Miloš Topić:

The first word says it all. So courage and courage doesn’t mean go out there and battle the world means say what needs to be said when it needs to be said. And understand that leadership is not a popularity contest and it often gets lonely. Hmm. But you have to be able to understand why you’re there. And that your decisions, your impact, and collaborations that you’re building across the university are meant to advance everyone. ’cause At the end of the day, if all people engaged in a particular project or a service succeed collectively as a team, none of them individually can possibly fail.

Joe Gottlieb:

That’s Miloš Topić, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Digital Officer at Grand Valley State University. He’s got a bachelor’s degree in computer science, a minor in mathematics, a master’s in Information Systems, an MBA, and a PhD in business administration, where his research was focused on the role of CIOs in leading innovation within higher education. Despite all that formal education, Miloš is very practical. His favorite thing to say is, focus on people first. They matter the most. Our conversation felt extremely natural, like two hikers exploring a wilderness that they know all too well, but still discover new details and vistas to enjoy. I hope you enjoy it too. 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 another episode of Transformed. My name is Joe Gottlieb, President and CTO of Higher Digital. And today I am joined by Dr. Miloš Topić, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Digital Officer at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. Miloš, welcome to TRANSFORMED.

Miloš Topić:

Thanks, Joe. Thank you for having me. What do you want to talk about?

Joe Gottlieb:

Well, I’m glad you asked. I would like to talk about your thoughts on courageous leadership for impactful transformation. But first, tell me a little bit about your origin story and how you got into serving higher education as you do each day.

Miloš Topić:

Absolutely. I’ve been fortunate to join Grand Valley State a little over three years ago. It came outta nowhere. I’ve been in New Jersey, New York City region for over 20 years, and right before the pandemic started, my family and I were looking for something a little bit less hectic, where less time would be spent stuck in traffic. And this opportunity presented itself and with each passing month or each passing semester, it has proven itself to be a good one for us. It is. Prior to this, I worked at two other universities as a Vice President, CIO, as a CTO, as a director of technology services on the academic technology and research side. And along the way, I’ve experimented in Fortune 1000 World and some of the startup companies from the educational background, my undergrad was in computer science and math. And my first master’s was Information Systems, then an MBA. And then I’ve completed that work, and I’m not going back to school <laugh> with a PhD in business administration where my research focus was on the role of CIOs in driving innovation in higher education.

Joe Gottlieb:

Well, I can’t imagine a better background for the stuff we’re gonna talk about then. So really neat to to, to learn about that. So this topic of courageous leadership, it’s it, it sounds benign, it sounds very lofty, but this isn’t the first time that you’ve applied a little bit different of a, a thought process and style to the way that you lead organizations. So I’d like to start out by, by having you talk about how you surveyed the landscape at Grand Valley State and started to ramp up your use of this approach, which we’re now referring to as courageous leadership.

Miloš Topić:

Sure. so as I was joining the university right before I arrived, an inside an outside independent body was brought in to provide an assessment of technological set of capabilities and landscape. Got that report, 50 plus pages standard things you’ve seen from a lot of consulting agencies. And there was a lot of things there that initially prompted a pause, how do we get here? How much of this is true and factual versus was limited or influenced by other factors outside it’s control at that moment in time. Also, prior to my arrival, information technology did not have a seat at the right table. We were always a circle or two outside the epicenter, if you will. And we were an afterthought when it came to strategy, vision, and direction setting. Decisions were made as often happens on a Friday at five 15 in the afternoon.

Miloš Topić:

Requirements were lobbed over the fence to us with a go live date at 8:00 AM on Monday morning. And as you know, that is not scalable. And it does, and as you know, it doesn’t produce quality necessary needed. So when I arrived, I’ve sat down and I listened, learned and asked a lot of questions of my peers in the senior leadership team president, board of trustees, academic deans. I met with every single full-time employee in information technology one-on-one, we sat down there were completely off record unscripted conversations, but I wanted to hear their fear, passion, hope drives goals, personal and organizational. And when as I grouped them all together, that started to influence some of the strategy and direction moving forward along the way. It was also very important to do two other things. And that is to be very public and direct in owning our past mistakes and failures. If they are factual, we have to own them. ’cause That’s how you start to build credibility and trust and build upon. And two, to also at the same time, provide some air cover for the team and let the rest of the community know that it is not okay to continue speaking about our friends and colleagues in a particular way as we’re now entering a new chapter and writing a new book in itself.

Joe Gottlieb:

Fascinating. So I, I wanna I wanna point out a couple of things there, which I really like hearing you articulate. So, one, understand the facts. Two, own the past, but three, signal a new future while declaring the need to be constructive, particularly with people when people are involved, right? You, you wanna, you wanna maintain their commitment, you wanna grow their commitment, reinforce their commitment, and you get there via intentional things in culture. Right? It feels like that was an important part of your approach.

Miloš Topić:

It it, at the end of the day, or at the beginning of it all, it’s always about people. Yeah. It’s relevant. What tools, technology, industry, profession you’re in. If you don’t have the right people that feel not only welcomed, but they feel like they belong at that place, you upside is always going to be limited, right? We spend way too much time at work for it to be a place where we’re miserable. How often have we been in organizations when, you know, obviously this is secondhand information, but I’ve heard from a lot of colleagues along the way on Sunday night, people start panicking and, and, and getting headaches because tomorrow’s Monday morning and they gotta go to work. Mm-Hmm. That is not a culture, that is not an environment where you can get that innovative spirit and get all the juices flowing and get the collaboration that you need across the team.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yeah. So true. So meanwhile, back at the ranch, you, you did a lot of listening. You talked about how things were gonna change at the highest level going forward, and then you started making changes happen. You started moving stuff to the cloud, isn’t that right?

Miloš Topić:

Yes, we we, we you know, some organizations try, try to operate in extremes, either all the way left or all the way right? Well, actually most of our world seems to be that way nowadays, <laugh>. And I think that a lot of the beauty is somewhere in the middle where you pick the good things from both sides and then kind of create your own destiny and your own path forward. We have had a number of systems that simply did not make sense to remain in our data centers, whether that was our email calendar, our learning management system a number of others. There’s a number of enterprise-wide systems that necessitated way too much care and feeding and way too many sleepless nights by some of our colleagues who had to wake up at two or three o’clock in the morning to kick that thing to, you know, gets itself back in shape before everybody started showing up at seven or eight o’clock in the morning. So we’ve looked to maximize economies of scale, business continuity, disaster recovery strengthen our incident response capabilities and the redundancy as a whole, while at the same time preserving certain things as failovers and additional set of capabilities, especially on the academic research and computing side. On-Prem, we’ve made some investments in hardware and software, which still had a number of really good years ahead of it, and it would be, it best fiscally or responsible to discard it without a really good reason.

Joe Gottlieb:

So I hear some balance in there. So yes, you were moving several things to the cloud, but those things that could be much more easily managed in the cloud with leverage, you might obtain, particularly for 24 7 operations. But meanwhile, you had some really important investments that you felt the best net new investment was to continue investing as needed in private infrastructure and capability to achieve the, the balance across the full portfolio.

Miloš Topić:

Yes. Well, ultimately the goal is to get as many people in the division of information technology to be as close to the core of our mission and the reason why we’re here. I want my folks to be engaged and involved in education, teaching, learning, support, services, research as appropriate, and spend less time on keeping the lights blinking green on a massive wall of, of racked servers behind them. Somebody else can do that for us and in many cases can do it better. Yeah. And provide near real time or real time failovers and capabilities, which we do not have. Other challenge. Two other kind of considerations along the way are, you have a lot of people who have spent years or decades operating in a particular model and anything new looks like a threat, or could be perceived like a threat. Oh, this is job security issue, or I gotta learn something new. So you gotta be mindful of how do you massage those conversations into place. And two, a lot of the higher education funding models and our budget structure is not really made for this subscription model that we all live in. Right. It’s a lot easier for whatever reason. But historically, and I think we’re changing slowly, it’s been a lot easier to get a million or two every five years to replace hardware than it is to get an extra a hundred or 200 K to pay this licensing fee every month or every year.

Joe Gottlieb:

So there’s some shift there in terms of some of the education and and budget management around this new set of line items, which, so you said it earlier, right? You there were several things that ought to be moved to cloud, suddenly that’s a new experience for lots of people that might feel displaced. And there you gotta manage that. But, and then also financially and budget wise those are new items and they’re less well understood. And with that comes a default usually in the negative direction when it comes to budgeting. Right. So you’re managing that and collectively, this sounds like some change that you were starting to affect. And tell me about how that was feeling early going and, and, and how you, how you worked through that.

Miloš Topić:

It, it, it’s it took some time and then with some colleagues it’s still work in progress, <laugh>, but ultimately you gotta understand they have to understand or we have to communicate what’s in it for them. We’re not doing this for us. We’re, I’m not taking any of this tech, putting in the trunk of my car and taking it home. This is for the ben benefit and, and future of our faculty staff and students. And when they ex understand how their lives and their responsibilities will be better improved, how we can save them time, how we can provide them capabilities on any device anywhere, which some of the legacy systems couldn’t do, especially in mobile devices, especially when it comes to reporting and data analytics. And then finally introducing some new features, functions and tech and capability technical capabilities that they haven’t had in the past. They didn’t even know they missed because they’ve never used them, they’ve never experienced them. So it’s all about presenting to colleagues in other areas why we’re doing this and what’s in it for them.

Joe Gottlieb:

And so to me that’s an area that, that sounds a bit like, well for sure it’s change management, right? It’s, it’s really helping an organization at the macro and oftentimes even at the micro level, understand why something different might be attractive. And, and, and the, there’s a lot of different methods one could use then to facilitate the, the reduction of the negative emotion and perhaps the creation of some positive emotion, some attraction, some motivation, right? So that had to be part of the craft as well. True.

Miloš Topić:

Absolutely. I think it’s the ongoing communication. Sometimes you have, sometimes you say the same thing nine different ways, and that ninth time it finally clicks and resonates. So it’s how do you get, first of all, you need to understand what the capabilities are and what the goals are. What’s the north star? Where do we want to be? And if our goal is to conquer that hill that’s five miles away allow us some freedom to build a strategy of how do we get there, right? Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, what’s the first bridge? What’s the first stream we go over? Do we go up the south side or the east side of the mountain? And so forth. And once we all are aligned around the common North star and goals and priorities, it is really important to understand why we’re doing this and what’s the relevance, how we’re doing it, and who’s doing it in that process.

Miloš Topić:

It is also very important to be very transparent and honest with your colleagues and peers, because often people will misunderstand that because it includes technology, that it’s a tech project and they don’t have to do anything. We’ll just deliver a finished product and give them keys to their brand new home. No, you actually have to help us design and build it. At the end of the day, it’s your house, and if I put your living room or your bedroom or your bathroom or you don’t want it, that’s not really a product you’re paying for. So it’s important for them to understand that they are the experts in that field, whether it’s a CRM for development and advancement or enrollment or you name it. They have to be engaged from the design stage forward.

Joe Gottlieb:

It’s a great simple way of stating something so important, which is engagement with the user is critical to getting that which is to be used. Right? Right. Like, and, and even when we might know a bit more than they at any given time or vice versa, facilitating that engagement right? Always produces new perspectives, new pathways. And maybe what was thought to be best in the beginning actually gets improved upon because of that effect where you’re, you’re opening up these perspectives, particularly by the folks that are most important, IE the people that are gonna be using the, the end result. That’s fascinating. So I wanna, I wanna turn this, I wanna twist this knife a little bit now. I didn’t mean to go that that violent, but how do you actively and continuously balance progress on operational necessities and strategic imperatives? Because what we were just talking about was, I think a relatively universal notion that it’s about the people in the end, getting them involved is key. But you could be getting people involved in keep the light stuff on. You could be getting people involved in crazy lofty strategic imperatives that you really wanna make progress on, but sometimes they’re ambiguous. But we, in the end, we gotta make progress on all of the these things that we’ve decided are important to our future. So how do you, how do you tackle that?

Miloš Topić:

Absolutely. I think they’re both critically important and they’re rarely in balance, right? Balance in a sense implies equilibrium. I think it’s more of a sliding scale. Sometimes it might be 50 50. And I think that’s very brief moments in time. Things change based on calendar, based on priorities, time of the year. And I think as you’re moving forward, it’s really like, I, I look at it as a pyramid that has three levels. First foundational, it’s the operational excellence. ’cause If you are coming in and you’re approaching colleagues from other areas and you’re saying, let’s create a vision and strategy and direction together, and they respond to you and say, I haven’t been able to print for two weeks. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, you don’t have the credibility, right? Right. So you have to get that operational excellence in place and build on it. Second floor or second story is when you are considered as a thought process in that design phase.

Miloš Topić:

When they go, you know, if historically it has been excluded from strategy, vision, and direction, and often brought in at step seven, once they start saying, Hey, we’re all meeting, how come IT is not at the table? Did we forget to invite ’em? Let’s make sure we invite ’em next time. Right? And then all of a sudden you become a regular member of those conversations. You’re co-creating and co-designing things. And then the peak level is the act. The one we all aspire to is the actual, actual visionary leadership. And that is when not only are you invited to co-create and design and contribute to their thoughts and ideas, but you are expected to bring forward your own when they say, this idea came out of IT or came out of technology, it’s better than what we thought. Or it’s different or it’s absolutely worthy of consideration. So it, that all takes time. Brick by brick building that wall, ultimately building the beautiful structure. And it has to be backed by evidence of progress. People have to see it on their own. It’s not enough to say, we’re getting better, we’re getting better, we’re getting better, better. If they’re not seeing them their daily lives, then you’re not getting better.

Joe Gottlieb:

So those three layers, I wanna make sure I understand correctly because I’m actually having two different thoughts here. It may be more one than not the other. That’s okay. But I’m gonna I’m greedy. So I’m, I’m curious about both. So the first, I think what you’re saying is that you could measure the, the inclusion and the partnering maturity between IT and other parts of the business, so to speak, as being measurable in three layers. Like there’s that sort of help us get the operational details right? ’cause We’re, we’re, we’re trying to get something done and something’s operating and let’s make it work and let’s keep it working. Then there’s the co-create with us, partner with us to figure out how to do what we want to do. And then the top layer is good ideas can come from anywhere, including IT. And if we keep, if we keep collaborating at this, well, like we might’ve started at layer two, good ideas are gonna come from anywhere. ’cause We’re all gonna understand each other better. And so a a seemingly technical thought might come from a business person who’s got a really good grounding in what the business is trying to do. Or you could flip those roles completely. So am I hearing that correctly?

Miloš Topić:

Yes, absolutely. Two other things that help and, and you know, I’m very fortunate to have to report to a president that’s visionary and sees the value of technology. President Mantella at Grand Valley State sees every single executive as an enterprise university leader. First, our technical functional areas are secondary. So I am a university leader who happens to be in charge of technology. I’m not a tech leader. And that takes some time to calibrate and spread across a large enterprise. But it, it brings you and gives you an honest and even seat at the table. Right? I’ve been in places and some of my colleagues who, who listen to this podcast will laugh and chuckle. When I arrived, there were conference, conference calls or meetings when there was a tech glitch. And some of them looked to me to get up and go under the table and plug in and fix it. I go, I’m not doing, that’s not what I’m here. I’m not service desk

Joe Gottlieb:

<Laugh>.

Miloš Topić:

I’m one of you. We’re equal members who are coming forward and now let’s experience what that service desk call looks like. We shouldn’t get special treatment. Let’s make the call.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yeah.

Miloš Topić:

And then when we make that call six months later or a year later, or ideally, technology’s designed in a way where there are no problems or the number of problems is minimal, you build your credibility. Yeah. And then the second thing is that I wanna say is, well this is an analogy that I’ve used many times in my life. You know, 20 plus 20 years ago, probably 20 plus pounds ago, and a couple of healthier knees ago, I used to play a lot of competitive sports team sports. And I look at technology in many respects as a very good referee. ’cause When the game is over, if nobody talks about the ref, they did a good job. Mm-Hmm. <Laugh>, we’re here to provide value to make things better, to make lives easier, not to complicate things and not to necessarily hog all the attention, time, effort, and energy.

Joe Gottlieb:

I like it. I like it. So it, it, it ideally is so inextricably part of that, what you’re trying to do, that it becomes less of a thing in its own right. Just like the way you said Dr. Mantella has set up the, your roles as, as as business leaders first and functional department heads second, which I think is really good towards driving a, a holistic leadership structure. Because that would say that you should all be more interested in accomplishing the institution’s objectives than discharging your departmental responsibilities.

Miloš Topić:

I, I think you are spot on that summary is, is a hundred percent accurate. It’s all about the university’s goals, objectives. We look at ourselves and our roles as temporary custodians of this wonderful university that existed decades before us and will be around for hundreds of years after. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. We are here for a period of time, whether it’s 5, 10, 15 years and we’re gonna do the best we can to make sure it’s further along and better for the next set of leaders, colleagues who come after us. Mm-Hmm.

Joe Gottlieb:

Love it. Okay. so then back to the, the, the greedy part of my analysis, which, which, which now I’m wondering if it still applies, but would you agree that those layers are also a way to think about the urgency? Not necessarily the pure importance, but the urgency of operational necessities? First and foremost, because they have the highest potential impacts in, in, in short orders of time. Meaning if something is wrong on an operational necessity, it’s gonna cause damage sooner than a strategic objective that’s not accomplished sooner. However, over time you do want to make room for those strategic objectives. And so you have to find time in between the efforts required to keep the most basic, fully aligned agreed operations running. Yeah. And so that, that’s part of the reason it’s so challenging to make progress on strategic objectives. And many organizations are sort of default reactive.

Joe Gottlieb:

They’re reacting to the things that they know are urgent and they can materially understand the impacts that they don’t work. And it’s, the strategic objectives are more ambiguous. They’re more lofty. There’s less pain associated with not accomplishing them. So in, in a high performance organization, you’re finding a way to make room for those things and, and, and, and achieving the balance. And sometimes the only way to do that is to properly put boundaries around the operational necessities such that what’s good enough, what service level is good enough and beyond which we’re not gonna strive ’cause we get diminishing returns. Does that make sense?

Miloš Topić:

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You, you’re spot on. Another thing that you know, that, that strengthens your comment is some of the things I said earlier, often technology or some of the other folks are not included early enough in these conversations. So if I know there’s a major, unless you really have to be first to market for a variety of reasons. When I, when I know that there’s this lofty goal of this 50 story penthouse that needs to open in 2028, but I know that now I can adjust, I can look at resource availability and dependencies. I can look at managed services agreements. Where can I bring in hired guns to help or teams of, of, you know, ninja assassins, if you will, to come in and execute things while we’re shifting priorities somewhere else. And then most importantly, it is really, really important to enable, empower, and support great group of people and leaders around you. ’cause This is not an individual sport or a game in any way, shape or form.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yeah. I like that balanced point about yes, the loftiness and the amount of time you might have could lead you to be less motivated to work it, at least related to other things that are more urgent. However, the beauty of the long-term goal is if you’re disciplined, you can hide away little bits of time, which over time amount to something great. Right. And that’s the way you nibble and make progress while affording the right level of intensity and resources to the things that are here and now. Yeah.

Miloš Topić:

Yeah. I mean I don’t wanna, I’m not sure who he was attributed to, but one of the quotes that I’m sure we’ve all heard is that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Yeah. It’s knowing where you’re going and then just building a bit by bit every single day. And eventually you’ll look and you’re there, but you’re halfway there.

Joe Gottlieb:

Yeah. Yeah. So let’s shift gears towards something that I know is happening there that’s super exciting. I want to talk about the Rep for Alliance. I actually first learned about this when I had Dr. Marlene Tromp, the president of Boise State on the podcast. But I’ve since come to understand that it was actually founded by Dr. Philomena Montella, your president during her first year at Grand Valley State, back in 2019. So tell me a bit about what it is and, and how you’ve seen it shaping student success over there.

Miloš Topić:

Yes. It, it is it’s a national alliance with a goal of changing, not necessarily changing, evolving, progressing education, educational models and delivery and content and relevance from the eyes and perspectives and input of students, both current and those who are yet to come. I mean, what a novel concept, right? Like we, we, we have all gone through educational systems in a variety of countries, states, parts of the world, and we know best what those who are coming 10, 20, 50 years after us should do. And everything else changes, right? Whether you look at major hospitality brands who could have had a different model, but they didn’t. And then competition came up and, and gave ’em a run for their money. And it still does. Or New York City Cab company could have had an app chose not to top of the hill. I’m in charge until somebody comes in and dethrones you.

Miloš Topić:

So it’s a started before I got here. It was a, an idea and a brainchild of President Mantella. And there were six universities initially. I think the Alliance is now up to eight. And folks who are interested more can go to Rep four REP, which stands for Rapid Educational Prototyping number four.org (rep4.org) and learn more and find a way how to get engaged. And I think we’re currently across these eight universities, we’re serving over 200,000 students. And they’re, we have national and local regional convenings where people come in, students bring their, bring forward their thoughts and ideas, and then we prototype them and see where they can be scaled. Could they go and become a pilot? Could they be ran into a section of that university, maybe the entire university or maybe hopefully down the road across all eight and then down the road across 80 and then 800. How do we bring relevance to the work we do, which is extremely important. I see education, but before he retired, my dad was a history professor. And I honestly believe in that notion that education is the great equalizer and it lifts many boats. Hmm. And it provides a lot of people. But we all come with different resources and different skills and knowledge and preconditions. And I don’t think we always consider those.

Joe Gottlieb:

Well, I think more and more it’s even, I think the need for this has ramped tremendously in the last 10 years for sure when we consider the technologies that younger generations are growing up with. And, you know, there’s a lot of talk about social media, but even, even beyond and before social media, the idea that we would know best as you playfully <laugh> articulated a moment ago, tongue in cheek is crazy. And so getting the actual user engaged, in this case, the student, and to un un to tap into their potential ideation, their perspectives, their standards right, is really, really exciting. And it’s really interesting to come to understand that the REP4 Alliance was had its early origins there at Grand Valley State. So let’s zoom out on that. As we start to bring this to a close. So, you know, your president, Philomena Mantella is for sure a change agent. What’s it like to work with a change agent, president like that? And, and you know, from your point of view as a, as a CIO

Miloš Topić:

It is exciting. It’s different. I’ve been in a higher education for over 20 years, probably 23, 24 now across different universities. Public, private, large, small. And when somebody comes in and is really willing to push the envelope and try something new and not default to playing it safe and not always being comfortable with, well this is okay and it’s an interesting idea, so why don’t we wait until a dozen other universities do it first and then we’ll look back at it in three years and see if it’s still relevant. If she sees value, she creates and spins up these activation teams that, that are out there in their task to be almost like scouts. They go ahead of us and test and prototype and and and iterate and then bring back and, you know, some insights, whether this is valuable and how to move forward.

Miloš Topić:

She is, I mean she’s demonstrated that through REP4. She’s a hundred percent open to collaborating across the university and across the nation, across other universities. State, local, federal governments, other entities, professional businesses. It is very refreshing at the same time on the other high, on the other hand you gotta be ready, you gotta know your stuff. Yeah, you gotta be on your toes. Yeah. Coming in and we’re like, yeah, kind of figure that out doesn’t really work because you gotta do your homework before you come into some of these conversations. ’cause If you are not prepared and you haven’t thought things through she sees through it fairly quickly.

Joe Gottlieb:

Well, to me it sounds like it comes with the territory, right? So if, you know, when you described how your organization is set up in terms of your roles, there’s a, there’s an expectation that everyone at the table is deadly serious about, about pursuing the mission of the institution. And so much so by the way, they’re willing to put it in front of their departmental responsibility, which is where you tend to manage your career. You tend to manage your value. There’s a lot of defaults that go on and human behavior and frankly professional behavior. And it sets up all too often a disconnect, a lack of alignment between what’s good for the organization and what’s good for the individual. So that to me, kind of it make it, it’s gets consistent <laugh> the fact that you better be on your toes because we’re all here for a really important reason. And if you can’t bring that every day, then you’re occupying a maybe you’re not, you know, maybe, maybe you don’t deserve the seat. Right. you mentioned in, when we first started that when you got there it was not at the table and now they are. And what have you seen during your time there about how that, how that table’s evolving? How the conversation is elevating?

Miloš Topić:

Yeah. so my role is university’s first. There was never a vice president, chief digital officer before who reported to the president. We had an assistant or associate vice president who reported under another vp an area that I probably shouldn’t comment on. ’cause It never made sense to me and it clearly didn’t make sense to the president. So when she came in, she changed it. Yeah. And one of the reasons why Chief Digital Officer has been added is my role has two primary parts. One is to lead the IT organization, and two is to, with our broader community, the president, VPs, academic deans, students, faculty, and staff reimagine the future of our university and education as a whole. It’s not just order taking position. Hmm. And as these roles have evolved, I’ve actually had interestingly enough, I’ve heard this from some of my colleagues recently that it took them some time to get used to me always asking, how can I help?

Miloš Topić:

What do you need? What is your strategic priority? Where do you want your division to be in a year or three? Because in the past they’ve worked with others who either weren’t given an opportunity to sit at that table or have been transitioned or have been limited or into a transactional relationship moving forward. And they were there to simply get the list of orders and then go execute. They were never, they were a supplier to a restaurant. They weren’t a chef creating a menu. Right. And we are chefs together influencing the menu of what we presented that evening or later that week.

Joe Gottlieb:

Nice. Well, I love, I love even that aspect of what I imagine will continue to evolve even further over time. Right? It’s like they were probably getting used to this guy’s very active. Why is he asking you so many questions? I don’t even know how to answer all these questions. Right. I’m, it’s easier for me. I don’t wanna put it, you know, I’m not saying you’ve said this, but I’ve talked to, I’ve assessed a lot of organizations and it’s easier for someone to complain about what, what the past might have looked like or, or just referred to something that, eh, you know, it’s not my department so I can’t really comment. Right. And that’s kind of also dismissive versus ownership, right. And the like. And so the fact that you’re there it probably took some getting used to for everyone involved. Right. But it’s neat to see how that is evolving and and I do imagine it will continue to do so. So let’s, let’s bring this to a summary. I’d love for you to just share, you know, what are three good takeaways for our listeners when they want to consider this topic of courageous leadership for impactful transformation?

Miloš Topić:

To summarize it into three of probably many concepts, the first word says it all. So courage and courage doesn’t mean go out there and battle the world means say what needs to be said when it needs to be said. And understand that leadership is not a popularity contest and it often gets lonely, but you have to be able to understand why you’re there. And that your decisions, your impact and collaborations that you’re building across the university are meant to advance everyone. ’cause At the end of the day, if all people engaged in a particular project or a service succeed collectively as a team, none of them individually can possibly fail ’cause they were part of the winning team. Yep. Two would be relevance. We often do things that we don’t question enough. We live our lives a particular way that we go to work and we do it completely differently.

Miloš Topić:

And you go, why are you doing that? Well that’s ’cause we’ve always done it this way. Do you do it that way at home? Nope. Do you live like that? Nope. So why are we doing at work? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? So relevance needs to be relevant to the year we live in and ideally to the year that’s yet to come. And then three be very steadfast on your North star on your mission, vision, vision, values and core beliefs and principles. Be flexible on that path and journey. ’cause Things will change. Sometimes you’ll take several steps sideways or backwards and that’s okay. Dust yourself off, stand up, smile and say, let’s do this again. So it’s having those three areas of focus I think will be helpful for everyone who moves forward.

Joe Gottlieb:

Great summary. Miloš, thanks so much for joining me today.

Miloš Topić:

Thank you very much Joe.

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:

You. Don’t 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 are 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.