Make a splash in the business world today. Sell yourself as a ‘turnaround expert’ — a God-like creature who can hire and fire and slash and consolidate and update and decentralize and perform all manner of black magic to take what is struggling and, well, turn it around.
At Hartford Business Journal, I recommended publishing my photo along with my column, which, as I predicted, doubled the number of women subscribers. I launched the sports section, commissioned a chess column, cut back on coverage of the Front Street renaissance in downtown Hartford, and offered bonuses to any reporter who could use the words “sex” and “actuary” in the same sentence.
The results? A wildly successful newspaper. I ‘m a turnaround expert.
Turnaround experts are less popular in the business world today than in years past. After all, that ‘Total Quality Management’ Japanese business magic that could transform almost anything can’t even seem to transform Japan any more.
No, in the turnaround game today, your best bet is public education. Pick yourself a basket-case district; find a few political friends who can help tweak the nightmarish union work rules; bludgeon the teachers into “teaching to the test;” and chances are, you can make enough of a mediocre improvement to prompt praise by exhausted school boards as a “turnaround expert.”
Frederick Hess, one of the nation’s most prolific writers and solid thinkers on education reform, wrote an amusing essay in 2009 on school turnarounds, from his perch at the American Enterprise Institute.
He noted that the educational turnaround craze today receives much the same kind of hype and over-enthusiasm as turnaround process received in years past in the private sector.
For education turnarounds, he urged aggressive, all-or-nothing enthusiasm and innovation, but he warned that good intentions and positive public relations aren’t enough to do the trick.
“Whether it is in schools or private firms, a successful turnaround requires transforming culture, expectations and routines,” he wrote. “That may not always be possible in organizations burdened by anachronistic contract provisions, rickety external support, and years of accrued administrative incompetence.”
While Hess warns against cautious incrementalism, the incremental approach is favored by many. You get the publicity, without all the pain of true transformation.
Ponder the 14-year-old exercise in incremental ‘progress’ that is the Hartford public schools, still operating under a court order to sort of, kind of, maybe, integrate its schools.
Despite years of street theater, the desegregation effort in Hartford has not really been about a “turnaround,” which would be very hard and involve being mean to teachers’ unions — which is prohibited in the Bible and the Connecticut Constitution.
No, the Sheff v. O’Neill litigation was, and is, about counting noses, of divvying up in some sort of fashion the dwindling percentage of white kids in the public schools to reach a magical minimum of ‘integrated’ city schools.
In theory, Hartford could turn around a city school full of black and Hispanic kids, produce enough Shakespeare scholars and electrical engineers to staff a small nation — and still be a dismal failure, by virtue of the Sheff judges looking over their shoulders.
The latest statistics found a bit more than a quarter of city school kids are educated in integrated, or ‘diverse’ setting — flat for the past year and, of course, far, far down from the eventual 35 percent objective.
All those involved will express disappointment, with promises to do better, to entice the white kids in, or bus the black kids out, or something, in an effort to reach the numbers that would represent … what, exactly? A turnaround? No, not really.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
