High Expectations, Short Fuse: The “Intangibles” Facing an Asian American President

Abstract

Securing a Presidency/Chancellorship is hard. Staying a president is even harder. So many critical variables are often beyond one’s control and awareness. You can be smart, productive, a team builder, effective, and fun to be with: all the positive aspects of leadership. But campus expectations of you, a community’s expectations of you, your values, their values, their prevailing attitudes, or their sense of your “personality” become the “intangibles,” which influence your success and failure. Understanding and confronting these intangibles is critical to success. Ignoring the intangibles is risky and will often sink a presidency. This chapter hopes to clarify many of the assumptions of leadership that are won and lost by an awareness of the dynamics of these “intangibles.” What follows is a discussion of the “intangibles” that have challenged and rewarded the presidencies of the author. Failing to recognize and deal with “intangibles” raises the risk of failure.