
Don't become someone who only regrets and ends up summarizing others' success stories
Each one of us is a stakeholder of the School—an active builder of its future, not a bystander or a mere commentator. The School is vigorously promoting project-based management to encourage those with capability, ideas, and passion to fully contribute their strengths. Project leaders are not restricted by title, position, rank, or employment status. If you can do it, step up and lead!
Unlike functional offices that handle day-to-day administrative operations, each project center within the School serves as a “development zone” for a specific category of initiatives. These project centers typically start out as "three-non centers"—with no authority, no personnel, and no budget—backed only by the School's trust. However, as their projects begin to generate tangible value for the School, producing notable outcomes, the level of institutional support increases rapidly. These centers then evolve into "three-have centers," gaining authority, staffing, and funding.Conversely, if a project center fails to deliver the expected value, even one that has already grown in scale may revert from a "three-have center" back to a "three-non center.""Having" or "not having" is a variable—it can go in either direction, depending on the extent to which the projects contribute to the School’s development.
At its core, a project is about creating new value—it's an act of entrepreneurship. Whether it's innovation or entrepreneurship, both require breaking away from conventional logic and challenging established institutional norms. Disrupting accepted logic is often seen as heresy; breaking institutional norms may be viewed as rebellion. While successful innovation and entrepreneurship are widely celebrated, the path toward them is often riddled with criticism, disdain, defamation, and even suppression. True innovators tend to be "rebellious" by nature—they appear to go against the grain of the existing order. For the School’s transformation to succeed and to yield valuable, innovative outcomes, we must rely on systemic mechanisms to break through these barriers—not merely on the individual courage of our faculty.
Project centers focused on creating new value are idealists, while functional centers responsible for maintaining order and stability are realists. The former act as opportunity-driven “entrepreneurs,” while the latter operate as risk-averse “professional managers.”“Trust first, outcomes later” and “outcomes first, recognition later” reflect two fundamentally different development mindsets. In the former, risk is borne by the management; in the latter, it is pushed onto the entrepreneurs. The School must take a page from venture capital firms—assuming as much of the risk as possible itself—so that project centers can innovate and act boldly. Functional centers must understand that the ultimate purpose of upholding systems and regulations is to safeguard and support the School’s development. Without that goal, rules and systems lose their value. Functional centers that invert this logic—clinging to rules for the sake of preserving authority and power—have no place in a progressive institution.
Management systems are built upon statistical patterns—they emerge only after sufficient data has revealed consistent trends. As a result, systems are inherently reactive and lag behind change. While systems do evolve in response to shifting goals and conditions, these adjustments are rarely agile. Institutional systems are designed to enhance scale and efficiency from 1 to 99—not to drive innovation or breakthroughs from 0 to 1. Those who seek innovation and leadership cannot afford to passively wait for systemic support. In times of profound transformation, the few and fragile opportunities for early leadership can easily be lost while we wait for slow-moving institutional reforms. The more effective approach is to pursue agile iteration along the edges of existing systems. “Development is the absolute principle.” If both project centers and functional centers share this understanding—and if the School’s performance evaluation system clearly reflects it—then everyone will be driven to find creative solutions. In doing so, they will discover the dynamic optimal balance between “leading projects” and “supporting projects” according to their respective roles.
People usually go through three stages in responding to innovation and entrepreneurship: looking down on it, not understanding it, and then finding themselves too late. When new ideas and approaches first emerge, people often dismiss them outright. Only after others have succeeded do they react with surprise and astonishment. By the time they grasp the reasons behind that success and seek to emulate it, the opportunity has slipped away—and it’s already too late. If we spend all our effort merely summarizing their success stories instead of mustering the courage to innovate ourselves, by the time we’ve finished our post-mortem, some unexpected successful person could have already appeared elsewhere. Our School must not become the regretful ones who only learn from others’ achievements.