The two most important words in community college faculty and administrative lexicons these days are institutional effectiveness.

For more than a decade, pressure for community colleges to prove their worth has been building among legislators, local governments, business, industry, community leaders, students, employers of community college graduates, taxpayers, and the media. This has created a new approach to leadership.

As Ronald Heifetz explains in Nieman Reports and The Harvard Business Review, "We put huge pressure on people in positions of authority to treat adaptive problems as if they were technical, when, in fact, leadership, in the sense of mobilizing people to tackle tough problems, often requires raising the tough questions rather than providing the easy answers."

Embracing the Tiger, a new book from the American Association of Community Colleges' Community College Press, raises the tough questions about institutional effectiveness and provides a variety of interesting answers.

This book is the result of a team effort by Dr. John E. Roueche, Dr. Laurence F. Johnson, Dr. Suanne D. Roueche, and their associates. They've added their voices to those of the leading experimentalists in the field of community college institutional effectiveness to publish this collection of research and reports of successful practices. The essays explain how institutional effectiveness works. Each chapter shows the leadership principles involved in creating a climate for documenting institutional accountability.

The future health and security of community colleges depends on adaptive leadership of the sort described in Embracing the Tiger. As Ronald Heifetz emphasizes, this leadership "often requires letting people feel the pinch of reality, rather than protecting them from change. "

Contributors to the book include: Laurence Johnson, recently of the League for Innovation in the Community College; Dr. James L. Hudgins, president of Midlands Technical College in South Carolina; Dr. Byron N. McClenney, president of the Community College of Denver; Dr. Patrick J. McAtee, president of Cowley County Community College in Kansas; Dr. Walter Bumphus, who is leaving his post as president of Brookhaven College in the Dallas County Community College District, Dr. James Tschechtelin, president of Baltimore City Community College; Dr. Robert Gordon, president of Humber College of Applied Arts and Technology in Ontario, Canada; and Dr. George R. Boggs, president of Palomar College in California.