On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 2:03 AM, George Herbert
<george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One phrase I see used quite often is "sometimes
we need to break a few eggs." For those who are not native american english
speakers, this is referring to the need to move beyond shifting things around into
breaking things apart, letting people go who may not fit in the new plan, stopping things
outright, etc. The eggs - people, projects, structures, policies, assumptions - need to
partly go away - be broken - in order to reform.
Lila's vision here clearly calls the change campaign out as having explicitly
intended to break eggs.
It further suggests strongly that this was the Board of Trustees' intention in hiring
her, and that they agreed with breaking those eggs.
I left the board during the search process, but remained on the search
committee. So while I cannot know what the board was thinking after
her tenure began, I can say that the search committee was not looking
for a "turnaround CEO"--at least to my understanding we were looking
for someone who would be able to execute better on some of the areas
(particularly engineering) where we wanted to make more improvements
but hadn't.
(Which would naturally involve some change--but sweeping reforms were
not envisioned; part of why Sue stepped down when she did was that she
felt the organization was basically stable and could be smoothly
handed off. It is certainly possible for someone to come in and decide
that was a wrong assessment, but it wasn't what the committee had been
looking for.)
-Kat