In this episode, recorded live at EACUBO 2025, Howard Teibel talks with Romayne Botti and Sara Thorndike about the transition from one chair to the next and what it reveals about…
In 1877, the first college "major" was coined at Johns Hopkins. The catalog for that year is a dense read, though short; courses toward the baccalaureate only required two years of study and then—presumably—a job. That catalog has hardened into something else today: a system that prizes credentials over curiosity, standardization over discovery, and completion over connection. In this episode, we…
For years, finance in higher education has worked quietly behind the scenes—essential, but rarely seen as a force for change. Budgets got balanced, reports got filed, and institutions moved forward... slowly. But what happens when that model starts to crack? When rising costs outpace tuition revenue, and the math that once worked no longer adds up? It’s a moment of reckoning—and an opportunity. In…
The opening speaker at the 2025 NBOA Annual Meeting will be Kyle Scheele, who is known for cooking up wild ideas that many people back for laughs and for learning. NBOA President and CEO Jeff Shields discusses with Scheele the process behind some of his outlandish projects and about being creative in the workplace. “I don’t want people to be like me,” said Scheele. “I want them to tap into their…
This week, Pete Wright and Howard Teibel dive deep into the topic of weak communication practices and their consequences in organizations. Howard, drawing from his extensive experience working with teams and leaders, shares insights on how miscommunication often stems from focusing on passing information rather than producing action and exploring assessments. The duo discusses five key…
