Wylie ISD: Plugged In for Education

Chris Lamb

Wylie ISD: Plugged in for Education

A pioneering school district lassos the bandwidth it needs.

THE CHALLENGE: The Wylie Independent School District (ISD) in Texas covers 41 square miles, includes fi ve campuses, and serves a population that is 13,000 students strong. The district was eager to use the Internet to bring new teaching tools into every classroom. However, providing a computer for every student would have been enormously expensive—and hard to sustain as the district population continued to increase.

“So the decision was made to create a bring-your-owndevice (BYOD) program and let students bring devices they already had into the classroom,” explains Chris Lamb, CIO for Wylie ISD. That included every student, from grades K through 12. But offering BYOD to more than 13,000 students meant Lamb needed more bandwidth than the 50 Mbps fi ber circuit he had. In 2011, Lamb decided to upgrade and switch providers.

THE SOLUTION: Time Warner Cable Business Class (TWCBC) was chosen to provide a 100 Mbps fi ber circuit and 10 Mbps Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) to Wylie ISD. The DIA service delivers symmetrical, private, and redundant connectivity for school districts that require fast speeds to maximize performance of applications.

The switch to TWCBC’s DIA was made easier by the fact that TWCBC is an E-Rate Eligible Telecommunications Provider (ETP). That meant that a portion of the DIA connectivity was supported by funding from the federal E-Rate Program, which reimburses school districts and libraries for Internet, telecommunications services, and equipment, based on the percentage of the student population receiving free and reduced-cost lunches.

E-Rate funding enabled Wylie schools to increase bandwidth so they could make the BYOD program available to students who own devices. Now Lamb is able to focus his limited budget on purchasing laptops and tablets for students who don’t already have them. That ensures a more inclusive and enriched learning experience for all.

Ultimately, as more students came on board, Lamb realized the district needed even greater performance. He upgraded from a 100 Mbps circuit to 200 Mbps and, in 2014, to 1 Gbps. Each time, the upgrade process was as easy as making a phone call to TWCBC.

THE RESULT: Students and teachers have experienced increased classroom engagement and more teacher-student collaboration. Lamb says the reliability of TWCBC’s DIA service is as great as any he’s experienced during his 30 years in the technology fi eld. Between that stability, and the increased bandwidth, “We don’t hesitate to say every student can use Internet-based apps,” he says. “When faculty looks at programs or new learning initiatives to add to the classroom, we look for cloud-based options now rather than creating material in-house.”

Thanks to fi ber-based DIA connectivity, Wylie ISD’s teachers and students now rely on Google Apps for Education, which securely integrates word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and graphic tools. This change has allowed students and teachers to take collaboration and learning to a new level, Lamb says. “A lot of Wylie ISD teachers create assignments in Google. The students then create documents and share them with the teacher. The teacher opens them up and makes comments or notes. It’s very powerful.”

Wylie ISD, named for a nineteenth century Texas pioneer, is determined to continue to explore the boundaries of twentyfi rst century education. “Technology helps us increase the speed of what we do,” Lamb says. It also paves the way for pioneering ever-richer ways of learning.

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HOW TO SIMPLIFY

DECLUTTER YOUR STRATEGY, YOUR BUSINESS, AND YOUR MESSAGE

In business today, complexity rules—in technology, in global connectedness, and in the speed of change. In fact, three quarters of midmarket CEOs anticipate greater complexity in business, but only about half are confi dent in their ability to manage it, according to an IBM Global Business Services study. Here, three experts tell SOLVE readers how smart companies are simplifying—and reaping the rewards.

SIMPLIFY YOUR

STRATEGY

For the last 15 years I have been obsessed by this nontrivial question: Why is it that successful people and organizations don’t break through to the next level?

It’s an important question for CEOs of companies (and for the rest of us as CEOs of our own lives) to answer. The answer I have found, hidden in plain sight, is: success.

I fi rst noticed the phenomenon while working with executive teams in Silicon Valley. When they were focused on the correct few things, they had success.

But with that success came the “right problem” of more options and opportunities. These opportunities distracted the leaders from the focus that had led to success in the fi rst place.

So—exaggerating the point in order to make it—success can actually become a catalyst for failure. It can lead to what Good to Great author Jim Collins has called “the undisciplined pursuit of more.”

The antidote to this is what I call the disciplined pursuit of less but better.

This is a simple enough idea to understand. But refl ect on your own life and ask yourself, “How easy is it to fall into the undisciplined pursuit of more?” and “How hard is it to lead my organization toward the disciplined pursuit of less?” Everything in modern life leads us to the fi rst. Almost nothing leads us to the second. It is only a very particular kind of leader—what I call an Essentialist—who can do it.

Consider the opposite kind of leader—a Nonessentialist. This is the highly driven, highly dispersed, and distracted leader we see everywhere today. It is the CEO of a 3,000-person company who recently announced he has 107 goals for the organization this year. That absurd number is only surpassed by the company’s 700 products. The company has so many products, in fact, that when I asked the marketing team about them I found that not one of them even knew what all the products were. I see similar examples everywhere.

Behind that example is a management myth that has been shared so deeply for so long that people don’t even question it. Stated succinctly, the idea is this: if you can fi t it all in you can have it all. The problem is it happens to not be true. It is a lie.

We have even changed our language to make the idea seem as if it is true. For example, the word “priority” came into the English language in the 1400s and it was singular. It meant the very fi rst thing. It stayed singular, very sensibly, for the next 500 years! Only in the 1900s did we begin to speak of “priorities.” So while we can fi nd ourselves feeling that everything is a priority, literally by defi nition, it can’t be.

Essentialists operate out of a very different mindset. They assume that almost everything is meaningless noise. They see their priority role as discerning between the trivial many and the vital few. For example Jack Dorsey, CEO of Square, has said he sees himself as the Chief Editor of the company rather than the Chief Executive.

Essentialists don’t see focus as one more thing to do; they see it as the essence of their leadership. It isn’t what they occasionally do, it is who they are. It is their disciplined pursuit.

The situation for CEOs is that life is fast and full of opportunity. The complication is they think they have to do it all. The impact of this is that they will end up making a millimeter of progress in a million directions. My position is that CEOs can make a different choice: they create space to discern the vital few from the trivial many. As a result they can lead their organizations to break through to the next level.

Greg McKeown is the CEO of THIS, Inc., a company whose mission is to assist people and companies to spend 80 percent of their time on the vital few rather than the trivial many. He is the author of the bestselling Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. This article is condensed from an interview with him. THE POWER OF THE DAILY POST-IT Every night, write down the top six tasks that are essential to get done tomorrow, in priority order. Cross off the bottom fi ve. Take the top item, write it on a Post-it note and put it on your computer. Schedule the fi rst two hours of the next day to work on that one thing. Repeat often enough that this becomes easy and part of your routine. One entrepreneur I work with started this daily routine and has built his $300,000 business to a $400 million business. He completely subscribes to the idea that the discipline of this routine is what got him there. —Greg McKeown

SIMPLIFY YOUR

BUSINESS

Where does complexity in business come from? Here are four different sources, and actions that leaders can take in each of them.

ORGANIZATION:

ELIMINATE LAYERS, INCREASE SPANS.

Many companies, from the size of GE on down, periodically go through exercises of reducing layers between the CEO and the first-line people. Layers of management have the effect of a game of telephone in which messages get completely distorted.

“Increasing spans” means that instead of two to four direct reports, managers get seven to 10. When only a few people report to an executive, he or she tends to get into the details of their work. When more people report to someone, he or she has to let them do their jobs.

Bausch & Lomb underwent this kind of streamlining process several years ago. The company’s leadership was able to accelerate growth, reduce costs, and get the company to the point where it ended up selling (to Valeant Pharmaceuticals) for far more than anybody expected.

PRODUCT:

REDUCE PROLIFERATION. Most companies like to add products and variations, but don’t like to take any away. Yet every time you add more products, you have to have more marketing material, training, warehousing, financing, and so on.

After a while, companies have some products that are very profitable, others a lot less so. Companies that have reduced complexity look at tailend products and just get rid of them. They stop offering them, sell them to somebody else, or migrate customers to better versions of the products.

Offering more is not always better, for customers or business. Furniture maker Herman Miller learned that with its award-winning Aeron chair. Nineteen customization steps in the ordering process led to 140 million possible configurations for the chair. However, an analysis revealed that only 4,000 options were ordered with any frequency. The company judiciously pared back the available options—and greatly reduced its operational and SKU complexity.

PROCESS:

BECOME STANDARDIZED. You do need a standard way of getting things done. This applies to manufacturing, of course, but it’s equally applicable to governance, budgeting, and other areas.

For example, many mid-sized companies don’t do a very good job of standardizing how they go to market. A sales person sells first, then has to work with the manufacturing people to get the order done on time. There’s unnecessary variation and complexity. Standardization means that before you sell, you have the info about whether and when the product is available.

A smaller example is the way people file expenses. Do they have to have them approved by somebody else? The more people you put in place to check other people’s work, the more complexity you’re creating. Is it possible that you can trust people to follow certain rules and only put in for legitimate expenses?

BEHAVIOR:

START WITH THE BOSSES. Often, it’s managerial behavior that creates complexity. Take, for example, the way we structure meetings. Many times, it’s not clear whether people are there to get information, make a decision, or simply to socialize and eat a bagel.

Get to the point. Send your presentation out ahead of time with the message, “Here are the two questions we want to discuss in the meeting.” Some companies have adopted a rule that no meeting can last more than 30 minutes; others have taken chairs out of the conference room.

CEOs have to be careful about where they focus their attention. Are they asking for more information? That can lead to people creating reports that the CEO doesn’t do anything with.

I worked with one CEO of an information services company who went to department operating review meetings. He learned that people were over-preparing because they wanted to look good in case he asked a question. When he cut the number of meetings he attended in half, he was able to spend more time with customers and with his board—and he freed up a whole lot of his employees’ time.

Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and was an executive-in-residence at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Simply Effective: How to Cut Through Complexity in Your Organization and Get Things Done. This article is condensed from an interview with him.

SIMPLIFY YOUR

MESSAGE

BY CARMINE GALLO

Ionce interviewed billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson on the topic of pitching a business. As CEO of Virgin Group, overseeing some 400 companies, Branson gets pitched constantly. His take: “If your idea can’t fit on the back of an envelope, it’s rubbish.”

Far too many business professionals indulge in this “rubbish” by making their product or brand message too long, complicated, and convoluted. If

you can’t tell someone what you do or how your product will change his or her life—and do so in one short sentence— take your pitch back to the drawing board and keep working on it.

Apple never releases a product without a one-sentence description to go along with it. For example, when Steve Jobs introduced the MacBook Air for the first time, he said, “It’s the world’s thinnest notebook.” In one sentence, he told you nearly everything you needed to know.

It takes work—and boldness—to make messages simple and clear. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” said Leonardo da Vinci. So be sophisticated. Keep your presentations, messaging, and pitches short and simple. Here are three ways to do so.

FOLLOW THE 10-40 RULE IN PRESENTATION

DESIGN. The average PowerPoint slide has 40 words, which is far too many words for the mind to consume in that context. The next time that you create a presentation deck, try to keep your first 10 slides to no more than 40 words, total. This will force you to tell a story with pictures and images instead of text alone. In the neuroscience literature, this concept is called the picture superiority effect, meaning that

your audience will more easily recall your message if it is presented in pictures rather than text.

We can only carry about three “chunks” of content in short-term memory.

CUT YOURSELF OFF AT 18 MINUTES. The famous

and ubiquitous TED Talks, which present new ideas and research to a global audience, are no more than 18 minutes long. Why? According to TED organizers, that is the ideal length of time to have a serious discussion without putting an audience to sleep.

Offering too much information results in cognitive backlog, meaning you’re giving your listener far more than he or she can retain in short-term memory, according to Dr. Paul King, a professor at Texas Christian University who studies communication and persuasion.

Cognitive processing—thinking, speaking, and listening—are demanding activities. “If you’re really concentrating, critical listening is a physically exhausting experience,” King explains. “Listening, for an audience member, is more draining than we give it credit for.”

So if you’ve got a point to make, don’t beat it to death; make it short and simple so your audience has a chance of retaining it and storing it in long-term memory.

STICK TO THREE SUPPORTING MESSAGES.

We can only carry about three “chunks” of content in short-term memory. Great writers know this. Thomas Jefferson guaranteed us three rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He didn’t outline 22 rights. The simplest way to create a simple message is to begin with a headline and support that headline with three points (features, benefits, and so on).

Many people will never heed this advice, and that gives you an advantage. Business professionals often refuse to simplify their messages because “everything is important.” If you, on the other hand, keep your message short and sweet, your sales will grow; make it complicated and you’ll lose customers.

It’s that simple.

Carmine Gallo is a popular keynote speaker, communication coach, and author of the bestselling book, Talk Like TED: The 9 PublicSpeaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.