Thank you for that introduction, and thank you for having me with you for this conference. I am quite appreciative to be back after an absence of about five years—back in the water, so to speak, and out of the frying pan.

You have heard that I recently stepped down from my position as Provost of North Carolina State University. Some of you know what a provost is, but others not. Well, a provost is the person who has to jump out of the frying pan when the heat gets too hot. The provost is also the chief academic officer of the university; so all 33,000 students, 2,000 faculty and their admission, courses, degrees, graduation and eventual happiness were my concern. And, in my case, also carrying the title of Executive Vice Chancellor, the person responsible for strategic planning, budget reductions and firing people. So, here’s a piece of advice—don’t hire the governor’s wife, even if she is ideal for the job.

Enough of that, however. Because, as they say, when a door closes a window opens. And like magic, just after I resigned, Doug Austen called to ask me to fill in a window that had opened in your program.

The only problem is that I don’t really know what I can offer you. My activity level in fisheries has been declining regularly over the past decade, to the point now that my fingers are almost unwrinkled and my inside of my waders have nearly dried out.

Doug asked me to talk about leadership and, more specifically, the need for strong leadership as you advance towards your 2010 target for measuring the success of the National Fish Habitat Action Plan. I accept this task with considerable trepidation. What can a person who has just had to vacate a major leadership position offer you about leadership? Its possible, though, that my experience over the past year, when being a so-called leader has been quite difficult, might make me a better, more honest speaker about leadership than I would have been a year ago, when everything was hunky-dory.

So, I am happy to offer some perspectives on the leadership that it will take to move the restoration of fish habitat to a new level of success and performance. I can offer in that regard my experience in trying to move several institutions of higher education, and particularly North Carolina State University, to new levels of success and performance. Universities and fish habitat are alike in many ways really. Fish habitat is all wet, and so are university administrators. Fish need water, and college students do, too, albeit with a little malt and hops. And everyone knows more about managing fisheries and running universities better than the people paid to do it.

More importantly, both universities and fish habitat are embedded in a complex world over which we can exert little influence. Universities often get criticized for having graduation rates that are too low; our six-year graduation rate is about 70%. But when we look at what keeps students from graduating, we find a web of causes involving money, part-time jobs that creep into full-time, changing majors, family matters and, once in awhile, trouble passing calculus. There is no silver bullet to catapult graduation rates from 70 to 90%.

The same is true, I know, for restoring and conserving fish habitat and, more importantly, for restoring and conserving fish populations and communities. Water quality, land development, catastrophic weather events, legal authority, budget opportunities, dams and other barriers are just a few elements of the matrix into which fish habitat is embedded.

So, what do we do about it?

In preparation for today, I reviewed the Internet documentation about the National Fish Habitat Action Plan. It is a marvelous program built on exactly the right principles of both content and operation. I congratulate you on the concept and the execution to date. Now, with one year left to get to your benchmark, I encourage you to act on those principles in ways that will require your highest commitment to leadership.

And to help stimulate your thinking and action, I’d like to offer three pieces of advice—three action verbs—that I know we need in the university and that you need in restoring and conserving fish habitat.

FOCUS

The first action verb is FOCUS. Focus is stated explicitly as an action in your key activities: “Mobilize and focus national and local support for achieving fish habitat conservation plan,” and, more specifically, to “focus existing resources to increase effectiveness in achieving results.”

Focus is perhaps the most difficult of our planning concepts because, in a retreat from leadership, we often design our strategies to be umbrellas rather than directions. A set of commercials for Traveler’s Insurance is playing now on television, in which a jolly English gentleman uses a giant umbrella to come to everyone’s rescue, whether the problem is a flat tire on a bicycle, moving a group of carnival acrobats across a river or some other similarly important crisis. We design our strategic plans often to be just such umbrellas, so we can gather up our various programs or projects or habitats under a few comprehensive listings or phrases. At NC State, we went through a strategic planning process and a strategic marketing process that led us to select five “focus areas.” They are producing leaders for the state, nation and world; environment and energy; educational innovation; health and well-being; and economic development. Sound good? Yes. Everyone at the university is happy about this because they all can find shelter under one of those five umbrellas. But does it help us focus our resources on what is most important? No. Does it provide guidance for deciding what to do and what not to do? No. But it keeps everyone out of the rain.

I’m convinced that if we, as leaders, would focus our efforts, throughout society, we could be so much more effective. If we decided to fix our failing inner-city schools really well, one at a time, we really wouldn’t be leaving any child behind. If we systematically focused our foreign aid to one nation at a time, we could lift that nation permanently out of poverty, and then move on to another. If we could decide to be really good at either football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball or baseball, maybe we could win a national championship. But, I digress…

As leaders of this national effort, you must focus your efforts on restoring fish habitat on a relatively few places. If you do so, you have the potential to make each of those places truly remarkable and self-sustaining so that then you could move on to do the same in other places.

In that regard, too much attention to the word “national” in the National Fish Habitat Action Plan may cause a problem. The breadth of the word “national” suggests that comprehensive coverage across the country is imperative. I think that it is not; rather I suggest that performance in a selected set of habitats is more important than comprehensive coverage across the country. I note from the Internet that you want 12 partnerships established by 2010, that you have 9 already operating, and that 11 more are in the works. And that information is probably old and there are more aspiring partnerships in the works. I don’t know the capacity of the program, but keeping 12 partnerships active and productive sounds like plenty; another dozen sounds like a lot. I encourage you to stay the course and resist the temptation to endorse new partnerships just because a group has come forward.

PRIORITIZE

The second action verb will help you focus; that verb is PRIORITIZE. You have that sprinkled all over your action plans, as well. You talk about priority areas, priority habitats and priority species. Good for you! In a real way, prioritizing is just the tool for focusing. You choose what to focus on by setting priorities. Ah, it sounds so simple.

Ah, it is so hard. Few of us are really willing to stand up and say “You’re in, you’re out.” This is truly where leadership comes in. I’ve found in my academic administrative career that people actually want the provost or dean or department head to make decisions—because they don’t want to make them. Of course, they still retain the prerogative to complain about the decisions you’ve made, but they want you to make them. Why? Because it is hard to decide.

A few years ago, in the last budget crisis, the president of the University of Nebraska made the decision to close a couple of programs on his campus—a department and a museum, as I recall. The faculty were outraged; they demanded participatory decision-making. The president told them that they could make the decision—and if they came up with a plan that they liked better, he would resign. After working on this problem for awhile, the faculty came back and told the president they liked his plan and he could keep being president—and could they now go back to their classrooms and labs, please?

In the current budget crisis, North Carolina State University is going through the same trauma. For the last year, I’ve been co-leading that process; when we started, we needed to cut about $25 million out of our permanent budget; now it is up to about $50 million. To be transparent and participatory, we have held every kind of meeting possible with faculty, administrators, and students to get their ideas about what to cut. We started by asking them to set priorities, but that didn’t work. Everything was important, and no one wanted to judge what was more important than what, what should be in or out.

So, we decided to go one step deeper and develop criteria that we should use to judge whether something should stay or go. We made a list of about 30 criteria, grouped into six major areas, that would guide our decisions. Is a program core or auxiliary? Are we good at it? Can someone else do it better? Are we efficient at doing it? Those criteria have been invaluable because they allowed us to let the data drive the decisions rather than the opinions of the decision-makers.

What hangs some people up on criteria is that they think the criteria all need to have numbers associated with them. Not true. Most of our criteria have yes-no answers; well, actually, they have yes-no-and-sort-of answers; we are academic after all). Let me illustrate with one of the bullets in the action plan regarding fish habitat partnerships. The bullet states that you should “address fish habitat conservation at a scale necessary to make a difference.” That statement can be converted into a series of questions—yes or no questions even—that allow this to be a useful criterion in your prioritization process. Consider these choices:

·  Does the habitat support the entire life-cycle of at least one priority species?

·  Is the habitat of sufficient size that the water quality conditions follow predictable patterns across the entire year?

·  Is the habitat small enough that the value of your actions can be isolated from other environmental variables?

·  Is the habitat in a watershed that will have minimal land disturbance activities over the next decade?

I know that you in the process of choosing priority locations for focusing your efforts. I strongly encourage you to continue to do that, but to do it based on explicit criteria and explicit responses to those criteria for each watershed.

Let me add an important cavet here—the criteria questions and the answers inform the decisions, but they don’t make the decisions for you. Leaders make the decisions, and there is still great scope within any set of honest criteria for the leadership to exercise the judgment that got them into leadership in the first place.

And let me mention one more aspect of leadership in this regard. I have always told the people with whom I work that their value is two-fold. One is as a member of the team who understands best the individual unit they lead, whether it be the College of Natural Resources or admissions department or diversity programming. But the other value is as a university statesperson who can and will put aside their individual units and think on behalf of the entire university. This second value is what vaults an organization from mediocrity to excellence.

Each of you in the leadership of this initiative comes from an agency or organization with a particular stake in the effort. Each of you also comes with a passion for a particular ecosystem, species or set of species. But you are rsvh here for the greater good of making a national fish habitat program successful overall and for a long time. You must, I believe, be willing to put your own interests aside for the benefit of focusing on the highest priority projects.

I believe that being explicit about the criteria and then being explicit about your judgment of each habitat’s condition relative to the criteria can help you get past your individual interests to the greater good. So, once again I ask you to stay the course on your willingness to not only talk about priorities but also to act on them.

COLLABORATE

The third verb is collaborate. I know you hear that one all the time, and you are, of course, devoted to this idea by your very presence here today. But humor me while I give you a somewhat different perspective on collaboration.

My experience in natural resources tells me that we generally approach collaboration by asking others to join us in our passions. We want to help them understand us, and then we believe they will value things as we value them. High value on fly rods, low value on ipods. High value on water falls, low value on shopping malls.

How’s that working for you so far? Thought so.

We face the same problem in universities. We want to tell prospective students about our wonderful faculty and majors and research laboratories. But they want to know about our gym and the food in the dining halls and if they can tickets to the Carolina game. We did a study at NC State a few years ago to find out why students who turned us down did so. We found out lots of things—lots of painful things—but one was particularly revealing. We make almost all entering students choose a major and get going in that major right away. Students who decided to come to NC State said that one of the things they liked most was that they got to enter a major right away. Students who decided not to come to NC State said that one of the things they liked least was that they had to enter a major right away So, we got the students who thought like us, but we didn’t have a chance with those who thought differently—who wanted to explore rather than get down the road. Our consultants told us, rightly, that if we wanted those students we were going to have to create an opportunity for them to come to NC State without declaring a major. A bunch of them also said that they weren’t coming because they got into Carolina—good riddance to them.