Nuno Fernandes
It’s just fascinating that every great organization that I’ve seen is as great people. And the opposite is also true. And so for us, creating this culture, it all starts with people. And it all starts with surrounding yourself with people that are really smart, but that are good people. that share your values, that you enjoy being around with. You’re going to spend a lot of time with them. They’re going to spend a lot of time with you. So when you create a team, you have to create a team of people that sort of share some values and that have some things in common so that you can understand each other. And also, you have to create a culture where you promote kindness. And I don’t mean this in a light way. And I know this sounds kind of strange in a corporate environment or in a business environment, but it’s incredibly important. Because One of the things I’ve noticed in my career is that when you give the opportunity for people to express themselves, to be innovative, to come up with new ideas, good things will happen. And it does not mean that at all times all the ideas will be great. Some will not be great. Some ideas will not be great. But some will. But if you have an environment where people are afraid or people are just doing their nine-to-five job and then They’re not really interested in the company, seeing the company or the enterprise or the university flourishing. You know, they’re not going to give their best. They’re just going to do the job. So to create an environment where people feel comfortable to speak their mind and to promote new ideas and to promote new concepts is incredibly, incredibly important.
Joe Gottlieb
That’s Nuno Fernandez, president of American Public University System, reminding leaders of the importance of assembling smart people in a culture of kindness. We talked about the need for true technology disruption in higher ed, how the constraints of a capped revenue model forces creative behaviors, and the organizational discipline needed to pursue lofty goals while avoiding burnout. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
Welcome to TRANSFORMED, a Higher Digital podcast focused on the new whys, the new whats, and the new hows in higher ed. In each episode, you will experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed while identifying and discussing the best practices needed to accomplish that resurgence. Culture, strategy, and tactics, planning and execution, people, process, and technology. It’s all on the menu because that’s what’s required to truly transform. Hello, and thanks for joining us for another episode of TRANSFORMED. My name is Joe Gottlieb, president and CTO of Higher Digital. And today I am joined by Nuno Fernandez, president of American Public University System. Nuno, welcome to TRANSFORMED.
Nuno Fernandes
Thank you, Joe. It’s a pleasure to be here. And what do you want to talk about today?
Joe Gottlieb
Well, I’m glad you asked, Nuno. I want to talk about your thoughts on thrifty innovation among friends at scale. But first, yeah, it sounds like a good one, huh? First, I’d love for you to share a little bit of background on your personal journey and how you got connected into the world of higher ed.
Nuno Fernandes
Absolutely, Joe. So my journey is not the common one among presidents of universities and colleges in the United States. I was born in Europe in a small country, in Portugal. And I was born into a very humble family and my grandparents actually didn’t know how to read or write. So my parents were first generation and my mother became a teacher actually, and my father became a lawyer. And I could see and I could witness how much that access to higher education transformed their lives and consequently my life as well, right? I always mention the butterfly effect, which are all these things that happen that you don’t really know why and where they started. But I can tell you that my butterfly effect started when my parents decided to attend college. And that was even before I was born, right? Because that moment transformed their lives and then transformed my life as well. So I started working in Europe, not in higher education. I worked in consumer goods. I worked for a very large German company for 11 years. And I spent the first part of my career in Europe. Then I was traveling around the world. I spent time in Latin America. And in the year 2012, I was hired by a tech company that was based out of Miami. And that’s how I started in higher education. At the time, it was very strange because I never really thought about higher education as something sort of service or product that you could communicate and market. It never sort of crossed my mind. But then I really connected with the fact that I thought about what education did to my family and I thought, how cool would it be if I can impact other families in a similar fashion? So I started a CMO in in that company. And that company was particularly interesting because we were bringing online higher education to many parts of the world where we were literally the first ones. And I could see how that was transforming the lives of so many thousands of people. So I’ve developed a passion that I didn’t know that I had about higher education. And eventually I became CEO of that company. And then in 2022, I had the good fortune of being invited to becoming the president of APUS and here I am.
Joe Gottlieb
That’s a great story. And like others I’ve heard, it reflects that awakening of passion you didn’t know you had for higher ed. And I find that that is, it’s actually quite normal because higher ed is a special place. And it’s cool to hear how you got connected to it and what it draws from in you.
Nuno Fernandes
Let’s follow up on that because I think it’s interesting. You know, I always, one time I was asked, What is the worst advice that you could give to someone in their career? And I think the worst advice is sort of follow your passion because you don’t really know what that is when you finish college. And what do you think your passion might be when you’re 20 or when you’re 22? It’s probably very different than what it is when you’re 40 or 50. And it’s also possible that you have many passions through your lifetime, right? Now, also, You know, the fact that you have a passion does not mean that you’re going to be good working with that. You know, you might, you know, you might like cars a lot, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be good for building cars or marketing cars or something like that. So I think that passion is something that you find and, you know, it finds you or you find it either way. And I was lucky to find my passion, you know, in my early 40s, which was when I started working with higher education.
Joe Gottlieb
Yeah, makes a lot of sense that something that develops and your ability to really connect with it is still forming when you’re younger and also connecting to abilities and commitment and things like that become important. So you’ve had a chance to see higher ed at a pretty interesting time, especially if you look back at the last decade and the rate of change that has steadily increased. at least from my view. So, you know, it’s getting harder to set the stage for these conversations. But despite that, I’d love to hear your perspective on the major trends that you keep top of mind as you make strategic decisions and leverage your leadership and management methods at APUS.
Nuno Fernandes
Yeah, I mean, I’m probably one of the few that believes that there’s not enough change going on. And what I mean by that is higher education is one of the few industries if you want to use that word that has not been disrupted by technology in fact one could argue that the model we have today is very similar to the model that existed a thousand years ago when the first university was created is debatable but let’s say the first university in italy in bologna the concept was that you have a professor and then the students are listening and then the students you know they make some sort of exam and then they progress Eventually, they graduate. That concept is still valid 1,000 years after that. Certainly, with online education, now you can do that through a computer, but the principle is still the same. You have a faculty, and then you have students, and the students memorize things, and they do the exam, and then they progress, and then they graduate. It’s one of the few industries that has not been disrupted by technology. Now, For the first time, I think that there’s a strong opportunity for the system to be disrupted and to be transformed into something better. And what I mean by that is one of the bigger problems, I believe, in higher education, particularly in the United States, but other parts of the world as well, is that the cost of higher education became so expensive that… the younger generations are starting to doubt if there’s really value in going to attend college or university. And it’s actually not true because if you look at all the data, the value is there. It’s proven that if you attend higher education, the revenue you’re going to generate through your lifetime is something like double or sometimes more the revenue that you can generate without a higher education degree. And it has also other aspects that I don’t know how connected they are, but for example, the longevity of people attending higher education seems to be longer than people not attending higher education. They seem to have more stable families and things like that. So there seems to be, just looking at data, there seems to be some strong benefits of attending higher education. However, The price has increased so much, I believe something like 300% over the last 20 years, that rightfully so, some people are starting to doubt if that’s what they want to do. And I completely understand it, by the way, because what you probably don’t want to do is get out of college when you are 22 or 23 and you have a debt of sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars that you’re going to carry for decades. And at the same time, you’re trying to Get married, raise a family, buy your house, get your first job. So you don’t even have your first job and you already have this tremendous debt to carry for a decade. So it doesn’t seem to be a good model. And I believe that with technology, now that model can be disrupted and you can probably create models that offer more quality, more service, more engagement at a much lower cost. One example, that I can give you, Joe, that is outside the industry, but I think it’s relevant and sort of illustrates very well what I’m trying to say is that you might remember like 15 years ago, you would go to Blockbuster, right? And then you would get one DVD and one night would be like $10 or $15. And then you get the popcorn, right? And then you had 24 hours to return the DVD. Otherwise, you’d pay late fees. So that was interesting and it was very successful at some point. But then something else came along and now you pay $15 per month to Netflix or whatever the rate is, but around 50 bucks. And you can watch unlimited movies and unlimited series without leaving your house. So it’s very hard to argue that Netflix is not the better model for the consumer, right? Because you have access for the same price that you could get one DVD. Now you can have endless movie series from the comfort of your home. And at the same time, the model is a lot better from a financial perspective for Netflix because you don’t have to deal with all the real estate and all the people that you have to hire locally and all of that. So it’s a win-win model where everybody wins. And what happened was that the savings that they generated versus the traditional blockbuster model, they transferred those savings to their customers, to their clients, and they kept some of those savings for themselves. so that they are a sustainable enterprise, but the customer is paying now 15 years later the same that they would pay for one DVD and now they can have endless movies. So it’s a good example of something that was disrupted by technology. And I believe that now for the first time, there are tools that are available that will allow education to really transform itself.
Joe Gottlieb
I think that’s a great way to set the stage. And you’re right, there’s this… The value is still there. The irony is the value is still there, despite it not feeling right, that the cost has risen so high without disruptive improvement. I want to crawl into our topic now. We’ve chosen to thematically summarize this conversation as thrifty innovation among friends at scale. And so that our listeners have an idea of where we’re headed, I will say this. Innovation is a must these days. And since APUS is big, you have to figure out how to innovate at scale. That’s a given. Right. And we’ll explain what we mean by among friends when we get into the organizational side of this. But to start out, let’s start talking about why thrift is so important.
Nuno Fernandes
Absolutely. So in our particular case, APUS is one of the largest universities in the United States. We’re actually number 12. And if you look at only online universities, I think we’re the seventh or eighth largest university in the country. But what is unique about APUS is that It is serving active duty students and veterans, predominantly active duty students. Although we have, and we’re growing in other areas, but our core cluster of students are active duty students. And these students, they are supported by the government with tuition assistance, right? And they have a price per credit of $250 that the government offers them as a benefit of being active duty. And then they use that to study. And that price per credit, that tuition assistance value has not changed in something like 20 years, right? So it forced us to be able to offer a great education, a great product, great services, but working with the constraints of knowing that our revenue per student is capped for the most part, right? It’s not going to go up. It’s not that we have the capacity to say like other universities have, you know, let’s increase the prices five or 10%. Because especially with the active duty students, they are limited with these tuition assistance, right? So that focus on the active duty students really made APUS something special. And we are the number one educator of that segment in the country. And we’re incredibly proud of that. But it’s also… a way that, you know, it’s sort of a way to force us to think in creative ways, knowing that, okay, I cannot increase my revenue, so how do I become more efficient? How do I do more for less? And I think this concept of doing more for less, it’s incredibly important, and it’s almost like philosophical. And there’s a sentence from an architect, an American architect, he said, technology is the capacity to do more for less until you can do everything with nothing or something like that. And it’s not that far away from the truth, right? Because not far away from where we’re going, certainly as a society. And that forces us to be innovative. So one example I can give you is we have inside the POS, we’re very committed to wellness, to healthy, promoting health, healthy lifestyle within our students, within our community. We promote fitness initiatives, nutrition conferences, things like that. It’s something that is part of our culture. And consequently, we’re very focused on mental health. But how do we offer mental health to 90,000 students? How do you do that in an online environment? So we found this company in London, in the UK, And they offered this tool to many universities in Europe and in Australia. And we said, what the tool does is a peer-to-peer tool. It’s an app where you have several people connected around the world and they support each other. And then you also have people trained on the app that support the students. And we found a way to do a deal with this company where we now offer mental health support 24-7 in 25 languages to all students, staff, faculty, and alumni forever. Wow. But think about if we were using the traditional route, how many people would we need to hire to do this, to offer 24-7 mental health support to all students, all alumni, all faculty, all staff? We’re talking about, I don’t know, 200,000 people. It would be literally impossible. So it’s a great example of how you can do more for less. It doesn’t mean that the service… is inferior, it means that the service is actually superior. Just like in the Netflix example I was providing, you can offer a superior service that is available 24-7 in 25 languages, but we can do it with technology and we are able to fit that into our sort of economic structure.
Joe Gottlieb
Great way to talk about how thrift comes into play when you have to wrestle with scale. We’ll be right back.
Emily Rudin
Hi, I’m Emily Rudin, Chief Client Officer at Higher Digital and proud sponsor of the TRANSFORMED podcast. Higher Digital is a full-service, product-agnostic consulting company providing strategic, functional, and technical expertise to help colleges and universities navigate digital transformation successfully. We believe true transformation isn’t about forcing change. It’s about unlocking the potential already within your institution. Our expert teams specialize in creating tailored solutions for your unique challenges, enabling meaningful and measurable progress. Higher education is evolving faster than ever. How is your institution adapting? Let’s start the conversation today. Visit higher.digital to learn more.
Joe Gottlieb
And now, back to our program. You’ve noted that APUS must operate efficiently due to the cap tuition rate, so good that we established that, and therefore must rely on scale and technology to address what we know are ever-rising costs. We know costs are going up. But before we talk about how your organizational culture helps you sustain ongoing transformation, can you talk a little bit about the methods that you employ to manage strategic change? Let’s set the framework for how you manage change at APUS.
Nuno Fernandes
Yes. So if you ask me, and maybe we talk about this later, but if you ask me, what are the most important responsibilities of a president? I would say there’s two, which is to develop the culture and to develop the brands or the brand. And by developing the brand, I don’t mean marketing-wise. I mean to create prestige, to create good reputation, to create… academic rigor, to create quality, things that really strengthen the brand. But number one is to create the culture. I think that’s the primary responsibility of a university president or the CEO or president of any enterprise for that matter. And to create culture, you need people. That’s your number one. I mean, it’s impossible to do that without a great group of people. If you want to create a great culture. I’ve seen many… enterprises, corporations, universities. And it’s just fascinating that every great organization that I’ve seen is as great people. And the opposite is also true. And so for us, creating this culture, it all starts with people. And it all starts with surrounding yourself with people that are really smart, that are ambitious, but that are good people. that share your values, that you enjoy being around with. And you’re going to spend a lot of time with them. They’re going to spend a lot of time with you. So when you create a team, you have to create a team of people that sort of share some values and that have some things in common so that you can understand each other. And also, you have to create a culture where you… promote kindness. And I don’t mean this in a light way. And I know this sounds kind of strange in a corporate environment or in a business environment, but it’s incredibly important. Because one of the things I’ve noticed in my career is that when you give the opportunity for people to express themselves, to be innovative, to come up with new ideas, good things will happen. And it does not mean that At all times, all the ideas will be great. Some will not be great. Some ideas will not be great. But some will. But if you have an environment where people are afraid or people are just doing their nine-to-five job and then they’re not really interested in seeing the company or the enterprise or the university flourishing, they’re not going to give their best. They’re just going to do the job. So to create an environment where people feel comfortable to speak their mind and to… to promote new ideas and to promote new concepts is incredibly, incredibly important. So that’s number one, is just be careful about the people you surround yourself with. And this is not only valid for the office of the president. This is valid for anyone in the organization. Just be very careful about the people you surround yourself with, which, by the way, this would be a recommendation I would also give on a personal note. Be careful with the people you surround yourself with. But also when you have that, then you need to build a vision that everyone understands and shares, right? And I believe in building big visions, you know, and by big visions, I don’t mean like that they’re not realistic or that they are, you know, silly, but like big things that we say, you know, we want to get this percentage of market share or we want to get, you know, we want to serve, students in X amount of states, or we want to expand our reach to civilian students by X thousand, or we want to launch, you know, 15 programs in the next two years, you know, things that are big that people can say, okay, well, I understand that. And I can relate to that. And I want to be a part of that. I, I think that any organization, any organization benefits from, from growth and from positivity, you know, when you are in a, you know, in a, in a growing environment, in a positive environment, Everything is easier, right? You have more resources. People feel better about themselves. And certainly it doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. You always have ups and downs and you’re going to have bumps and you have things that you can’t control, regulatory issues, whatever it might be. But if you have a growth mindset, I think it’s much, much easier. So all these to say that you have to create a culture that promotes this sort of critical thinking, this dialogue, this engagement, but particularly a culture of trust where people trust each other where people can speak their mind and where people enjoy being around each other. So it’s a long way of answering that question, but this would be my summary.
Joe Gottlieb
Well, I’m actually going to ask you a little bit of a follow-up question related to that. And you mentioned vision, right? Being able to create a vision. You mentioned vision. Big goals, being able to get people excited about tackling big goals. You also talked about having an atmosphere where people feel encouraged to try things, to experiment. Yes. Now, in practice, what a leader must do, and make sure I’m not putting words in your mouth, but I’m testing for whether this fits for you and APUS and the way you go about it. You want to encourage those ideas, But you also want to help the organization collectively, not just individually as one leader doing it all, filter those ideas for fit with the vision, for fit with your strategy, for fit with your finite choices about what APUS is and is trying to be. And so my question is, some of that can be done by feel, some of it benefits from writing a few things down so that there’s not ambiguity about the scope. And so you aren’t spending unnecessary energy with ideas that are too far flung from the core. And then if the team is relatively stable, there’s rhythm that happens there, right? Everyone feels not only the encouragement to have new ideas, but they feel the musculature of the organization filtering those ideas, and that’s exhilarating and not demeaning or alienating, right? I think you get the point, right? How do you do that?
Nuno Fernandes
You touched a couple of points there. So the first one is that I would say that you don’t, and this is not my sentence, I don’t remember who said it, Steve Jobs or something, he said something like, you don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do, right? You want smart people to tell you what they want to do. So consequently, you always have to find people in whatever position they have that they are much better than you doing that. So our provost is much better managing the academic team than I will ever be. Our HR leader is much better managing HR than I will ever be, and so on and so forth, right? So the point that I’m making is that the leader, in this case, sort of the president of a university, you have to set like the big vision and you have to work on the culture. That’s why I said culture and brand, culture and brand. You have to work on that and you have to set the tone for everyone else to flourish. But that does not mean that it’s a chaotic or disorganized process. It’s actually the opposite. So what we do at APUS, if you want to get into the details, but I hope that I don’t bother the audience, what we do at APUS is that Every year we have a strategic planning season. And usually that starts around July and goes all the way to October. And during that strategic planning season, what we do is I work with my direct team and say, okay, this is our vision for the next three to five years. This is what we want to achieve. Now I want you to tell me how we’re going to contribute to supporting that vision, right? And each area, you know, HR and marketing and, you know, admissions and academics and quality and, content production, whatever it might be, they all go back and they work on what they will do to support that vision. Then we get together again, and then we all agree that this is what we want to do. And then they will work with their teams to do the same. So what this allows is that all the organization, all the senior organization, all the managers of the organization are aligned under one single vision, and everyone knows how they can and how they should be supporting that vision. So it’s a very, very organized process that we measure with a lot of detail. Now, what I meant by the ideas is that if I want to talk about, again, to use the HR example, right? If I want to talk about HR, I’m expecting that my HR leader tells me the things that we should be doing. And certainly I will have opinions, but it’s not for me to tell her that this is what we should do because she’s the expert in HR and I’m not. So what I mean… by this trust and this openness is that you have to give the opportunity for people to flourish and for people to show their talent and for people to learn and for people to be able to execute on things that they are experts on. Because otherwise, it’s not fun. It’s not fun. So that’s what I mean by that. And it’s actually a very structured and organized approach. process, but everyone has the capacity to contribute to it. And another thing is the capacity to be able to speak openly, right? So we have a culture inside APUS where we like to use your example of friendship, right? We like to tell you, we like to tell each other when things are good, but we specifically like to tell each other when we disagree. Respectfully, But it’s very important to say, well, I think that’s a bad idea, and let me tell you why. And then you have an argument about it, and then you come to a decision. But the worst thing that could happen to an organization is that people follow ideas just because someone from a higher level said that that was the thing that they wanted to do without giving them the opportunity to say what they think.
Joe Gottlieb
That sounds like an established, almost comfort zone around what is normally a trouble trigger situation for most organizations. And maybe just to confirm here that your culture embraces the importance of disagreement and discussion. And it sounds to me like you have either a safe word or just an established mode of operations that makes it okay, right? It preempts the usual reflex. If someone’s new to the organization, they encounter a disagreement, they wouldn’t know necessarily unless you told them or they saw it, right? That you guys have a different way.
Nuno Fernandes
They would know because we have 12, we developed a system of 12 values in the DPOS, right? And it was designed originally to be one value per month that you celebrate and that you promote and you talk about it And for example, one value that we have is it states very clearly says it is okay to make mistakes for as long as you don’t do the same mistake twice. But because if you’re not making mistakes, then you’re probably not doing much. Because if you’re going to create, if you’re going to innovate, you’re going to do some mistakes along the way, and that’s perfectly fine. Just learn from that and move on. And we have 12 of these that are all around our culture. So every new person that joins the organization, they are immediately exposed to those. So it does not mean that immediately you say, oh, you know, I understand what that is because, you know, a lot of organizations, they also say one thing and they do another. So I assume that for new staff, new faculty, certainly, you know, you see these things and say, how much of this is actually true? How much of this can I actually do? And to be honest, Joe, I don’t know how to write yet, right? the extent of implementation that we have of these values. I know it’s not 100%, but I know it’s not zero. If you ask me, I would say we’re probably a 60 to 70%, right? That everyone sort of understands what our values are. And we celebrate that every month. And now we started celebrating that every quarter where by voting, people nominate their colleagues that represent these values for that specific quarter. And we post that on social media and we send them awards. and things like that so that everyone sort of learns what this means. But more than having a nice thing on a wall, it’s like, what do you really do in real life about this? And I think we really try to live up to these values, but it’s always a struggle, right? You have to keep promoting and to keep motivating your team to do so. But I feel that we are in a very good place and really moving in the right direction.
Joe Gottlieb
So we’ve talked about a lot of the aspects of your culture there at APUS. I’ll now ask you to zoom out and think about change. How would you characterize the identity of APUS and how that identity is transforming?
Nuno Fernandes
Yeah, so APUS is a very interesting organization in many ways. And I think it’s our DNA, certainly the core DNA is that we are a military organization. driven institution because we are the number one educator of military servicemen and servicewomen. Having said that, we’ve started expanding with veterans and we are also the number one educator of veterans in the United States. If you measure that by GI bill consumption, right? So if people that use their GI bill to pay for education, we are the number one in the country as well. Then, Recently, we started expanding, and this is interesting, to offering the same discounted tuition that we offer to active duty students and to veterans. We offer that to their extended families. And this is something very unique of APUS. And what that means is that if you are an active duty person, you don’t have to be enrolled with APUS. In fact, you don’t have to be enrolled in any university, but your direct family, your children, your spouse, your parents, your family, your brother, your sister, they have access to the same rate that you would have at APUS. So we’re giving an incredible opportunity for civilian people to have access to a preferred military and veteran rate if they are in a military or veteran family. So we started expanding into this sort of like military families and veteran families universe. And most recently, we also started expanding with non-military students, you know, quote unquote civilians, right? And what I think that is interesting about the POS, and this is truly an opportunity and very unique in the country, is that if we take our military DNA, you sort of have all those values about discipline, resilience, patriotism, defending and serving the country, honor, respect, like all the values around the military. And I do think that those values are so appealing for so many people today. that are non-military people, but people that identify themselves. I’m a patriot. I believe in discipline. I believe in respect. I believe in honor. And therefore, it’s a university that is very attractive because you get an accredited education for a very affordable tuition. I would think the quality of our services is top-notch. But you also have the opportunity to mingle with this audience that represents that ideology. And I think that’s very interesting for a part of the populations in the United States. So I would say that we, if you asked me to zoom out, I would think the summary would be, Joe, that we always want to keep our DNA of serving those who serve. And that’s how we started. And hopefully we will always be the number one educator of that population. But we also want to expand our audience because we know that we have a great education, great programs, great faculty, great services. It’s very affordable and that other people could benefit from that. And going back to my point, my original point of, you know, transforming lives and transforming families and impacting societies, that’s exactly what we are doing. So I would say that from a high level perspective, that’s sort of what, you know, what APUS is all about.
Joe Gottlieb
You mentioned the word ideology. As you were describing all those values that you obtain from the military service orientation, I couldn’t help but thinking about faith-based organizations that have a similar but different foundation. And it’s very interesting, particularly in days such as these, to see either rediscovered reaffirm or just extend the experience of a values core that has a source that can translate and and you’re quite right that people need this right like you also alluded to the friendships inside your organization it’s healthy to have those kinds of friendships personally right so that’s the segue i want to We alluded to it a little bit, but I want to double click on this notion. You’ve got a specific style of leadership. Absolutely. And it works for you. So talk to me about how your leadership style and the role that friendship plays within it, like now really related to you and, you know, day in the life of Nuno.
Nuno Fernandes
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s important to sort of frame what friendship means in this context, right? Because if you think about leadership, A friend, not an acquaintance, like a real friend, you know, one of those that you can count with your fingers. What do you expect from that friend? You know, you expect that he or she is brutally honest with you, right? You expect that he or she is there when you need him or her. You expect that he or she is going to be by your side when you have a bad moment, right? And all these things you can apply to a work environment, not necessarily in the exact same way, but the point is that you want to work with a team of people, like I mentioned before, that can be brutally honest with you, with respect, but they will always tell you what they think about what is happening. And they will always do that with the best intention possible. Not to play politics, not to try to play any game, but just because they care so deeply about the university, about the students and about the team. So you want to have that sort of mindset where people say, okay, I’m gonna be brutally honest with you, but I also have your back. And if you make a mistake, don’t worry, I’m gonna protect you. And I’m gonna help you. And in that context, I think that applying that sort of philosophical idea of friendship to the workplace, I think it’s very valuable. Now, what else do friends do? They like to have fun. They have good times together. They have experiences together. And we try to create an environment, again, adapted to the university world, the office world, to create an environment where people have fun. And we celebrate each other. Like I told you, we celebrate every month. We celebrate the people that better represent the values. But for example, just last week, and I mean, it was last week when we’re recording these, not necessarily last week when this is aired, but just recently we had our commencement in Washington, D.C. And one of the things that we’ve done, we have this event called Be Great, where we recognize the staff and faculty. So we celebrate them. We have something like 42 awards where, you know, faculty of the year and a course with bigger student satisfaction and things like that, where we, We generally celebrate and it’s a gala event. Everyone is dressed up. I’m wearing a tuxedo. A lot of people are. And it’s a way to celebrate the ones that are really making this vision a reality. So this concept of having fun, but also the concept of kindness. And I think I alluded to that before. It’s just being a good person. Just try to be a good person. Try to help each other. try to be honest, try to be transparent, and everything is much easier in that context. And also, as I said before, something that we are promoting significantly inside APUS is that friends also care about each other and they want you to be well, like they want you to prosper, they want you to be healthy, they want you to be in a good spot. So we are promoting this concept of wellness, mental health, physical activity, nutrition, fitness inside the organization, not only for our staff and faculty, but trying to promote that also with students. Although I have to say that in our case, a lot of our students, they’re incredibly active because they are in the military. So by design, they are. But it’s so important to, if you can help someone just by, oh, I didn’t know that if I eat these, it’s going to be better for me. Or I didn’t know that I should cut these, you know, just this drink, or I should get this dessert, or just people understanding how they can take care of themselves. I think it’s incredibly important because, and this was actually part of my commencement speech just a few days ago, was I think that’s the first rule that every leader should have, regardless of your level in the organization, is the first rule is that you have to take care of yourself. And I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way. I don’t mean that in an egocentric way. I mean that if your mind and your body are not in the right place, you will not be a good colleague. You will not be a good support for the others. You will not be as good as a parent as you could be. You will not be as good of a friend as you could be. So this concept of healthy mind and healthy body is something that we try to promote. So all these things combined, you could say, well, that’s sort of like friendship, but it’s not friendship in the… traditional sense of the word, but some of these things, we certainly take it from that and apply that to the university world.
Joe Gottlieb
What are some examples of how you leverage your organizational culture to pursue lofty goals while protecting against burnout?
Nuno Fernandes
Yeah, one of the things that we didn’t talk about, but it’s very important, is the capacity to embrace change. When we started talking about that in the beginning, you asked me, How much change do you see? And I answered, I don’t see enough because I think that we should be moving, not we as APUS, I mean the industry, education, we should be moving much faster, but this is a slow-moving industry by design. But the capacity to embrace change is critical and is paramount to us. So in the beginning, it was a bit of a cultural shock in the organization when all this change and all these projects. But then because of all the things that I mentioned before, and because thankfully we are having success, right? Our students are very satisfied with the education they’re receiving. They’re telling us we measure that every month. You know, our net promoter score, which measures how much our students will recommend us is through the roof. We have now two and a half years of consecutive growth in terms of students wanting to be part of the organization, 10 quarters of growth. So all these things, they fuel positivity, right? And they fuel trust. And like I said, growth is the best medicine for everything in a work environment. So the capacity for people to accept change and to not… not be close-minded. And I can give you some examples. So I recently asked our provost, we have a small portfolio of computer science programs. We have a large portfolio of cyber programs, but we want to expand that with AI and things like that. But I said, you know, what would be really cool would be if we also have, because for a school like us, which is an affordable, accessible school, typically you don’t tackle these kind of programs, right? These kind of innovative programs. And so what would be really cool would be to also offer some studies in the field of quantum computers, which might be something that will be big in the future or probably not. We don’t know, but certainly something that seems that there’s potential. So how cool would it be that you could study quantum computer for a very affordable tuition as opposed to pay thousands of dollars somewhere else? And our provost, she looked at me and said, okay, I’m going to look into that. And typically, in a sort of traditional environment, that would not be the case. There would be 20 reasons why we shouldn’t and couldn’t do this. But we embrace that, okay, let me try, let me see what’s possible, let me investigate, and then I’ll get back to you. I mentioned recently the big, great event, which is our gala dinner. And I remember two and a half years ago when I started, I called my chief of staff, and she’s phenomenal. And I told her, You know, I really want to do like an Oscar-style event, red carpet, and offer these awards to people. And she looked at me and said, like, for real? I said, yeah, for real. So we started doing, you know, the first one was great, but it was not as sophisticated as now we are. But we did it. You know, we just said, okay, well, let’s try to do it. And then we went and did it. Well, she did it. I didn’t. But I just showed up, right? But the point is that when you give that ability for people– to trust that change is good and that change brings positive results. And that change is actually the fuel that you should be looking for in order to keep developing yourself and the organization. I think that’s really the sweet spot for any enterprise that you should strive for, for people to embrace change. And if things are not changing, you go and you change them. I think Tom Peters said something like, if it’s not broken, break it. And I agree 100% with that. If it’s not broken, someone else will break it. So just, you know, you might, well, just do it yourself. Just break it and build it again. And this can sound like sort of chaotic, but it’s not. It’s actually very, very disciplined. And it’s more like a mindset, right? That you look at a situation and you think, okay, well, how can we make this better? How can I serve my students better? What else can I do? And you always have this mindset of trying to do things a bit differently.
Joe Gottlieb
So in those two examples, I do want to pick up the part about burnout, right? Those two examples sound to me like examples of where those ideas that came from you that on one level sounded super ambitious and perhaps the potential for would be really draining of an organization. Because you let in one case, the provost, and in the other case, the chief of staff, go off and figure out how APUS might do this. They became vested. That didn’t feel like burnout. And it probably involved some new things that they would do they’d have to add to their plate. But their end result was you got an outcome that your organization, particularly the leader in each case, could accomplish. And then you pointed out, well, the first award’s Banquet wasn’t quite what we hoped for, but then we iterated, right? The
Nuno Fernandes
first one was fantastic considering that we had like three months to prepare and that it was the first time that we were doing that. But certainly when you look at how it is now, it became this sort of super sophisticated event that is very different than what it was before. But before, the first edition was fantastic. But very important, Joe, and I didn’t mention that, there’s so many things to talk about, is As part of our culture, one thing that we’re very much focused on, which kind of fits that sort of wellness and window that I opened before, is that we try to have this sort of balance between work and private life, to the burnout aspect that you mentioned. So, for example, one thing that we don’t do is that we try to avoid at all costs to contact people after hours. Like, you know, if you need to send an email, if you just put it on your outbox to go out next morning at eight o’clock, you know, you don’t need to be sending emails at nine o’clock at night. And, you know, people are with their family, then suddenly the phone is blinking and then you have to see, and then your mind is already somewhere else. And so we try to, we try, not only we try, but we actually, this we are doing, we don’t contact people after hours, unless it’s sort of an emergency, right? Let’s say you have a problem with your IT system or something like that. And obviously, right? But if it’s, ongoing project or some new idea that you had or some work as usual, we’d never contact people after hours. I don’t want to say never, maybe sometimes, but most likely we will not. We try to be very respectful during the weekends. I’m a father myself and one of the things I regret is that in the first years of when my son was very young, I’d I didn’t necessarily follow this rule and I regret that. You know, there’s many weekends that I was working or, you know, many nights that I was working or many like school events that I missed. And to be honest, you know, it’s not worth it because you come to this realization that most things can wait. Meaning, you know, if you want to do something on a Thursday at 6 p.m. and if you do that on Friday at 8 a.m., most likely nothing will happen. You know, it’s okay. It’s okay to wait and it’s okay to take that time for you, for your family, you know, for your loved ones, for your friends. So we try to promote that work-life balance significantly. And, you know, if you look at our Glassdoor rankings, for example, I think this is something that people really appreciate and that they see that we are actively trying to do that. So, yeah. So the burnout, it’s almost like an athlete mindset, which is if you’re working out, man, just go and kill yourself. Just work out as hard as you can until you can’t do it anymore. But once you’re done, then you go and you rest and you sleep well and your mind is at peace. And then you come the next day and you just do it again at that ultra competitive level. But you have to balance that. you know, that mix of working out and resting.
Joe Gottlieb
That takes discipline as an organization. And what I mean by that is not just the discipline of not bothering people after hours or over the weekends. The discipline I’m referring to here is it means that the organization, for that to persist, for that to be accomplished as you describe it, and it’s not perfect, but it’s largely established, you need to be effective getting things done during the business day And that requires proactive, disciplined effort, right? If people are not efficient during the day, if they’re not using every opportunity and evolving meeting structures and decision-making rhythms in the business day, they’re going to be left to bug someone else at night because they want to catch up, right? So I want to recognize the discipline that must exist if you’re able to honor that rule it’s very impressive
Nuno Fernandes
We try very hard you know and that doesn’t mean you know we have a lot of overachievers you know that’s by design by the way but but but you you have to understand that not everyone thinks the same way and that not everyone sort of has that kind of mindset and there’s nothing wrong with that right but you can still If you want to, you can work all night. There’s nothing preventing you, but you shouldn’t be impacting other people after the office hours.
Joe Gottlieb
You’ve been the president of APUS for about two and a half years now. We’ve been talking about this culture where you’ve got this wonderful rhythm established. What’s the next big thing you’re focused on accomplishing with that organization?
Nuno Fernandes
Yeah, Joe, as I said, I think the main roles for a president of any organization and certainly of APUS is to develop the culture and to develop the value of the brand. And by the value of the brand, I mean the prestige, the quality, the service, the recognition from our students. And those are really the true greatest things and true greatest I would say that the president could live in any organization. That you build a great culture that hopefully can persist over time. And you build a lot of value for your organization, for your name that people recognize. Now, I’ll tell you something interesting. I have, I studied economics. So I’m like, I’m a finance guy by profession. that’s what i studied but i never worked with finance not not directly certainly as the president you know you look at pnls and balance sheets and things like that but i was never a cfo or you know finding vp of finance or anything like that but that’s what i studied but then i started working uh early in my career i started working with product management and with marketing so and for many many years of my life i’ve worked as a marketeer and and um And when I started in education, I started as a CMO, as I told you in the very beginning. So I was the chief marketing officer. So I always looked at marketing as a way to build the bridge between what you want to offer and what people want to buy. So you have something that you want to offer, and then there’s someone out there that wants to buy that, and you have to build that bridge to get from the product to the consumer and vice versa. But in education, it’s not necessarily like that. And that’s why in education, I’m a big believer in the value of developing your brand and in the value of spending lots and lots and lots of money on marketing. I can see why, and we spend money on marketing, obviously, everybody does, but the true value is to develop your brand and to develop your prestige and to develop an organization that people want to be a part of, that they feel that it probably means a bit more than just the education, that they’re going to get other services. And to the point we discussed earlier, they’re probably going to get exposed to other values that they feel identified with. And they know that if they come here, they see the success of our graduates and they see our graduates are prospering. And they say, well, you know what? I like these. It’s affordable. I can see that their students are having great success. I want to be a part of that. I understand that these guys, they also give me other benefits. They offer me mental health. They offer me wellness. They offer me discounts at membership at gyms and things like that. And I’m going to mingle with the military. I like that patriotic side and all that discipline, that resilience, whatever it might be. It’s not for everyone. Nothing is. But the point is that it’s much better to develop that and that people want to come here because they truly want to come here. versus because they saw a marketing ad. You see my point? And that’s the job of the president. I would argue that’s also the job of the provost. And we have a wonderful provost and we work very, very well together and we understand each other very well. But that’s our job. Our job is to promote the reputation of the university. And the more you promote the reputation, the less you have to spend in marketing ads. And, you know, to some extent that is working, I would say. But we also have the benefit of having a lot of military students, so it’s sort of a closed community. But we have something like, and take this number with a grain of salt, we have something like 40% of our new students, they come because someone recommended, you know, that someone said, you know, you should go to APUS. And that… That number I’m very proud of, you know, because 40% is a large number. It will never be 100%, but just knowing that people are recommending you, that they say, you know what, Joe, I go there, I like it, you should try it out. And, you know, four out of every 10 students, they come because someone told them that they should. That’s fantastic. Another great stat is, and again, this number take with a grain of salt, but I think it’s something like more than 20% of our students they come back for a second degree with APUS. So, you know, they finish their bachelor’s and then they come for a master’s or whatever it might be. So, and that’s the kind of thing that I believe that the president should be doing, you know, promoting the culture and promoting the value and the reputation of the brand.
Joe Gottlieb
Well, it sounds to me like there’s a lot of value to be shared with the broader market based upon what you have cooking there. So let’s bring this to a summary. What are three takeaways we can offer our listeners on the topic of thrifty innovation among friends at scale?
Nuno Fernandes
Yeah, so the first one is that I believe having limited resources is actually a benefit, and that constraint drives creative behaviors. The second one is that the ability to build a trust-based system where everyone feels empowered, they feel that they’re valued, they feel that they matter, they feel that they can rely on each other, and they feel that they can openly speak and provide advice their opinion and ideas. And the third one is this kind of big vision, right? This clear vision that is built with the management team, that is shared by the management team, and then you deploy and you trickle down through the entire organization so that everyone feels that they are part of this hopefully winning strategy. And I would say those are the three aspects of our discussion today.
Joe Gottlieb
Great summary. Nuno, thanks so much for joining me today.
Nuno Fernandes
Thank you. My pleasure, Joe.
Joe Gottlieb
And thanks to our guests for joining us as well. I hope you have a great day. I look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of TRANSFORMED.
Hey, listeners of TRANSFORMED. I hope you enjoyed that episode. And whether you did or not, I hope that made you stop and think about the role that you were playing in your organization’s ability to change in the digital era. And if it made you stop and think, perhaps you would be willing to share your thoughts, suggestions, alternative perspectives, or even criticisms related to this or any other episode. I would love to hear from you. So send me an email at info@higher.digital or joe@higher.digital. And if you have friends or colleagues that you think might enjoy it, please share our podcast with them. As you and they can easily find, TRANSFORMED is available wherever you get your podcasts.
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