You know the old saying, “Slow and steady wins the race.”

For the most part, this is true. And in most endeavors, this is good advice.

Most endeavors…

But not campus operations.

Why? Because in the case of campus operations slow and steady hurts students. Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math with mythical Campus Z.

Campus Z has an enrollment of 1,000 students.

Campus Z currently produces a 90% student success rate. Pick your metric… graduation, test scores, college enrollment, etc.

Which means that 10% of Campus Z’s students are not successful, which is 100 students.

Campus Z knows if they implement “Improvement Strategy 1” at full capacity, they can increase their success rate to 95%. Meaning the number of NOT successful students could be reduced to 50.

But Campus Z adopts a slow and steady approach, which means that they are now knowingly keeping their failure rate higher than it could be.

Add to this, the opportunity cost of not being able to implement “Advanced Improvement Strategy 2,” because they are still stuck in the slow and steady Improvement Strategy 1 learning curve.

So, let the lesser schools stick to “Slow and Steady.” Instead embrace “Fast and Steady.” Increase your tempo while maintaining your focus.  Get to the next plateau quicker, which increases your student success rate. But this also allows you to engage in the next thing before anyone else even understands the old thing.  This increases your relative campus success level and lets you unleash the offense instead of always playing defense.

“Slow and Steady” may win the race. “Fast and Steady” rewrites the rules of the game and increases the competitive advantage of your staff and students.

Think. Work. Achieve.

Your turn…

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