A-HEC: One of the things A-HEC is interested in is identifying transformational change. Can you share with us any specific changes you have made, or are in the process of making, that have helped to transform Walden University?

PP: Yes, in the last four years, Walden has been completely transformed. There is practically no way in which we have not been transformed and it speaks to our history. Four years ago, we had 1,800 students and about 125 faculty. At the end of November 2005, we had 23,000 students and approximately 1,000 faculty. I came to the university at the time that Laureate Education was making an investment in Walden and taking operating control. Walden had for its first 30 years been held privately by two different families, both of them really passionate about the mission, but not really interested in expansion. When I came, I certainly wanted to build on our heritage and maintain the quality of our learning experience, but as part of a publicly-traded company, our objective also was to expand the institution in a for-profit sector that demanded it.

Our founders, Bernie and Rita Turner, and Harold Hodgkinson, were visionary and great social activists who started the Walden experiment. They came back to visit Walden in the summer of 2005 and spoke at our commencement in honor of the 35th anniversary. They were just dazzled by the growth of the university, by its transformative expansion, but also by the fact that while we had expanded, we also had stepped up to a very different level of academic excellence; we had increased our quality while we increased our size..

A-HEC: When we speak about “transformation” (versus more evolutionary change) we mean a very fundamental or deep change in culture, shared meaning, values, or mission. It sounds like you have scaled at an amazing rate but many or most of your values have remained constant. Were there any key cultural changes that enabled your successful scaling?

PP: Most of our transformations have come from going from small to large, and many of them are cultural. An important change that I have mentioned during the interview is identifying processes and continuously improving those. On the cultural front, this means that we are no longer driven by a crisis mentality, where individual players can be heroes by running in at the last minute to solve a problem that no one had anticipated. Further, in small organizations, there are usually many “generalists” who can swap in and out of roles, helping out as each new crisis emerges. As we have expanded, we have staffed the university with a talented team of experts from the academy, from the business world, and from the world of technology. These talented and creative individuals bring to bear years of experience and professional expertise. And we are all charged by our CEO Paula Singer with working closely together in order to succeed for our students and our shareholders. To do this, we must be equally successful in serving our students as learners, as consumers, and as end-users, all the roles that they play in life. This means that we check our egos at the door and all work respectfully and collaboratively together. As you can imagine, this approach to our organization has also created an important cultural transformation where strength in all areas is equally valued. No single group, such as the academics, or the business folks, or the technology gurus dominate. I think that we can all point to numerous organizational failures in the world of distance education over the last decade; in each case, I think that you would find that the organization was not equally good at academics, business and technology. In each case, one dominated at the expense of the others, and the success of the organization.

Copyright 2006 Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness.