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Explaining Away a Lack of Success

Posted on January 17th, 2012

It’s been a rough couple of years.  It looks like were not completely out of the woods yet either.  In the companies that we work with here at ROI, we see lots of people who are grateful to have jobs, but feel run down, exhausted and wondering if there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  Given this, it’s easy to let them off the hook by pointing to all the things that have prevented them from being successful or from meeting targets.  The article linked below from Manufactures Tech calls this “failing elegantly.”  It’s a great phrase.  It reminds me of Nixon’s “ withdrawal with dignity.”    It has been a couple of years that have kicked us hard.  But explaining away our inability to meet goals, even when some of it is true, just sets us up to miss again.  Allowing us to look around and point out all the reasons we didn’t make goals makes it easier to try a little less.  A more productive approach is to treat each poor period as  a “game tape” to be reviewed and see if we missed anything.  It takes a strong leader and a smooth facilitator to get people engaged in this kind of conversation, but it worth the effort to create a culture where0 workers go into each new situation eagle-eyed for hidden opportunties and not-yet-seen barriers.

 Link

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Gainful Employment Rules and Financial Aid

Posted on January 10th, 2012

The US Dept of Education has finalized their “gainful employment” rule for institutions providing training and education.  The rule is set to go  into effect July 1, 2012.  In brief, the rule is designed to prevent educational institutions from setting students up with enormous debt loads and little opportunity to pay them back.  The rule does this by monitoring the payback rate of students from individual institutions.  The idea is to prevent “diploma mills” from encouraging students to enter programs, pay for them with government sponsored financial aid, and then providing either inferior education or misleading information about employment opportunities post-graduation.  Institutions that fail the test limits will lose access to government sponsored financial aid. Given the reliance of some for-profit education institutions, it will be very interesting to watch the effect that it has on the business of secondary education.  There have been numerous, highly visible articles recently on student debt, so it’s unlikely to be come an unpopular bill.

A fuller explanation can be found in this Wall Street Journal article here.

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