Youve got to fix the people first. Insiders and new people. Everything else flows from that. And in todays complex world, nobody does anything successful alone its all about teamwork.

In these situations, nothing is more important than communication. In every direction and to every audience or constituency. At the College, this meant staff, faculty, management, trustees, students, parents, regulators and even the public. But you cant do it all at once. You can do anything you want, but not everything you want.

In some ways, convincing these guys to come to Kendall - when there were days when I wondered myself what I was doing there was one of my hardest sales. It was a little like selling people tickets to the last trip on the Titanic. But they came.

It's like childbirth. Its uncomfortable, painful, sometimes bloody, but youre always being stretched.

It wasnt really their fault that the last president left them with life preservers made out of concrete.

Of course, youve also got to follow up and make sure that the changes youre asking for get made. Excuses or apologies which arent accompanied by changes in behavior (and real results) are just insults.

You get used to it after a while. Working with him is like changing the tires on a moving car. You come in each morning without a clue as to what the day will bring. All you know is that the day will fly by and there will be screaming. Its like having a picnic at the end of the runway at OHare.

. I was pretty honest from my first day at the College that nothing was ever going to be the same. No more business as usual. No more head-in-the-sand. Hope is not an effective strategy in these situations. The only direction things go by themselves is downhill. Those days were over at Kendall.

When I arrived, the bank was knocking at the door, the College was in a crisis, and everyone in the place was afraid for their jobs. It was not a pretty picture. My job was clear: save it, sell it, or shut it down. Clear and obvious, but by no means simple or straightforward. I always say that you should never mistake a clear view for a short distance.

We had been searching and hoping for some solution for the College for years. Now I know that Howards a more secular kind of guy. He told me once that its sometimes hard to distinguish between praying and whining, but this transformation is precisely what many of us have prayed for each in our own way and those prayers have been answered.