Navigating Change from Teibel Education

Somewhere this weekend, someone who runs a university finance office will spend their Saturday rebuilding a set of trail steps they'll never climb. No one's paying them; the hikers who use those steps in three years won't know their name. They do it anyway — and they'll tell you it's the clearest thinking they do all year. That instinct runs under this whole conversation. Robyn Pennington — Chief...

In 1997, Garry Kasparov lost a chess match to IBM’s Deep Blue. The easy story was that the machine had won and the human had lost. The age of human superiority in chess was over. Kasparov saw something different and asked a more useful question: What if the future of chess was not human versus machine, but human plus machine? He called it advanced chess, or centaur chess. And when skilled amateurs...

In a moment when higher education finds itself pressed on all sides—demographics, policy shifts, the financial realities of running institutions—this live conversation from the EACUBO Annual Meeting offers something increasingly rare: clarity grounded in humanity. Howard Teibel invites Bill Guerrero and Nico Washington to reflect not on strategy alone, but on the personal philosophies that have sh...

At first glance, the idea seems almost too ordinary to merit investigation: every workplace has a layer of tasks no one celebrates. Coordinating committees. Taking notes. Ordering refreshments. Keeping the machine running. These responsibilities rarely lead to promotions, and yet they quietly shape careers. Laurie Weingart, Carnegie Mellon professor and co-author of The No Club: Putting a Stop to...

There are moments in a career when a small interaction—almost forgettable at the time—reshapes how a person thinks about leadership. For Mitch Wein , one of those key moments came during a meeting about selecting an architect, where a simple vote turned into a lesson about transparency and the value of explaining the reasoning behind our choices. That experience became the backbone of how he appro...

Leadership inside a professional community rarely looks like leadership on an organizational chart. It’s quieter, more relational, shaped by volunteers who balance full workloads with the desire to support their peers. In this episode, recorded live at EACUBO 2025, Howard Teibel talks with Romayne Botti and Sara Thorndike about the transition from one chair to the next and what it reveals about ho...

In 1877, the first college "major" was coined at Johns Hopkins. The catalog for that year is a dense read, though short; courses toward the baccalaureate only required two years of study and then—presumably—a job. That catalog has hardened into something else today: a system that prizes credentials over curiosity, standardization over discovery, and completion over connection. In this episode, we...

For years, finance in higher education has worked quietly behind the scenes—essential, but rarely seen as a force for change. Budgets got balanced, reports got filed, and institutions moved forward... slowly. But what happens when that model starts to crack? When rising costs outpace tuition revenue, and the math that once worked no longer adds up? It’s a moment of reckoning—and an opportunity. In...

The opening speaker at the 2025 NBOA Annual Meeting will be Kyle Scheele, who is known for cooking up wild ideas that many people back for laughs and for learning. NBOA President and CEO Jeff Shields discusses with Scheele the process behind some of his outlandish projects and about being creative in the workplace. “I don’t want people to be like me,” said Scheele. “I want them to tap into their o...

This week, Pete Wright and Howard Teibel dive deep into the topic of weak communication practices and their consequences in organizations. Howard, drawing from his extensive experience working with teams and leaders, shares insights on how miscommunication often stems from focusing on passing information rather than producing action and exploring assessments. The duo discusses five key consequence...

Being of service . This is at the heart of the roles we play in higher education. At the 2024 WACUBO Annual Conference at Disneyland in California, leaders and practitioners in administration came together to explore how they can Dream, Lead, and Inspire others to serve the mission of our industry. Lupe Valencia, Deputy Chief Financial Officer and Chief Facilities Officer at the University of Texa...

We are thrilled to present this episode of the Net Assets Podcast, a partnership between NBOA and Teibel Education Consulting , with NBOA President and CEO Jeff Shields and Teibel Education President Howard Teibel. This episode marks the first in what we hope will become a collection of some of the best and most illuminating interviews dedicated to you, independent school business leaders. As NBOA...

This week, Jeff Shields, President and CEO at NBOA, joins Howard Teibel for a conversation on the future of independent schools ahead of the 2024 NBOA Annual Meeting & Business Solutions Showcase. Howard and Jeff speak about issues of integrating telework, the sustainability of post-pandemic innovations, and the critical importance of community and collaboration in sparking transformative idea...

As we continue our gradual emergence from a certain hibernation over the last three years, the opportunity to engage with our colleagues is more critical than ever. Brad Bacca, President of Western Colorado University and the Western Association of College and University Business Officers, sits down this week with Howard Teibel as they turn their attention to the upcoming WACUBO Annual Conference...

NBOA President and CEO, Jeff Shields, joins Howard Teibel for a conversation on indepenent school business, finance, and operations, all in preparation for the association's 25 Anniversary Celebration in Los Angeles, February 19-22. What’s top-of-mind for business officers coming out of the pandemic after three years? How are finance professionals addressing the ongoing financial issues pre-K-12 i...

Unbeknownst to us in February 2020, we were about to go into a certain kind of hibernation, one forced on us by the circumstances of our time. Two years into this, we may be seeing the beginning of the light at the end of the tunnel – learning how to live with this global pandemic and bring back the kind of social connection we value and need. Jeff Shields, CEO of the National Business Officers As...

Joining Howard Teibel today in conversation is Dr. Nathan Grawe, distinguished teaching professor of the social sciences at Carleton college, where he has served on the faculty since 1999. You might have seen Nathan's work as it relates to the framing of the enrollment cliff, something that's been exacerbated and accelerated in this last year. As we find ourselves beginning to emerge out of lockdo...

As we turn our energy to 2021, we can begin to catch a glimpse of getting on the other side of this crisis. Independent school leaders have implemented innovations over the last nine months that they could only dream about prior to the pandemic. The question now is can they sustain these changes with intentionality.  Jeff Shields, CEO of the National Business Officers Association and Howard Teibel...

At Teibel Education we are committed to having your people be connected with a higher purpose. As we look to 2021 and the hope for greater ease and less uncertainty, we bring you a podcast on learning. How do you produce active listening in a colleague, student, or peer? Active listening is a central tenant to the capacity to learn and acquire new skills. In this podcast, we explore learning with...

Mission in Action Today on the show we bring a demonstration of living a mission. Our guest is Doug Brown, President of UMass Memorial Community Hospitals and Chief Administrative Officer for the UMass Memorial Health Care system. He had a vision for their community - looking in their own backyard and anchoring their institutional mission through local investing, local procurement, and local hirin...

This is an important conversation to listen to the whole way through. First, ask yourself: what’s the highest purpose of your organization?  Likely you have an answer, something you’ve been told, or something you’ve absorbed through your experience over the years. But maybe the greater truth is that we need to discover our organization’s purpose with our people.   When we move to higher purpose, w...

Heather Jarhling is a rising senior at Colby College in Waterville Maine. She — like her peers — is facing an unsettled future. This cohort spent the last three and a half months running to keep up with a shift to online education that many of them did not sign up for. Of course, no one signed up for the changes sweeping education as a result of the pandemic. And the rising voices around racial in...

As we begin to pivot in our organizations from the necessary critical decisions to get through these first few months and on to living with a new way of working, how do we not fall back into business as usual? Our people are looking not only for direction and stability but a sense of connection to a larger purpose. At the heart of people feeling disconnected is the absence of a certain kind of lea...

In our lifetime, Higher Education has not seen the kind of global shock to its system that emerged over a two-month period. We anticipated a systematic and orderly shift in the next few years to address the rising cost of education, changing demographics, and a growing adult population choosing to come back to further their education. Those institutions that had already invested in a new kind of e...

Many of us listen to podcasts in moments of leisure or capacity to separate from work. Sometimes a topic comes along that is central to what we’re facing right now. This week, we are very fortunate to have educator and futurist Bryan Alexander joining us for a conversation around scenario planning in the era of COVID-19. Bryan recently has been a leader in a crowdsourced operation to document the...