Chairman Hermes, Vice-Chair Cemo, and other distinguished members of the Board,

I appreciate the opportunity to share some of my thoughts with you today.  What I would like to focus on is good communication – that being continuing the open dialogue and shared understanding among faculty, administration, and students that has been the signature trademark of Dr. Gogue.  We all recall his tagline of hitting the ground listening when he first arrived at U of H.  By fostering communication, Dr. Gogue was able to coalesce a plan and vision of research excellence for our institution.  It seems that perspective is all the more critical as you face the task of finding a replacement for Dr. Gouge in order to continue the momentum of moving UH towards being a world class institution commensurate with the needs of the city of Houston and the state of Texas. 

But this isn’t just my own perspective. This past year, a new faculty climate survey was issued by the Faculty Senate and a detailed analysis and report will be forthcoming.  What I would like to do today is provide you with just one portion outlining the areas considered important among faculty when it comes to evaluating the overall performance of our administration which certainly includes our next chancellor.  These results are, of course, preliminary and the usual caveats remain until the formal report appears.

The punch line is that three performance dimensions continue to be just as important as it was 5 years earlier in the 2002 survey. 

They are:

• Improving the national/international academic stature of the University
• Execution of the position with honesty/integrity, and
• Fostering shared governance/dialogue with faculty

In essence, these are the criteria that faculty on average use most often when considering what constitutes overall performance.  One represents an objective, the other two critical success factors – areas that we must be good at in order to reach our objective.

Let me end by saying that as a professor in the Decision and Information Science dept in the Bauer College of Business, I typically introduce a very pragmatic perspective to my students when I lecture about planning for the future and setting goals.  Part of the equation I tell them is determining whether we have the requisite skills, abilities, and motivation to achieve what we set out to do.  But another part has to do with how best to utilize all the know-how embedded within the organization.  I then tell my students about a Fortune 500 firm I was helping a few years back in which they requested a detailed assessment of strategic alignment starting at the top with the CEO through the tactical middle level managers and down to the operational level workers.   The CEO and the VPs were quite confident that their perspective of what constituted the firm’s mission and critical success factors were institutionalized throughout the organization. They just wanted to understand why it wasn’t occurring as efficiently and effectively as they believe it ought to.  At the operational level, the line managers were equally quick to tell me what they understood as critical for the company to do well.  Needless to say, when I reported back to the CEO and the VPs, they were surprised at how misaligned their organization was.  A series of structural changes had to be implemented to ensure greater dialogue, communication, and decision making occurring at the right level and at the right time.  As a result, critical information obtained at the operational level was able to get up to the strategic level.  Likewise, a more integrated perspective from the top was finally able to connect together a number of departments to work more as single unit. 

In closing, I would submit to you that a critical success factor for our next Chancellor and President of the U of H system as well as interim chancellor would be to continue and improve on the level of communication that Dr. Gouge has been able to achieve these past few years.  As in the case of the Fortune 500 firm, improving internal communication can enhance the knowledge and skills already available in our University.