Last month the President of Harvard University announced that the college will offer free attendance for students from families with annual incomes of  less than $100,000 and tuition-free for students from families with annual incomes of less than $200,000.

This is a significant step in the transformation of higher education in line with the ‘radical’ new model I suggested in my book ‘SLINGSHOT’ (first published in 2010). It will be interesting to see which university will be the first to embrace the full model I put forth:

Leading universities have amassed billions of dollars in endowment. Rather than trying to outcompete each other in endowment ratios and levels, why not tap the returns these funds generate as the basis of a new model. Use a portion of the endowment’s yearly investment income to do away with tuition fees altogether and offer free attendance to all students. In return, once students graduate, they would contribute a predetermined percentage of their annual earnings to the school for a set number of years, or until a specified threshold is reached.

For universities with suitable resources, the cost of this program would be relatively low, as they would only have to invest a portion of their yearly investment income from their endowment, and not principal. To illustrate, here is the rough calculation for Amherst College, with rounded figures for 2024: 5 % of its $3.5 billion endowment would yield $97,000 for each of its 1,800 students per year, more than sufficient to cover the full cost of attendance.

The returns would be tantalizing. Universities could select students purely on future potential from an expanded talent pool and receive far greater levels of alumni contributions than they do currently (they could even account for a portion of students not pursuing commercial careers with their degrees). For students, this model would eliminate the biggest burden of higher education altogether, that of being saddled with suffocating debt. It would also better prepare them for the postgraduation marketplace, as universities would be more motivated to offer pragmatic learning, and it would liberate them to take charge of their future with much greater flexibility. In short, there would be a close alignment of interests between students and universities.

#lifelonglearning #education #transformation #harvarduniversity #leadership #amherstcollege

Thank you, YPO Malaysia, for a fantastic event.

I very much enjoyed the day we spent together recently in Kuala Lumpur for my 'Re-Imagine Your Business Boundaries' Master Class.

The great atmosphere, venue, and of course your highly engaged and talented members made for a fun and memorable event of impactful learning.

#ypo #mindvalley #leadership #businesslearning #innovation

Until the mid-twentieth century, it was widely accepted that no one could run the distance of a mile in less than 4 minutes.  That the human body was simply not built to run that fast for that long.

Then in 1954, the English runner Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier.  What was even more remarkable is what followed: Roger held the speed record for only 46 days, and within 10 years 300 other runners also ran under 4 minutes.  

This is a great illustration of the artificial mental boundaries we all operate within.  Exposing these boundaries and systematically overstepping them is your superpower, one that the Slingshot Framework enables you to harness. 

#leadership #transformation #inspiration #innovation #businessgrowth  

A key principle of The Slingshot Framework is to harness the 'Innovation Shortcut' - combining traditionally separate resources or applying unconventional resources to create new value. And low and behold, animals are a great source of such innovation shortcuts.

One great example is from my visit to Santiago, Chile a few years ago. There, one of the business units of a B2B service company was providing pest control to municipal office buildings. Instead of using poison to quell the bothersome pigeon population, they hit on a much more simple, humane, and eco-friendly approach: They brough in a couple of falcons whose presence frightened away the pigeons. Where did the birds flee? To the top of the next office building. Naturally, the company then offered their services there, so that the process created a continuous loop of falcons chasing pigeons around the city and a brilliant, self-perpetuating business for themselves.

A more recent and equally ingenuous example is from the Czech Republic. Officials in the Brdy region had over a million dollars of funding for a new dam but were at an impasse due to the lack of needed building permits. To everyone's surprise, the dam was erected almost overnight by none other than a team of beavers.

From the National Geographic article: ""Beavers always know best,” Jaroslav Obermajer, head of the Central Bohemian office of the Czech Nature and Landscape Protection Agency, told Radio Prague International, which first reported the story. Their structures create habitat for scores of other species, such as aquatic insects, fish, and amphibians as well as larger creatures like herons, whooping cranes, moose, and bison. Beaver dams can also serve as natural firebreaks, carbon sinks, and they provide flooding control. Beavers are the original ecosystem engineers."

There you have it.  What animals can you recruit for your next innovation?

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/beaver-dam-czech-republic

#innovation #animals #leadership #resourcemanagement #creativity

What happens when your customers start to use your products in completely unexpected, unintended ways, taking creative control of their utility? You should just let them go crazy and observe. Afterall, their exploration of the absurd may just lead you to discover completely new market spaces worth pursuing.

One extreme example of such product use deviation is the story of Larry Walters, a truck driver who gained instant celebrity status in 1982, when one afternoon of heightened curiosity or boredom, he attached 45 weather balloons to his lawn chair, lifted off, and quickly ascended to a height of 16,000 ft (nearly 5,000 meters).  After drifting around in the sky for a while, he got cold, shot some of the balloons with a BB gun he was carrying, and started to descend. On his way down he got in the way of commercial aircraft landing at Los Angeles airport and crashed into some power lines. 

In this case, Larry was clearly not satisfied with the more banal and conventional use of a lawn chair, and took it upon himself to transform it into a cockpit.  And in the process, he pioneered an entirely new, possible direction and market opportunity for the lawn chair industry: recreational flying machines.  

#customerexperience #humor #designthinking #innovation #transformation