President’s Blog
28/08/2025 2025-08-28 17:41President’s Blog
President's Blog
Delivering Strategic Plans: Why Culture, Clarity and Ownership Matter
When I wrote Euro University of Bahrain’s five-year strategic plan, that was the easy part. Knowing what you want to achieve is one thing. Assembling the teams and making it happen is something else entirely. I quickly realised that culture is critical to delivering strategy operationally. Culture should be viewed as your company’s operating system—the platform used to get things done. Companies are the sum of their people and it’s essential everyone understands the big picture, how 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 fit in and how 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 contribute. A plan is not a wishful thought or mere hope. I took inspiration from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, specifically Habit 2: Start with the end in mind. I wrote our strategic plan backwards. I imagined what we could look like in five years. Then I designed KPIs to track progress towards that vision. Next, I worked backwards again, defining the small steps, tasks …
How do you navigate complex and uncertain problems?
In leadership and research, the toughest challenges rarely have straightforward solutions. Often, you don’t have all the data and the connections between actions and results aren’t always obvious. Human behaviour, for example, can be unpredictable. I’ve learned that speed—the steady rhythm of trying, learning and adapting—is essential to making meaningful progress amid uncertainty and complexity. Speed doesn’t mean rushing or cutting corners. It’s about cadence: an iterative rhythm of doing, learning and improving. We start with a minimum viable plan and then act. Good enough, not perfect. We evaluate honestly, discuss openly what worked and what didn’t, and apply those lessons to the next iteration. This approach requires teams who communicate clearly, take genuine agency, and foster transparency. Only with those qualities can continuous improvement become truly embedded in how we work. This matters because many of the challenges we face in education, research or organisational development are complex and …
To be, To Do and To Want
A few evenings ago, I found myself in a surprisingly deep conversation with my 11-year-old, trying to explain the verb “to be.” What started as a fairly innocent grammar discussion became something much harder to articulate. The more we explored it, the more I realised that “being” isn’t a simple concept at all. In fact, it may be one of the hardest things to explain, and perhaps even harder to practise. In education we often talk about what people do. We build curricula around skills, we set outcomes and assessments, we track performance. All of that matters. Action is necessary. Doing gives us agency. It’s how we participate in the world and how we make change possible. But I worry that we don’t give nearly enough attention to the deeper questions of being. Who are our students becoming—not just in terms of careers, but as people? Are they learning to …
The Human Edge: Why Personalised Mentorship is the Future of Learning
In a world increasingly driven by algorithms and automated processes, it’s easy to believe that efficiency alone is the key to progress. But at Euro University of Bahrain, we hold a different view: the true power of education lies in its human heart. While AI excels at delivering information, it cannot replicate the nuanced guidance, the personal insights, or the tailored encouragement that a dedicated mentor provides. This is why we are deeply committed to personalised mentorship and learning. Education, for us, is not a one-size-fits-all conveyor belt. It’s a journey that requires careful navigation, inspired by individual potential. Our faculty don’t just teach subjects; they invest in our students as individuals, offering crafted support and building relationships that transcend the lecture hall. This commitment to quality relationships ensures that: We believe that true value in education isn’t just about the volume of knowledge absorbed, but the depth of understanding …
Teaching in 2025: Why Human Connection Still Matters Most
Last week I had the privilege of attending Bahrain Polytechnic’s Teaching and Learning 2025 conference. The theme — “Can AI Replace Teachers?” — sparked valuable reflection. While many of the presentations focused on practical uses of today’s AI tools, the bigger takeaway for me lay elsewhere. It reaffirmed a belief I’ve long held: that AI, for all its promise, cannot replace the human core of education. Teaching is not just content delivery — it is connection, inspiration and interpretation. As AI becomes more embedded in our systems, we must resist the temptation to reduce education to automation. Instead, we should focus on how AI can support the qualities only humans bring: empathy, communication, critical thinking, ethical judgement — and equally important, the uniquely human capacities for art, imagination and creativity. In the rush to integrate AI, we must remember: students are not datasets, and learning is not a transaction. It …
Professor Andrew Nix is the President and CEO of Euro University of Bahrain. Prior to this he served as the Provost and Vice Chancellor at Alasala University (Dammam, KSA), and before that he was the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bristol (UK).
