‘You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.’
Friedrich Nietzsche
Martin Bean: leaning into disruption
On 31 March 2020, the first of 263 days of COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne, Australia, I was five years into the role of Vice Chancellor at RMIT University, one of Australia's largest universities. (‘Vice Chancellor’ is what universities like to call their Chief Executive Officer). As lockdown began, I found myself pondering a big question: What do you do when over 11 000 staff and 80 000 students are relying on you as their leader, and in your gut you fear your tried and tested leadership playbook is suddenly made obsolete by a global pandemic?
Let's be clear. I am not one to panic, and this wasn't my first rodeo. Half a decade running The Open University, the largest university by number of students in the United Kingdom, and General Manager of Worldwide Education Products for Microsoft are two of many other leadership roles I've filled. I know markets, finance and technology, my DNA is in leading positive disruption at scale, and I can adapt as well as anyone. But this was different.
To borrow the earthquake metaphor I'd learned from living in California, this was ‘the big one’.
The viability of a 133-year-old institution threatened by the complete closure of campuses and borders. Thousands of students stranded. Australia, ...
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