I am seeking your ideas on how to improve NACAS and therefore how to improve auxiliary services. You might ask why the association is seeking transformational ideas during our current economic crisis. I recently talked to the Executive Committee about that. What I said was "Never Waste A Crisis."
Despite all the different issues that top leaders are facing, there is a commonality to great leaders in times like these. It can be summed up in the phrase ‘Never waste a crisis.’” - Dr. Saj-nicole Joni, Forbes Magazine, December, 2008
The present “perfect storm” of increased demands for student instruction partnered with lower federal, state, local and student tuition funding is indeed a crisis not faced by most of our colleagues for twenty or thirty years, if at all in our lifetime. You are in a position to respond to a once-in-a-lifetime set of circumstances. In the midst of dealing with often tremendous hurt as the college and personal lives change with reductions in programs, financial commitments, or even personal retirement plans, some of which won’t be visible, you must keep acting, with compassion. You and your team can mitigate their hardships with opportunity, inspiration and the call to hard work. You do that every day.
Now you must inspire and insist that others join you. As a member of the management team you have and now must keep those teams together and working well. Great teams will need all their shared trust and commitment to work through the inevitable battles that break out when making tough choices. Handled right, these struggles will be about creating breakthrough futures, not about protecting turf or power.
Sometimes you will lead from behind, without ego, by facilitating the best decisions. You are used to looking for a return on investment. You are used to looking at the central mission first, and making hard decisions about what must be deemed secondary to that mission. You understand that if the language of budgets, value and constraints is foreign to some, now is the time to examine your challenges using that device. Your President, peers and college need your management and financial skills now more than ever.
Beyond this crisis is a new landscape, one that will define your institution and perhaps the role of your universities nationally as we set the basis for opportunity and prosperity for our students, institutions and country for decades to come. Find the opportunities that reach beyond survival, guide your organizations to get there and extend a helping hand to as many as you can along the way. Many have noted that the costs of this crisis are high. In fact, they are way too high to go to waste.
Now is the time for NACAS leaders to work to improve both our association and our auxiliary services profession. For us ONLY to improve NACAS without improving our industry is a meaningless activity which doesn't benefit our colleges and universities. We MUST do both.
So I am seeking your ideas, as NACAS leaders on how to improve. You will find ideas in our library on the work that Charlie Figari as 2008 President of NACAS led, as well as the work that the NACAS Education Foundation and President Frank Mumford initiated and funded. This was an important start.
But while the present crisis creates special problems for NACAS and all of higher education, it MUST not stop us from working to continue to seek new ways to better serve our institutions. We do important work in a critical area of higher education. Your participation in NACAS and networking with NACAS members is more important now than ever before. The value of your membership for yourself and others must be greater by far than the cost to your institution. We need to insure that you cannot afford not to be active in NACAS -- The Connections that Count. Your transformational ideas will insure that we do not waste this crisis.
Bob Hassmiller
CEO