Dr. Ali Houshmand:

In my opinion, every leader who who joins an organization and takes responsibility must think about the responsibility, the, the organization, first and foremost, rather than herself or himself. I base my leadership on the fact that no matter what happens, I don’t have the fear of losing my job because my job in here is not, or my responsibility is not in here to maintain my job, to keep my job, to keep other people happy so that they like me, so that they can keep me. I have certain core principles that I use in order to lead this organization. And if those sets of principles are gonna be violated, I’d rather not have the job, rather than trying to stick to a job that I would then be not be effective. So this is really the foundation of how I do things. I feel very liberated in that regard. That doesn’t mean I want to be fired, nobody does. But that, that also doesn’t mean that I’m willing to compromise everything to keep that job.

Joe Gottlieb:

That’s Dr. Ali Houshmand, president of Rowan University. It took Ali less than 10 years to double enrollment at Rowan, from 11,000 students in 2012 to 23,000 students in 2021, while earning Carnegie’s doctoral research university designation, completing $1.5 billion in construction projects and raising $155 million in new gifts and pledges. He’s a guy that gets things done, and I believe it has a lot to do with his principle-centered leadership. We talked about his principles, how he has structured his leadership team, how they prioritize as a team, and how they have been measuring success since he started. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Welcome to TRANSFORMED, a Higher Digital podcast, focused on the new why’s, the new what’s, and the new how’s 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, welcome and thanks for joining us for this special presidential series episode of TRANSFORMED. My name is Joe Gottlieb, president and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I am joined by Dr. Ali Houshmand, president of Rowan University. Ali, welcome to TRANSFORMED.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Delighted to be here, Joe. Thank you for the invitation.

Joe Gottlieb:

So today we’re gonna be talking about, I think, a very interesting topic and we, we put the name of it as Principle-Centered Leadership for Confident Transformation. But before we get into that, tell me a little bit about your personal journey and how it shaped your perspective on the work you do in higher ed.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Uh, Joe. I was born in Iran in 1954. Uh, I left old country in 1975. Went to England, uh, to study mathematics. Uh, I got a bachelor’s and a master’s, and I then moved to this country. In 1983, I went to the University of Michigan. I got another master’s and a doctorate in engineering. Started my first job at United Airlines in Chicago headquarters, where I used to do a scheduling of about 22, 500 flights a day. Me and member of a team, of course. And then after one year, I kind of got bored and I joined University of Cincinnati as assistant professor. Uh, was there for 10 years. Moved to Drexel University, year 2000. I was there as dean and associate pro as as interim provost for six years. Then I moved to Rowan University in 2006. And I’ve been here since then. For the first five or six years was I was provost, and then I became interim president and and president.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

I was born in Iran, as I said, with nine brothers and sisters. My mom and dad who have passed. They were illiterate. I’m the only person of the family who is outside. And my drive in, in, in getting to here is that I’m very, very much into learning. When believe in advancement, I’ve got a lot of kind of self-confidence in myself. So despite the fact that I was in a very rough neighborhood of Tehran in shanty towns, I did not allow that to stop me from progress. So that’s a very short version of my, my past.

Joe Gottlieb:

Excellent. Well, it sounds like a, a strong foundation for what you’ve been doing, and it, it makes sense to me. It’s quite fitting. So let’s dive into this topic. We, we, we, we want to talk about principle centered leadership for transformation. And I know we’re gonna be talking about that because there’s something special going on at Rowan under your leadership. I wanna start by asking you, how are you liberated personally by this concept of principle centered leadership?

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

<inaudible>, in my opinion, every leader who who joins an organization and takes responsibility must think about the responsibility, the, the organization first and foremost, rather than herself or himself. I base my leadership on the fact that no matter what happens, I don’t have the fear of losing my job because my job in here is not, or my responsibility is not in here to maintain my job, to keep my job, to keep other peoples happy so that they like me so that they can keep me. I have certain core principles that I use in order to lead this organization. And if those sets of principles are gonna be violated, I’d rather not have the job, rather than trying to stick to a job that I would then be not be effective. So this is really the foundation of how I do things. I feel very liberated in that regard. That doesn’t mean I want to be fired, nobody does. But that, that also doesn’t mean that I’m willing to compromise everything to keep that job. And that is very, very important to me. And it’s very liberating too.

Joe Gottlieb:

So that sounds like a great philosophy to approach what I’m sure is a very challenging job. What I know is a very challenging job leading a complex organization. Heck, I, higher education institutions are not just many cities. Large ones are are, are

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Large, large cities. Large cities.

Joe Gottlieb:

You could think of ’em as large cities ’cause they have so many things going on.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

In fact, we are about 2000 students more than the entire population of Glassboro.

Joe Gottlieb:

Oh, there you go. Well, and when I think about that and I think about that complexity, I think about, well, this is really hard. It certainly gets incrementally easier being a principal centered leader when you’re also running a data-driven organization. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so let’s talk about how Rowan is a data-driven organization. I have to say, when I looked at your Rowan on the rise report that you put out periodically, at least every year, I think, right? There’s a frequency there.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Yeah. Once every year. Yes.

Joe Gottlieb:

Once every year. You’ve been measuring yourself against your strategic objectives since you got there, basically and took on the president role. So let’s talk about that because I think it really is a best practice and others can learn from it.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Well, I, I think data as, as, as you know, Joe doesn’t lie. Especially accurate data and in higher education, because you’re dealing with many, many constituents, all of whom are important. Faculty, staff, students, parents, alumni, the government agencies or, or the elected officials. All of them are important. And the best way you can communicate to all of the, these group, each of which may not necessarily have the same mission or same intent vis-a-vis the university, is the easiest and the best way of informing everybody in an open and transparent way. Data doesn’t lie. I don’t need to hide anything. So I produce this report every year so that all of these constituencies can see the facts of this institution right there and then without any, any glorification or, or any, any editorial. So that, you know, I try to kind of make myself look better.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

I want to show people that we make decision in this university based on facts and figures. I leave my emotion at home every day that I come and I bring a bag of passion with me. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And so that’s really the, the way we operate. So, data-driven decision making, in my opinion, is very, very simple. It’s actually what my board demand from me every year by the board gives me a specific targets to reach. And I pass those very same targets to every one of my senior leadership and middle managers. And I say, here is our collective goal. This is not my goal to impress the board. This is our goal to impress everybody. Therefore, we all work towards those set of goals that are set by our board of trustees. And I’m happy to say that in every year, over the past several years, we have surpassed the goals that have been set by the board for us, for example, in terms of fundraising over the past two years, last year goal of mine was $15 million. I raised, we raised 120 million. This year also is 20 million. Already we have raised 55 million. So, so goals are set, but we excite people. We say, that doesn’t really should be our, our our challenge. As soon as we reach that, we stop, we can keep on going. We can keep on believing because the sky is the limit.

Joe Gottlieb:

That’s impressive. The other thing I wanna point out is that you have some trend lines on some strategic metrics going all the way back to 2010. Yeah. Because those metrics haven’t changed. They have been the same thing you’ve been measuring since 2010. Yeah. And we can all probably think about the usual suspects there, but importantly, in this powerful body of work, you’ve allowed yourself the flexibility to remove metrics that don’t serve you anymore. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and bring on other metrics that are needed that

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Important

Joe Gottlieb:

To measure new things that you’re pursuing. And I’d just like pointing that out because it in a, in a frame that is very polished and, and and very serious, you are allowing yourself the right level of flexibility to give you the maximum focus via that real estate. Does that, I imagine that’s intentional.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

That is intentional. There is another intent in that you constantly want to evolve and learn and provide the most accurate and valuable pieces of information to all of your constituents. Sometimes you find out and recognize that certain measure that you have been informing them is not of great value, and yet you have been missing on some other measures. So you, that’s that the evolution that we are doing, we are doing because we constantly want to inform everybody of the real, the most relevant and informative set of data that guides us to make our decision around this institution.

Joe Gottlieb:

I love it. So now I wanna zoom in on the structure of your leadership and management organization. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> your cabinet includes an executive leadership tier and an administrative leadership tier. Yeah. And so my question is, how has this approach help you to execute on your mission while scaling up the size and complexity of your programs and your extended organization?

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Well, it turns out that the, the, the, the senior leadership in the executive cabinet are the ones who chart the mission of the institution. They, they provide the plans, they bring it to the executive cabinet, it gets approved when it comes to the implementation. It’s their responsibility because I’ve empowered them and I hold them accountable. And then they pass this into the middle management who are the implementers and hold them accountable in, in turn and make sure that they produce. And this again, has two very powerful, uh, message number one, this senior leadership really feel that they’re in power and in, and, and, and in charge. And it gives them that sense of pride and ownership that is their job to to, to excel. And they transfer that to their lower management and get them equally excited. And so that’s, that’s really the function of the teamwork, because there is not a single organization that a single person can do everything or knows everything.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

I can tell you right now, there are many, many things that I don’t know, but there are many people that I have who do that, who do know what I don’t know. And I go to them to seek, to seek their, their response. So that really to me is the, these two tiers are multi-tier. Yeah. We need to, at every level, we need to excite the people below us. I provide energy to my executive cabinet. They provide energy to the lower and so forth. That’s how the entire university gets energized and move towards the common goal and common, uh, you know, targets.

Joe Gottlieb:

What I, what I’ve often seen, which I find to be very typical, is that as organizations get larger, by their nature, they become more complex.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Of

Joe Gottlieb:

Course. And, and as, as they become more large and complex, you obviously have to start to invest in leadership tiering out of necessity. Yeah. Now, there’s always this talk about flat organizations. There’s flat organizational culture, which is different from flat organizational structure or quantity. But the net the concept is easy to say, hard to do. And what I wanna talk next about is, is that you often see in an organization that has this tiered structure. Yep. You’ve got the people and the lower tier that have that know what really goes on. And you have the people at the leadership tier that don’t really know what goes on. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And if they’re not using principle centered leadership that they are coached on all the time by their ultimate leader, they can spend a lot of their energy worrying about getting fired <laugh>. Exactly. Or impressing or feeling good about themselves as opposed to knowing just enough about what the people below them know so they can be effective leaders. So I wanna bring this back to the data-driven organization aspect. Do you find that this, this in fact fits and works in a way that most organizations struggle to ever even get the opportunity to test?

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Yeah. Yeah. You see, that’s very important because the hierarchy of the people at the position is critically important. The other day I was talking to our deans and deans are, you know, very important people. They’re head of the academic of the whole college. And my complaint to them was, some of you are, are acting like a department chairs. It turns out that the department chairs all report to the deans. And what it is that you have brought your level of effectiveness to one, one level below. So you become a department chair. Department chair becomes just a faculty. And as a result, you waste your time in going out there in order to fundraise, in order to fundraise, in order to take your faculty, let’s say to NSF or to NIH and introduce them to your program director, write a big grant, make a con, you know, conversation with a big CEO and bring them into your executive, to your advisor and council.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

These are the kind of things that a dean needs to do. So everybody has a position. I need my senior leadership to have the ability to know how to delegate just as I have the ability to delegate. Therefore, they need to know their people at the lower level, their capabilities, their weaknesses, and channel all of their positives into the direction of doing their division. Good. And that really to me is the principle, because as you said, just as I don’t know everything, my senior executive leaders don’t know everything about every aspect of the university, either even in their own J job, maybe they don’t know certain thing, but they need to know where to go and who to ask to get that thing done. And that’s really is the, is this tiered level of leadership that, that we have in here. We, we hold our middle managers at a very high level because they really are the one who produce tremendous amount of work.

Joe Gottlieb:

So we’ve examined how data flowing through the organization with transparency and an expectation among leaders that we will make decisions based upon principles using data. That is a, I think, a clear statement about how you’ve seen this work at the scale in which you’re operating. Remind for our listeners how many, how, how big is Rowan? I should know.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Rowan has 20, 23,000 students, about 4,100 staff.

Joe Gottlieb:

So big enough to be hard <laugh>, right? Like that’s, that was the, the, the data point I was looking for. So we’ve talked about how data enables this to work more effectively than without data. Now I want to ask you, how do you prioritize in this structure? Because while data can help give you information to make decisions, right. How do you decide as an organization to make hard choices knowing there are finite resources? Mm-Hmm. Knowing there’s a finite bandwidth Mm-Hmm. And a finite effective bandwidth that you have in the organization. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

We do, we do, I do in my mind, and we do in this university, a lot of what we call SWOT analysis. We identify our strengths, our weaknesses. We try to kind of improve on our weaknesses so that we will be less weak, enhance our strengths. We then look at the outside control, outside factors. That is what are the opportunities and what are the threats? How do we maneuver the institution so that those threats does not come and bite us? And how do we take maximum opportunity of those that are around us? If you look at the way that we have done things, we have taken maximum amount of opportunities because at the time where there was, uh, for example, uh, a covid, uh, trauma in here, this country past four years, we in this university used that period to grow the university faster than any other period in the history of the university.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Because at that time, everybody was busy worrying about the challenges. We tried to kind of sneak in there and take all the advantages. Hmm. And that’s what we did. We are building a veteran school and nursing in school, a research. We have started a major collaboration with virtual $85 million gift and investment from them. $220 million investment in new faculty building massive infrastructure. All of them are happening during the pandemic because we knew the timing of how to take advantage of the opportunities. So we constantly look at our strengths and our weaknesses and look around from outside what are the opportunities? What are the, what are the threats? How do we protect ourselves against the threats? How do we take maximum advantage of the opportunities?

Joe Gottlieb:

So to me, and I’ve, I’ve used SWOT analysis quite a bit in my past as well. And so that sounds like you use that frame to help you distinguish things on the basis of your collective understanding of let’s say, their merit as an opportunity or their, or their risk as a threat. Yeah. And would you say that Rowan does fewer things better by using that frame then more things less effectively when you use that frame?

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Well, uh, we, we do less, it’s a hard question to ask quite honestly. Here it is. I’m a multitasker. I do not like to work on one project. I’m a serious c serious operator in that I, we are working on multiple projects at the same time. But we do, we even that we do that intelligent, it’s not just random. You say let’s work on 10 projects or 15 projects. We also, sometimes we have projects or issues that we, we would love to really work with our senate, with our union so that they will have some positive, sometimes they want the, we want them to win and we want to kind of, uh, what we call to create this harmony within the campus. So anything that we could do regarding certain projects or issue that we believe that there is probably resistance on campus, we try to pivot.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

We don’t try to kind of bring that as a way of conflict between us that taps our energy and stops us from our progress. Therefore, it’s not really a one project at a time. There are multiple projects. I can tell you right now, in my mind, there are at least nine buildings that we are either building or planning or the near completion. And, and amongst them they go well over $700 million. Uh, and, and so that’s, that’s just one project regarding the building. And then you look at the, we are talking to online entities. We just signed a major contract with McKinsey’s and company about, you know, business to business online. We do all of those things, but we do them all intelligently because first of all, Joe, I am, I’m the kind of guy who gets very, very bored very quickly. If I don’t have things to do, therefore I have to be busy. And if I’m not, then I go to my farm and grow hot pepper for my hot sauce projects.

Joe Gottlieb:

That’s right. The hot sauce. Yes. Well make, make sure we provide a link to the hot sauce, uh, in absolutely guest notes. But you know, what I’m hearing you say, Ali, is that, is that when you have this machinery work working well Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you, yes, you’re gonna be selective and focused, but you actually can get a lot done when you’re benefiting from the efficiency and effectiveness of the things we’ve been talking about. Yeah. Effective measurement, good structure and leadership principle centered decisions using data. When you start to do this, you, you find, I imagine is you don’t have to abandon nearly as much of the quantity of things that you know you need to complete because you actually have the confidence and the track record Exactly. Of getting things done. Yeah.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Yes. And, and result be good result begets good result. And when people, let’s assume that there are, you know, I dunno how many exactly. Divisions in here, let’s say of the 10 divisions in here, legal, finance, facilities, you name it. Okay. Let’s say that of these, if seven of them are working on big projects and, and a lot of success, the other three look at them and say, how can we be belong them? You energize everybody. You kind of try to bring everybody along. And because at, at the head of each of these individuals are competent individuals and, and very ambitious individuals who want to be successful as well. And because they’re empowered, they have the ability to kind of do their share of moving the organization upward.

Joe Gottlieb:

It’s a wonderful virtuous cycle. Right. We talk about leaders leading by example. Well, leadership organizations leading by example becomes even more scalable.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Joe Gottlieb:

Now, now I want to dial into a little bit of a somewhat technical, but also specific topic, which is you’ve, there are a lot of institutions out there that are wrestling with struggling with the move online. And many of them have turned to online program manager companies to help them get there. There’s been a lot of mixed results in that effort because to bring on a partner like that partnering is hard. And if you’re not really effective at partnering, things can really not hit the mark pretty easily. There’s a lot of ways for things to go wrong, but you’ve, you’ve made the choice to build internal capabilities, but then also build those capabilities such, such a way that there really is a business relationship, but an effective one internally serving all of your programs and departments. So much so that you can also even offer that to other institutions looking for an OPM. Yeah. And I would hope at least imagine that because you’ve learned what you’ve learned about doing it internally, you probably are better at it than the average one that’s out there. So let’s talk a bit about that.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Well, I actually, when I was at Drexel, I was running such a college, I was running Goodwin College of Professional Studies or the former, uh, uh, night school, so to speak. And when I, when I came here, the first thing that I did, Joe, was I said, every mistake that I made when I was at Drexel and running that thing I’m not gonna make in here, that was the first thing. And that was the key success in that I empowered every single dean and every department who was willing to bring their, their projects into the online domain. I made sure that they benefit from that. So what we did, we created a formula. We said, we are going to run this thing as a completely separate cost center. It has nothing to do with the state of New Jersey. The building is not, is not on the, on our land.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

The salaries and benefit are all paid from that revenue. Even the operating expense, you name it, everything, every penny that is expense is paid by the revenue that they generate, including rent, utility, you name it. And then the balance of this thing gets distributed throughout the university. So every dollar that they make 40 cents of it immediately goes to the general fund of the university. Wow. And that helps undergraduates, that that’s the reason that Rowan University’s finances is the strongest right now in amongst many of the state institutions. And, and so the remaining 60 cents, about 40, 50 cents of it gets spent on all of the expenditures, the building, you know, the lease for the building, utilities, faculties, you name it, administration, everything. And then there is another 10 cents and it’s still that 10 cents to dollar gets distributed to those departments who were willing to put their courses online for us to generate additional revenue. So they love it as well. In fact, some of those departments right now generate more revenue this way than be appropriate to them as their operating budget annually.

Joe Gottlieb:

Wow.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

And Rowan Global today generates more revenue, gross revenue twice than the state of New Jersey. Give us direct cash appropriation for the Glassborough campus twice. And that the power of it, and our goal is to expand this thing to three or four times. We are currently at about $75 million gross revenue from online. I would like to see 200 million, I would like to see 1,000,000,001 day. And the way to do that is you provide high quality education affordably with the greatest customer service. If you do these three, then you can actually capture a good chunk of the market globally, not regionally, not nationally, globally. And I believe that is really what we are doing.

Joe Gottlieb:

Well the beauty of that, right? With with online you, it’s easier, it’s still very difficult, but it’s easier to participate in global markets because of the Absolutely.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Right.

Joe Gottlieb:

Absolutely. I think people are, all, institutions are all discovering this, but there’s a lot of things to get right. And it sounds like you guys have got a great recipe there. So I wanna, I want to throw in one extra question before we bring this to a close. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if you’ll indulge me. And that is given this apparatus that you have running at Rowan Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which we’ve been talking about. How is it enabling you to change the way that you do strategic planning, financial planning, performance management? This, I think we’re talking about special stuff here, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on how some of the usual models that exist in higher ed haven’t served you. And so you’ve had to reinvent other models, other approaches.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Well, uh, the number one, in my opinion for being a a, an effective organization and eventually having a strategic plan that everybody has a skin in the game is transparency, openness, and honesty. When I became president, the first thing that I did, Joe, I put the budget of the university online for everybody to see. Not many presidents do that. I can assure you that. So if you are a faculty member and you want to know the set of our budget, which division has what they get it. In fact, when the, when the board of trustees budget committee meets, there is a faculty representative who will get exact same material regarding the budget that the board chair gets that I get. And that’s very important. That’s number one. And then on the top of that, you would like to kind of create a tent that is large enough that anybody with good intention, irrespective of their position, their title, they could come into this tent and contribute for the good of the university.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

And that gives it ownership because the more owners they are, and if all of them are singing the same tune that organization succeed. What we have created in here, we have created the four pillars. And if you go across the campus and ask any faculty and the staff, what are the four pillars they tell you, access, affordability, quality, education, and being an economic engine for our community. So that has become the culture of this institution. Everybody knows that we love access. We want to give every citizen of the state of New Jersey and America an opportunity to come to Rowan and get a degree irrespective of their scores. That’s the beauty of it. We actually accept 100% students because we have the county college relationship. And if the students don’t have their scores to get into our May Rowan proper, they can come through the, through the county colleges.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

And in fact, we even have a county college model where the student of the county college live on our own campus, but they’re being educated by the county college and pay the county college tuition. We have created three plus one. All of these things have been done because of that openness and transparency, the faculty. Because if I didn’t have that, I can assure you they will resist me in every corner that they could. So to me, the effective leadership is open leadership. If you have nothing to hide, if you have nothing to fear, be open.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yep. I love it.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

It’s the most liberating way to do it.

Joe Gottlieb:

So that brings us full circle. So let’s bring this to a close. What, in summary, what three takeaways will you offer our listeners on the topic of principle centered leadership for confident transformation?

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

Well, I say every parent, every person in this who is listening to this thing, then your son or daughter, your loved one to us, I promise you, we, we do our very, very best to keep them safe, give them a great education and make sure that they’re not heavily indebted and they go and get a great job. That’s number one. We in this university, because we cannot do everything by my, by ourselves. And the state cannot constantly bank roll us, nor can students constantly bankroll us through increased tuition and fees. We do partnership with investors and developers to build and expand the campus without burdening the university’s budget. The Rowan Boulevard that we have built is a half a billion dollar investment. Not a penny of it was used by Rowan, was Rowan’s money. But every piece of that Rowan Boulevard is being now used by Rowan and Rowan students.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

That’s the power of partnership. We have built a whole new city at the back of other people’s money to the benefit of everybody. And the third thing is that we need to rightsize our education. There is a lack of fit in the way that what we produce and what the real world and industry wants. Our job as a public institution is to train the future of our country, to train their, their future leaders who come and manage this great country. And what we need to do, we need to do it in such a way that when they got their degree, they go to the workforce. They can immediately be effective. And that’s what it mean by rightsizing and trying to avoid that lack of fit. We bring the industry into the curriculum to work with us so that we can ask them early on, who do you want us to train?

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

You know, Lockheed Martin hires more than a hundred of our engineers and scientists every year because we have this model. They never hire that many people from any other university. They do it from us because from the moment that a student comes in here, they’re also working on a project related to Lockheed Martin for the next four years, they most likely pass their security clearance. And as soon as they finish their degree, they’re hired by them. And that should be the future of education. We need to educate people for the economy of this country rather than for what the faculty wishes to, to, to, to teach. That really is a lack of bit that we need to fix.

Joe Gottlieb:

Great summary. Ali, thank you so much for joining me today.

Dr. Ali Houshmand:

It was a pleasure speaking with you, Joe. Look forward to further discussion. Thank you for the invitation

Joe Gottlieb:

And thanks to our guests for joining us as well. Have a great day and we’ll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of Transformed.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yo, stop the music. Hey, listeners have transformed. I hope you enjoyed that episode and whether you did or not, I hope that it 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 at Higher Digital or Joe at 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.