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Shared Lessons, Shared Success

By Leo I. Higdon Jr.

When I left Wall Street in 1993 for a new career in academia, I found many opportunities to adapt the skills and perspectives I had acquired in the business world to college administration. I expected that. Today, I see new chances for knowledge transfer between the corporate and educational sectors—and what I have learned is that now, many of the lessons are flowing in the opposite direction. These days, I'd say CEOs have as much to learn from college presidents as we do from CEOs.

In the corporate world, we are seeing the demise of the imperial CEO, brought down in part by communications technology that gives anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection the 21st century equivalent of a microphone, a soapbox, and an enormous audience. Increasingly strict disclosure requirements have made the corporate environment dramatically more open. In the Internet age, any shareholder—or for that matter, any reporter, blogger, interested employee, or ordinary citizen—can instantly obtain detailed information about a company and share it, and their opinions about it, with the world. . . .

Excerpted from the fall 2008 issue of The Presidency. To subscribe to the magazine, please call (301) 632-6757, or order online through ACE's bookstore.