One way I love to reminisce is through music. A couple of years ago, I asked folks on Twitter to share some of their favorite tunes (tagging their suggestions with #summersongs) and compiled a couple of playlists built on their recommendations. But that’s too much work for one person. That’s why this year I’ve decided to create an open Spotify #summersongs playlist for everyone to contribute to. Here are my five picks:

1. The Cars – “Good Times Roll”

The ultimate summertime driving song. This song was on constant play during my early college years. (The whole album was, in fact.) Roll down the windows, hit the highway and crank up the volume. Try not to read too much into the nonsensical lyrics — “let them brush your rock’n'roll hair”? What does that even mean? — just crank it, accelerate and celebrate that summer has arrived.

2. Sly & the Family Stone – “Hot Fun in the Summertime”

Every time I hear this tune, I imagine kids playing in the spray of a fire hydrant, jumping and running through the water on a hazy summer day while the older folks fan themselves in their lounge chairs.

3. Mungo Jerry – “In the Summertime”

.@andrewcareaga Mungo Jerry, "In the Summertime" #summersongs @RollingStone—
Joe Bonner (@bonnerj) May 19, 2013

A classic. Thanks, Joe, for reminding me.

4. Ramones – “California Sun” 

You’ve gotta have a little bit of California surf music to go along with your summertime playlist. Who better to cover a classic surf tune than four leather-clad punks from Queens?

5. Cheap Trick – “Surrender”

I have no idea why this reminds me of summer. Maybe because at the time Cheap Trick’s live album, At Budokan, came out, I was spending as much time as I could going to outdoor summer concerts. I never saw Cheap Trick at an outdoor concert (but I did see them indoors a couple of times). Anyway, it’s a great tune for the season — in my mind, anyway.

Here’s the start of the Spotify playlist. If I set it up right, you should be able to add your summer tunes to it. The only requirement: Nothing from Grease. Thanks.

Photo by hi-phi on Flickr

The CASE 2013 Summit for Leaders in Advancement is all about disruption.

If there’s one topic that causes great consternation and hand-wringing in the halls of academia these days, it’s the topic of disruption in higher education. We read blog posts about it. We watch videos about it. We even read entire books about it.

This summer, you’ll have a chance to learn from some of the leading disrupters and chroniclers of disruption around. So disrupt your summer, find out what’s next in the world of disruptive education, and join me in San Francisco July 14-16 for the CASE 2013 Summit for Leaders in Advancement.

I was privileged to be part of the advisory team that worked with CASE staff to develop the conference program. I think we came up with a winning event. We have a great lineup of keynote presenters, including:

• Jeff Selingo, a Chronicle of Higher Education editor and author of this spring’s must-read book for higher ed marketers, College (Un)bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students
• Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera
• Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy
• Guy Kawasaki, who is — well, he’s Guy Kawasaki, that’s who!

In addition to leading speakers on disruptive innovation, we’ve also disrupted the typical CASE Summit format. We’ve taken a page from the TEDx playbook and mixed in some fast-paced TED-style presentations. We’re calling them CASEx sessions.

I hope you’ll have a chance to join us for the summit. If not, you can always follow along with the #casesummit hashtag.

We heard from a lot of great speakers about leadership, and much of what I heard either inspired me or made me think more about ways I could be more effective as a leader. Those few hours on Friday have given me much to think about.

For me, the best takeaway of the day came from the first presenter: a minister named Andy Stanley.

He said:

"Complexity is the enemy of clarity" – #AndyStanley #cfaleadercast—
Andrew Careaga (@andrewcareaga) May 10, 2013

Complexity is the enemy of clarity.

Those of us in the communications business know this, right? We learned from Strunk and White to “Omit needless words.” We try to break complex thoughts down into shorter, single-thought sentences. We strive for simplicity.

But as the work we do becomes more complex, it’s easy to lose sight of the need for clarity. It becomes shrouded by the fog of too many projects, too many priorities, too many new stakeholders to worry about, too many audiences to be reached with a single message or vehicle. (The typical higher ed home page is one example of how complex things can get in our world. Contrast the typical higher ed home page with Google’s, and the issue is very clear.)

Things may be even tougher for higher ed communicators than those in other fields. (Another speaker of the day, John C. Maxwell, pointed out that “Educators make the simple complex. Communicators make the complex simple.”) But judging from the buzzword-laden press releases that come from the corporate world, it looks like things are tough all over for communicators.

No matter what our sector is, complexity is the enemy of clarity.

But complexity is inevitable. It comes with growth.

Think about how you do your job these days. Now, compare it to five years ago. Consider the role social media plays in your marketing compared to its role in 2008. Look back 10, 20 years and you’ll see a tremendous difference. Remember your institution’s first web page?

Much has changed and grown more complex, hasn’t it.

Stanley said: “Growth creates complexity, which requires simplicity.”

The need for clarity has never been greater. We need more clarity in how we think, communicate, lead and work with others. We need to strip away all the complexity and figure out the clearest, best-understood approach to any project or task.

An experiment

Here’s an idea (stolen from Andy Stanley’s talk): Take a current project you’re involved in. The more complex, the better (for the purpose of this exercise). In the context of that project, try to answer these three questions:

1. What are we doing?
2. Why are we doing it?
3. Where do I fit in?

If you’re really ambitious, try to answer the same three questions for your department, or your institution.

Those are three simple questions. But clearly, simple doesn’t mean easy. Answering them will take you quite a bit of think time. I’m still trying to answer them for my department, my university and myself.

P.S. – For anyone interested in reading more about what Andy Stanley, John C. Maxwell and all of the other speakers had to say, a consulting firm called The Malphurs Group has posted a great summary of all the Chick-Fil-A Leadercast 2013 presentations.

Photo © Chepatchet | Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images

And with commencement, of course, comes a phalanx of speakers, each of whom toils over finding just the right words to inspire and motivate the newest crop of college graduates and hope a few of their words resonate with the listener. (I remember just one part of the speech by Linda Ellerbee, who spoke at my commencement from journalism school. She said something like, “You don’t need a journalism degree to practice journalism. But I guess it doesn’t hurt.” Thanks, Linda.)

So for this week’s Friday Five, I thought I’d share a few quotes from some of my favorite blogs posts of the week. Maybe they’ll be even more inspiring than whatever commencement address you’ll get to sit through this year.

1. “Reach is not a measure of engagement. It is a raw score. In sports—except for golf—the person or team with the highest score always wins, but it isn’t necessarily true in social media. Your number of followers is just a ground floor indicator, if you will.”

– C.K. Syme, writing about measuring social media activity in Going Beyond Reach in Social Media Engagement

2. “Few benefit from the growth of distance learning more than people with military experience. They value knowing that if relocated for work they may still further their educations from wherever home is, without having to retake courses or contend with separate admissions and accreditation standards.”

– Eric Brooks, in Why U.S. News Ranks Online Programs for Veterans

3. “Shoes are more than their design or color or whatever. They ground us. They plant us on this earth, and they help us stay up straight. They point where we’re supposed to be moving.

– Tonya Oaks Smith, writing about a recently created tumblr (higheredshoes) in Walk in My Shoes

4. “The worst advice for the college essay is ‘write a college essay.’ If you sit down to write for a nameless, faceless and highly judgmental admissions reader, your essay will not capture who you are and what you believe.”

– Rick Hazelton, in a May College Checklist for Juniors in the New York Times’ college admissions blog The Choice

5. “Change is scary and painful. It takes us out of our routines and comfort zones and into uncharted territory. It makes us feel uncertain, insecure, and (quite frankly) a little bit dumb.”

– Erik Gruber, in 8 Obstacles to Change and How to Overcome Them

Quotation mark image via MatthewRad on Flickr.

Numbers matter in social media.

Dan Zarrella makes this clear in his popular Science of Social Media presentation. In the simplest of terms, if you want to get your message out to as many people as possible, then the bigger your potential audience, the greater the chance you’ll reach a bigger group of people. (This assumes your audience is paying attention to you, and that assumes they find your content worth paying attention to, sharing and acting upon. And that ties back to your credibility among the audience and their level of trust in you and your message.)

But that’s just potential reach, and as C.K. Syme points out in a recent post, reach is only a starting point. But it can be “the beginning of great things.”

“Raw numbers don’t give us a good mirror of effectiveness,” she writes, “but they are one of the indicators.” She suggests social media managers consider other measures, such as potential reach and share of conversation, and she points readers to some tools and resources that can help them do that.

Flickr photo by Mervyn Chua.