The Path to Quality

J. Irwin Miller was born in Columbus in 1909 and graduated from Yale in 1931. As the great nephew of William Irwin, one of the founders of Cummins, Miller grew very naturally into the family business. In 1934, he was asked to come home (from another family business venture in California) and lead Cummins Diesel, the family's struggling engine manufacturer that had yet to make a profit.

He was able to turn around the company and by the early 1950s built the manufacturer to $100 million in revenue. That is when Cummins hit a wall. “There simply wasn't enough world-class engineering talent to keep up with demand.” He was faced with a business problem and a community problem. Miller quickly understood and stated the real problem: “How can we recruit and attract the best engineers and their families to a town they've never heard of and one that has lousy schools?”

Exacerbating that problem, Columbus was growing so rapidly (from the World War II baby boom) that the Columbus school district would have to build an elementary school every two years in order to keep up with the demographics. Compounding the problem even further was the fact that it had been so long since the last school was built, that the school board had no experience with the building process. Like many school boards in the Baby Boom explosion, they wanted something that could be built quickly and cheaply. So they selected a contractor who proposed a prefabricated solution.

It was a disaster. As Jack told me, “Despite using prefabricated construction the school ran over budget and did not open on time. And, within the first year it ran into severe maintenance problems. It was an embarrassment for the board and the community. This failure, however, was both opportune and timely for Miller to introduce some of his thinking on the value of investing in quality and a process for building strong communities.”

Miller lived by a cardinal rule: “It is expensive to be mediocre; Quality has always been cost effective.”

Incredibly, this corporate CEO, facing a shortage of talent, realized that the real problem was, in fact, a very human one. “. . . if you don't have a healthy community, it's impossible to have a healthy company.” It begins with healthy schools. That's because good designers and engineers tend to also be good citizens and loving and responsible parents. They want what is best for their children—just as Lisa and I did back in the 1990s and just as you did, do, or will in your child-rearing years. It is a universal heart cry; our children are our messages to the future. We care about them and the message they bear.

Miller knew that a real community is one in which the people build things together. That's why he believed and preached “stakeholder engagement.” In other words, leaders must respect all the stakeholders—those with valid interest or concern—in any business venture, crisis, community, or grand quest. Failing to do so is to be guilty of Gandhi's relational insight: “Whatever you do for me but without me, you do against me.”

So he took the components of the problem and crafted “The Offer”: if the school board would choose an architect from his list of five world-class designers, Cummins would pay the architect's fee.

They accepted his offer.

After interviewing all five, the board chose Harry Weese. He designed the Lillian C. Schmitt Elementary School, which opened in 1957. The school generated incredible attention, not only in Columbus or in Indiana but nationally. It sent a message that Columbus was a community serious about investing in the future and more importantly in their kids! It was a community doing something quite different. And, yes, diesel engineers around the world noticed.

Of course, because of the baby boom, the need for new schools kept growing. Immediately after the first school completed, the board came back to Miller for a second school, Mabel McDowell Elementary. Miller and Cummins did it again. Through the Cummins Foundation Architecture Program they have continued to do so.

Jack told me that the experience and relationship with Miller and Cummins shaped something in the citizenry of Columbus. The magnificent school designs and the exposure and interaction with some of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century stirred other leaders to follow. The library, churches, city buildings, park landscaping, fire station, and businesses saw the value of great design. They also motivated the learning and collaboration that great design demands.

Miller always saw architecture as a proxy for culture. Or, as Winston Churchill said (and Miller often quoted), “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” In other words, architecture shapes and reinforces the values, attitudes, behaviors, and habits that provide the glue for a thriving community. So, in Columbus, these projects created a reservoir of social capital¹ that is so vital to a democracy.

One of the lessons found to be common in schools that experienced transformation is that culture is the work that creates engaged learning. Culture, not reform, is the primary issue. And this may be why the Education Machine so often fails to change the atmosphere. Reform initiatives come across as direct blunt instruments, like using a bulldozer to cultivate orchids. But a healthy culture will naturally produce engaged schools kids who get very absorbed in learning.

When Achievement Drives Culture

When I interviewed Leo Linbeck, CEO of Aquinas Companies and advisor to the KIPP Academy, I learned that he is passionate about the future of education in America and is a strong advocate for rigorous charter schools.

Linbeck can knock your shoes off with his confident and bold assessments, such as what he said to me when we spoke about the future of education:

“History shows that no monopoly has ever reformed itself.” And, “Education used to be a proxy for the character traits needed for individuals to self-govern in a democracy: traits like honesty, hard work, and accomplishment. When education went from being a proxy for good citizenship to an end itself, we essentially taught kids how to cheat in order to succeed.”

Those two heavy pronouncements were a lot to absorb in the fifteen seconds Leo stated them. I asked him to expand on the second one.

He answered, “Our schools went from a learning culture to an academic achievement culture, synonymous with testing. Kids aren't asked to learn the material; they are asked to pass a test. We are teaching kids techniques for taking tests and how to answer questions.”

In other words, school has become a proxy, not for the character qualities of citizenry, but for learning how to game the system. As Linbeck spoke, I felt like I was getting an eye exam. I left the conversation wearing a new pair of glasses that brought the world into new focus and clarity.

Sometime later, I wore those “glasses” when I interviewed Candi Dearing, principle for Sarasota Middle School. Candi cut to the real issue very quickly by telling me a story about her grandson, Elisha.

“Elisha was home working on an assignment. Dad was helping. They were memorizing the states and their capitals. So I looked up the benchmark (teacher guidelines for what successful achievement looks like) for this assignment and it said, ‘Locate and identify the states, their capitals, and territories of the U.S. on a map.’

“I asked Elisha, ‘What is a capital and why do you need to know it?’

“‘So I can pass the test.’”

Candi continued, “We're demanding memorization, not comprehension. We're not taking that simple step to move kids into the kind of higher level thinking that they will need in this world. In our middle school my teachers and I will routinely crouch down next to a child and ask:

‘What are you learning?’

‘Why are you learning it?’

‘Why is it important?’

‘How does this relate to what you've been learning in class?’”

The Lesson of Volkswagen and Teaching to the Test

Is there a connection between a five-year-old memorizing states and capitals in order to pass a test and Volkswagen's cheating on emission testing? Your answer may reveal the glasses you wear.

The drive to become the world's biggest carmaker, while saddled with emission standards that “everyone knew” were unobtainable, led to VW's choice of one very logical course of action: cheat to pass. After all, almost everyone has learned to game the system. You know, cheat in order to play on the team, use sexual favors to achieve acceptance to a prestigious college, or slip some cash to the building inspector. Perhaps it is that same gaming the system that led a car manufacturer's need for success to outweigh the moral tension of the moment. Or, did that tension even exist?

We all know it; these corrosive elements begin early and invisibly. But they end up polluting the entire reservoir that is everyone's drinking water. That is why blame is such a futile exercise. Where do you place blame when it is the culture? Do we blame the teacher who gave Elisha the assignment? The curriculum developers who create content to meet the benchmarks? The test creators, the policy makers?

When dealing with the Education Machine, from the inside, it seems that no one person sees how any component relates to any other. So we either blame the last person on the assembly line, the one who took the test, or the one who gave the test. Or, we blame the person at the top because, “They should have known!”

And indeed they should have except for the fact that they are wearing the wrong glasses.

That is why Columbus, Indiana, strikes me as such a rich, and increasingly rare, island of character and integrity. J. Irwin Miller had—and lived—such great insights about the importance of quality and stakeholder engagement. Did Volkswagen consider their stakeholders? Did they demand quality?

You see everyone's values in the way they either build, or destroy, social capital.

We will walk through the Columbus process for building coalitions in detail in the chapter titled “Leading Change at Your School.”

When Quality Drives Culture

J. Irwin Miller believed that when people build things together, they reveal their collective quality of spirit, temperament, and character in the quality of the buildings they construct. He knew that excellence of character would always reveal itself in built things.

What is built and what endures represent the true test of human character. What does it say about a town of less than 50,000 citizens who embraced the value of partnering with so many luminaries of twentieth century architecture? While many metropolises hired the same architects to create trophies to elevate their presence on the global stage, Columbus saw an intrinsic worth in the activity of building great structures to serve and uplift its citizens.

It does take vision to create a culture driven by quality. But, it is not the kind of vision reserved for a few or for the privileged. Remember Miller's cardinal rule: “It is expensive to be mediocre in this world. Quality has always been cost effective.”

Jack Hess and other city leaders have taken these lessons for building social capital through collective design, and created a framework and organization to steward their legacy. For example, the nonprofit Institute for Coalition Building (which Jack leads) now works in partnership with other cities and organizations to share Miller's thinking and the lessons from Columbus's 60-year experiment in participative democracy.²

“. . . When Business Leaves but the People Stay”

Company towns were common in the years after the war. Many captured a unique snapshot of a past way of life in America. In that time and in those cities, America was predominantly a blend of rich and poor living together and sharing the public commons. They benefited somewhat equally from investments in schools, parks, libraries, and other community initiatives. The kids played on the same sports teams and attended the public school together. They were neighbors, not strangers. All of that began to change when the tide rolled out.

Beginning in the late 1970s the fortunes of the auto, steel, and tire industries, along with unionized labor, began a steep and rapid decline. Emerging from World War II that industrial triad, and their communities and culture, had so profoundly shaped our nation that it represented the face of America and the American dream to the rest of the world. The communities concentrated around the Great Lakes and sprinkled throughout the Midwest slipped into their deepest postwar recession. After a generation of growth, stability, and a rising and strong middle class, there was no graceful transition.

In his book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, Robert Putnam paints a vivid portrait of the diminishing landscape of opportunity for American kids. He uses his own hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio (“sadly typical of America”), to frame his portrait.

Port Clinton, a suburb of Toledo, benefited from that town's mid-century rise in prosperity. In the 1950s Toledo was the home of seven Fortune 500 companies. Chrysler, Jeep, and GM also had a large manufacturing presence in the town. Putnam begins the story at Port Clinton's peak in 1959 when kids of different socioeconomic status had relatively equal opportunities for success. In tracing its decline, he examines how the fortunes of kids followed two divergent paths based on family income. The future for kids in low-income families would rest primarily on their schools for a ladder up and out of their conditions. LeeAnn, the principle in one of these towns, commented, “What can you do when the business leaves but the people stay?”

When Putnam writes that, in that time, most people had “social airbags,” he describes a culture that was once common in factory towns, newly minted suburbs, and ethnic urban neighborhoods. Those airbags seemed to deploy evenly to kids from any part of town.

I know about those airbags: I had many opportunities to take the wrong path in life or check out of school. But the community airbags—neighborhoods, schools, coaches, police, Boy Scouts, and churches—inflated, saving me from disaster. When towns like Port Clinton lost those airbags, the road to success for low-income kids became a harrowing ride down a mountain road that had no guardrails.

Part of the problem with the company towns was their dependence on the automakers in Detroit. The company towns popped up all along the distribution pipe of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler dollars. But they didn't have a large and locally grown business community. The towns were tied to, and dependent upon, the fortunes of a remote industry. The shift to imported vehicles reduced, sometimes suddenly, the money in the pipeline. Then, because they had an insufficient presence of local businesses, the reduction of income turned the towns into sinkholes.

Responding to Change

In many ways, Columbus fit the profile of the Rust Belt towns, but with one big exception. Columbus was a real, integrated, community of stakeholders. They were neighbors. But the town was also hit by the same economic turbulence of that time. “Between 1989 and the early 1990s, Cummins survived near-bankruptcy and a hostile takeover attempt in a dramatic story of a community coming together.”³

The company was two weeks from missing payroll when a local bank lent Cummins $30 million to get through to the other side. Because they were neighbors they had a deeper understanding of the risks and the stakes. The state, on the other hand, refused to provide any help to a $6 billion company. How does a small town bank take on such a high level of risk while the state of Indiana looks the other way? Because of the great deposit of social capital, Columbus was (and is) a “neighborly town.”

Unlike Port Clinton, Columbus's community and business leaders rallied and, through private investments of $1.7 billion, absorbed the shock and spurred enough entrepreneurial growth to add 9,000 jobs that other companies shed. While the unemployment rate in the region was 14 percent, it was 2 percent in Columbus.

The town's leaders knew that the ground had shifted. They clearly saw that it was time to re-examine their economic strategy and reinspect the foundation in education that had made Columbus so strong and allowed it to prosper over the previous 30 years.

Becoming Future Ready

Columbus has evolved from a city known for great schools and architecture to a future-ready, integrated learning community. When learning is cultivated and permeates the community, it generates a willingness to come together, talk openly, listen intently, think creatively, and mobilize. This is called social capital; we will circle back to it many times throughout this book. It is an asset that, when built up, is available to be drawn upon in times of crisis. It is often the only asset a community can draw upon when a crisis like the collapse of the Rust Belt strikes.

Columbus drew heavily against that reserve in the 1980s and came out of the crises determined never to take their investment in kids and schools for granted again. Learning is encoded into their DNA. Schools are integral components of community life, not isolated and elite silos.

Our MindShift team visited other communities that came to recognize the untapped and uncultivated assets of community and rapidly moved to rebuild and restore their social capital. They worked to tear down the barriers between business, community leaders, parents, and schools; they placed kids and schools back into the center of their growth strategies. They faced the same challenge that J. Irwin Miller faced: How do you attract good families to unfamiliar towns with mediocre schools?

The Columbus story resonates because it is not about heroics. Miller's legacy is often confused with the architectural wonders spread across the town, or the success of Cummins. But those factors actually point to something deeper. Miller often said, “The process is more important than the product.” His vision was a process and a framework that transcends individuals and the idiosyncrasies of communities.

The process explains that communities work when they discover what they share in common and when each citizen feels a stake in the community's success. That mindset takes a broad and long view. It takes more time on the front end, but delivers positive outcomes, and delivers them for a long time.

In 1972, Miller's view of stakeholder engagement exploded into public in his rebuttal to Milton Friedman's declaration that “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits . . .”

Miller countered, “While some still argue that business has no social responsibility, we believe that our survival in the very long run is as dependent upon responsible citizenship in our communities and in the society, as it is on responsible technology, financial, and production performance.”

The Columbus archipelago has not only preserved clarity of what it is to be good neighbors, but their near-death experience in the fallout of the Rust Belt gave them a new impetus to capture the cultural and organic treasures of their heritage. From this experience, they have also worked to make it a repeatable and scalable process for others.

Reform versus Culture

Culture is the real issue. It starts there. Culture is what everyone (in a company, family, school, association, an athletic team, or any other group) does when leadership is not present, watching, or directing. It represents, not the rules, but the collective set of “shared basic assumptions.” Culture is the “habits of the heart.”

Culture is rooted in community; it begins with people who have a common journey into common challenges, and who are focused on a common cause. But culture does not happen by accident and it can't go unattended. For towns like Port Clinton prosperity was the result of a rising tide, not a common cause. When crises hit there were no reserves of social capital to draw upon.

If we understand the real issue, we will also understand the real challenge. Schools reflect the community. Reform does not work when it assumes that schools are standalone places where kids get educated. Columbus understands that schools are both a microcosm of the community and catalysts for community enrichment. The Community School movement is just one sign that the tide is shifting back, “It's about bringing community back to our school systems and bringing schools back to our community,” says Norman Browning, leader of the group, Local Schools for Local Children.⁴

The Reform Machine often hits communities with rigid “strategies for success” but soon finds it is no match for the existing culture's deep-rooted habits.

Sadly, the Reform Machine is in a hurry. As a result, it has created a low trust and high stakes culture. It operates in an artificial window of about three years before miracles must manifest or heads will roll. It brings us full circle to the dilemma of the Volkswagen syndrome.

Learning rarely happens outside the context of a safe and stable environment where teachers are emotionally connected to, and provide support and hope for, their kids. Columbus has preserved the lessons of civic engagement put into practice in the 1950s and still adapted with the times. It is impossible to navigate the future when our sense of the past is lost. Resilience and insight depend on that perspective. Vision not only means an inspired look into the future it also means to see the present, clearly and realistically. There could be no iPhone without an exiled Steve Jobs, just as there could be no Midwestern Mecca of Architecture without a failed school project.

The Choluteca Bridge of the Information Age

The Choluteca Bridge in Honduras is famous for two reasons. In 1998 it survived Hurricane Mitch in almost perfect condition, withstanding a year's worth of rain during seven days of that severe storm. Mitch also moved the Choluteca River away from the bridge and into a new channel, and erased the roadways on either side of the bridge. The bridge now stands as a curious monument to a powerful hurricane, but goes nowhere.

The next chapter, “Gutenberg to Google,” describes a similar disruption considered by many as consequential to the invention of the printing press. Digital media has served as a disruptive innovation that has swept past one historic information-based enterprise after another, with one exception—education. The Education Machine is still a bridge for many but is in danger of becoming a curious monument to an antiquated notion of learning.