Publication Type: Web Article
Year of Publication: 2006
Dewey, a Virginia teacher, says that this book’s message can be encapsulated in
the sentence, “the effective leader is a connected generalist whose leadership
and communication are ongoing, strategic, and future-focused.”
Marx, G. (2006). Future-focused
leadership: Preparing schools, students and communities for tomorrow’s
realities. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
by Gary Marx
2006; 208 pp/paper
Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
ASCD Stock Number: 105009
by George Dewey
High School Physics
Fairfax County, VA
Here are three scenarios:
Assembled by a corporation averaging more than twenty
such brainstorming sessions per year over the past three
years, a rocket scientist, a neurosurgeon, a lawyer, and
a mathematician tackle the question, "How can surgery
be improved?". This company has 500 patent applications
in areas as diverse as optics, e-commerce, mobile networking,
robotics, and biotechnology, and has purchased thousands
of other patents. It operates under the philosophy of
merging the input from a group of interdisciplinary experts
in a horizontal manner distinct from most industries where
such expertise tends to be "siloed." "We think that if
we specialize in inventions, we can do it better than
people who do it as a sideline," comments its CEO.
The new principal of a large high school stated as his
primary goal to reduce the effective size of the school
through improved and open communication, including a commitment
to making the community a place where professional learning
would take place. During the summer following a year of
much greater visibility and openness by an administration
which seemed intent on greater teacher input, hundreds
of lockers were installed along the walls of the science
department thus precluding any use of the area for laboratory
activities as in the past. This was done with no advance
consultation or communication with the department whose
academic program would be impacted.
A new elementary school will open its doors to students
for the first time this fall. Located within a large district
in an affluent part of the state, this school will have
no overhead projectors, no TV monitors, and no black/white
boards. Instead, teachers and students will use (indeed,
must use) DVD players, the United Streaming video service,
and computer-driven "smartboards"—and also communicate
with the smartboards via student "smartpads."
For those of us who become rattled when our CVS or supermarket
rearranges its shelves or prints a calendar Friday through
Thursday instead of Sunday through Saturday, Gary Marx provides
little consolation. Future-Focused Leadership, with
its education-focused subtitle Preparing Schools, Students,
and Communities for Tomorrow's Realities, presents the
necessity, indeed the obligation, for those of us involved
in education leadership to address the future needs of our
students who, after all, will be living in futures most of
us can only dimly perceive.
The message of Marx's thesis can be stated in a single sentence:
The effective leader is a connected generalist whose leadership
and communication are on-going, strategic, and future-focused.
Furthermore, such facilitative leadership can only arise
from a solid core of trusting relationships and teamwork from
a diverse group of stakeholders who are involved in constantly
listening and scanning the environment. Following the author's
own suggestion, we might reduce his thesis to the slogan,
"A leader's vision keeps the connections."
The journalist Charles Wells once described his preference for
the terms "enlightened" and "obstructionist" over the hackneyed
and outdated "liberal" and "conservative." In this spirit
Gary Marx, a former senior executive for the American Association
of School Administrators, might be said to describe an ecology
of education which is enlightened rather than obstructionist.
The need for consistency and reliability in a leader's approach
toward enlightened leadership seems an obvious requirement
for success along with the seeming paradoxical ability to
adapt and change in response to environmental challenges in
what Marx calls "the organization."
The three scenarios mentioned above are all real. The first, taken
from the cover story of Business Week (7/3/06), describes
the future-focused leadership of Nathan Myhrvold and his company,
Intellectual Ventures. The second describes the action of
a principal who had violated some of Marx's tenets of strategic
communication: that it be continual, all-encompassing and
informed. The third describes the types of adjustments in
attitudes and approaches to student learning which teachers
must make in schools of the future. Yet this third example
also underscores the tensions between traditional and nuanced
approaches which teachers and students in a future-focused
educational community must address.
Marx's book serves as an introduction to the impact that a rapidly
changing culture is having upon our learning communities and
offers an outline of strategies and plans to use in the adjustment;
an adjustment, incidentally, which must be continual as opposed
to those "five-year self studies" with which we are all familiar
and which, once completed, usually sit on a shelf, ignored,
until the next study is mandated.
In this emerging future which Marx foresees top-down mandated
approaches are to be replaced by the "flattening" or "horizontal"
form of leadership advocated by Thomas Friedman in his recent
book, The World Is Flat, or by Gayle Moller and Anita
Pankake in Lead with Me.
Future-Focused Leadership is divided into five parts:
The Connected Leader, Tools and Techniques for Scanning the
Environment, Creating a Vision of the Future, Future-Focused
Communication, and Moving Forward. Part Two is by far the
most extensive (40% of the chapters) and centers around 16
trends the author had previously identified as most directly
impacting our political, economic, social, technological,
demographic, and environmental futures (16
Trends: Their Profound Impact on Our Future, Educational
Research Service, 2006). After identifying and exploring issues
stemming from these trends, Marx offers a valuable variety
of tools which could be used or modified for "scanning the
environment," a vital and continual process as Marx describes
While both the urgency and relevancy of the author's message are
undeniable and present at all levels of the educational community,
we often get the impression that his thesis has been adapted
from the business world. Marx's references to "the organization"
ultimately find a focus on education, but in reading Chapters
3, 4, and 6 one gets the impression schools are something
of an add-on. To be fair, Marx certainly succeeds in making
the case that educational leaders must draw on the surveys
and advice from a diverse community of which schools are only
a part—albeit a key part. The anticipation of trends
and constructive responses to them is to be preferred over
reactions to events and circumstances after they have occurred.
Despite Marx's emphasis on the "convening of diverse groups" in leaders'
surveys of the landscape, one gets the impression this deals
more with the community within which schools operate than
with teachers and students themselves. We see this in the
composition of his "Future Council of Advisors," a sounding
board which Marx recommends and employed in responding to
the two rounds of questionnaires for his book. Marx's own
Council aided the author in identifying and analyzing trends
and issues which he intended to address. Of the 34 members,
most are heads of futurist organizations or national associations
or boards. About one-third are (or were) superintendents of
school systems and only two are teachers, one of whom was
a National Teacher of the Year who gives a single example
of an educational issue alongside a total of 30 remarks by
The significance of teacher leadership, as outlined, for example,
by Katzenmeyer, Moller, and Pankake in Awakening the Sleeping
Giant (Corwin Press, 2001) and Lead with Me (Eye
on Education, 2006), is not a part of Marx's radar scan of
his educational environment. In the book text, we find a mere
mention of the importance of "engaging all staff" in environmental
scanning, plus his twice stated (beginning and end) "gentle
reminder: because of educators' important role in society,
anyone involved in education is, or should be, a leader."
Principals—often described by others as key leaders in
accomplishing change in a school—are missing altogether
from the "Council of Advisors" and only appear in the index
Marx's observations that "the new coin of the realm is information
and relationships," "the vertical is becoming increasingly
horizontal," that learning objectives must include preparation
for employment on an international scale, and that it is necessary
to engage students in real world problems all focus our attention
on the breadth and the depth of the relevant learning experience.
This reminds me of a quote from Friedman's The World Is
Flat: "Instead of IBM giving you a guarantee that you
will be employed, you had to guarantee that you could stay
employable." [Alex Attal, former IBM engineer.] Could not
the same be said of the mission of our schools?
In Marx's book there is much to help guide and focus a future-focused
leader, but one needs to overlook the excesses of language
and "futurese" inherent in any gathering of futurists: hyperbole
like "genius," "eloquent," "warp speed," "increasing exponentially;"
cliches like "seismic shifts," "quantum leaps" (misapplied,
actually), "culture of excellence," "winning school climate,"
"fluidity is in, rigidity is out;" or the esoteric acronyms,
PEST, STEEPV, SWOT, SOFI. After giving us many techniques
and tools for scanning our environment, including an example
of a State of the Future Index (SOFI), Marx might have been
more helpful had he provided an example in Appendix C of a
State of Education Index, rather than the suggested activity
of making one up.
Finally, a reaction: One needs a sense of perspective, persistence,
and proportion in all of this. Nature, and evolutive growth
itself, exist in a state of dynamic equilibrium, the necessary
tension between stability and change. Using another metaphor,
we exist in our life-voyage upon a sea with tricky shoals
and currents, and we need an anchor as well as wind. For better
or worse, we live, as some have said, in a "byte culture"
with ever-shortening intellectual, psychological and emotional
attention spans. The "news hours" are rare compared with "say
it in 15 seconds and move on." In contrast with knowledge
and information, understanding does not come on the fly. As
we scan the horizons for significant breezes, we need to be
informed and discerning. And we need be wary of stumbling
over obstacles at our feet while our eyes gaze upward at awesome
futures. After all, boards still need to be shaped, bricks
still need to be laid, lawns still need to be mowed, and diapers
still need changing.
In Future-Focused Leadership values are mentioned only
in passing, and these of a utilitarian nature, not of ethical
or moral dimension. Like the laws of nature, some values upon
which we struggle to build a life do not change. The Law of
Conservation of Mass and Energy will remain unyielding regardless
of any future we select. Might this not be true as well of
the principles we choose as foundation for our futures through
education, such as the value of stewardship?