December 2019: School Administrator
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Staff
Editor's Note
The Brilliance of Jim Collins
WE’RE ENORMOUSLY grateful when a leading author — in this case, Jim Collins — agrees to sit for an extended interview or to contribute an article to challenge the thinking of our readers.
Collins, for at least the third time since publishing his widely cited best seller Good to Great back in 2001, readily accepted an invitation to be part of an issue of School Administrator. He acknowledges an abiding interest in the leadership of K-12 schooling and uses every reasonable chance to better understand the driving forces in education today.
For this issue on leadership survival and sustenance, we asked Larry Nyland, a veteran of 27 years as a superintendent, to engage Collins in conversation about his newest work, a 40-page monograph titled Turning the Flywheel, and some related issues.
Of course, the limits of space in our print edition means we can capture only a portion of Collins’ appealing analysis. So I encourage our readers to look at the lightly edited 5,500-word version of the conversation that appears with the magazine’s online edition.
There you will read what Collins learned from a study he helped to conduct of superintendents and school principals in adverse environments. “I noticed that they were, either consciously or not, building flywheels,” he says. “One of the things that really stood out in that work was the idea of getting a consistent approach rather than a new silver bullet every three years. Get something that’s going to work over time and build flywheel momentum within it.”
I hope many of you will want to read more.
Jay P. Goldman
Editor, School Administrator
703-875-0745
jgoldman@aasa.org
@JPGoldman
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