Learning from Big Bird
[This is the second of a 2-part series on my learning from the DMGroup Superintendent Summit.]
Many educational leaders reach outside the educational literature to get insights from the business community. One of my favorite books is Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, by Amy Wallace and Edwin Catmull and published by Transworld Publishers in 2014. The book tells the story of Pixar, the animation studio that developed new technologies for animation and joined forces with Disney to establish a powerhouse in the entertainment world. While we, in education, operate in a very different environment, we can learn some lessons about supporting innovation by looking at the moves Pixar made that led to creativity and success. Likewise, Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t, published in 2001 by William Collins, taught us, among other things, that the most successful companies find those things that they can be the best at, rather than being mediocre at a lot of things.
Day 2 of the DMGroup Superintendent’s Strategy Summit began with a case study about the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) – the home of Sesame Street and Big Bird. John Kim, DMGroup’s Chief Executive Officer and Founder and professor at Harvard University, led a discussion of the role the CTW played in establishing television as a medium for educating young children, their struggles as television evolved from a free, one-TV-few-choices industry to the on-demand, for-cost media in the modern, digital world in which we now live, to the rebirth of CTW after Jeff Dunn took over as CEO in 2014.
It felt a little unfair to judge the decisions made by the former CEO, who faced significant challenges resulting from the rise of video-on-demand and new entertainment choices for children and their families. We know how it all turned out. On the other hand, the changes taking place in the entertainment industry were significant and operating as if nothing has changed is a recipe for disaster. Decreasing revenues, dwindling support of public television, combined with a lackluster internal culture led one senior executive to note, “Jim Henson wouldn’t recognize the place” (as reported by John Kim, 2020).
Jeff Dunn, who had previously been the COO of Nickelodeon Networks, a for-profit company, came on board as the CEO of Sesame Workshop (formerly known as the Children’s Television Workshop) in 2014. Again, we were asked to judge the steps taken by the CEO when we knew, of course, how these decisions faired. Dunn had made a number of decisions that propelled SW to improved financial status and greater success. Some decisions, such as the move from public television (which only covered 10% of the cost of producing Sesame Street) to the for-profit HBO, were controversial but necessary to keep Sesame Street afloat. Of course, Sesame’s story hasn’t really ended at all and there’s further decisions to be made that may either stymie progress or propel them to success.
In many ways, we in education are operating the same way we have been operating, despite a dramatic changes that are going on around us. Whether or not we make appropriate changes will decide our fate; will our decisions stymie our progress of propel us to success?
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