Michael Gordon-Smith is the founder and chief executive of an education management organization serving multiple charter and private school systems. Before that he was a superintendent, a principal, and the executive director of a start-up K–12 school that opened with two thousand students and a twenty-seven million dollar budget.
He has led more than two hundred staff, carried capital planning and bond financing, and answered to boards, regulators, and fifteen hundred families at the same time. He has also stood on the other side of every one of those conversations as a classroom teacher.
He holds a PhD in English from Emory University and has held faculty appointments at four institutions, teaching everything from developmental college writing to graduate seminars. That combination is unusual and it is the point: he spent twenty years trained to find where an argument stops holding, then ten years running the organizations those arguments get made in.
He speaks to employers rather than educators. The sector was the laboratory, not the subject: what a leader owes before asking for discretionary effort is the same question in a factory, a hospital system or a services firm, and the answer is easier to see somewhere the money could never solve it.
His first book, Go First: What Leaders Owe Before They Ask, is forthcoming.
