Operations
What Twelve Years Running a University Fleet Taught Me About Leadership
The vehicles were never the hard part. Twelve years in, the fleet had taught me that the real work of operations leadership happens in the questions you are willing to ask — and the answers you are willing to accept.
When I took responsibility for Emory University's fleet, it was a collection of 664 vehicles spread across the state, each one attached to a department, a budget line, and a person who was certain they needed it. My title said I managed vehicles. What I actually managed was a set of assumptions that no one had questioned in years.
A university fleet is a strange thing to lead. It is not a business unit with a profit motive keeping everyone honest. It is a service — quiet, essential, and almost entirely invisible until something breaks. Nobody sends a thank-you note because the shuttle ran on time or the research van started on a cold morning. The only feedback loop is the negative one. That absence of noise is exactly why the discipline has to come from inside the operation, not from the complaints landing on your desk.
The number that mattered wasn't the number of trucks
For a long time, the fleet was measured the way most fleets are: by how many vehicles we had and how many were running. Those are counting metrics. They tell you the size of the thing, not the health of it. The number that changed how I led was cost per mile — the fully loaded cost of moving one vehicle one mile, fuel and maintenance and depreciation and downtime all folded in.
In 2018 that number was $1.78. By 2025 it was $0.98. Nearly cut in half. But the figure itself is not the lesson. The lesson is that until we defined it, agreed on it, and put it in front of leadership every quarter, we were flying an operation on gut feel and anecdotes. A single expensive number, once everyone could see it, did more to align behavior than any policy memo I ever wrote.
Right-sizing is a leadership act, not a spreadsheet exercise
Taking the fleet from 664 vehicles to 585 sounds like an optimization problem. On paper, you run the utilization data, find the vehicles that move a few hundred miles a year, and retire them. The spreadsheet writes itself.
The spreadsheet is not the job. The job is the conversation with the department head who has had that vehicle for a decade, who budgeted around it, who sees it — not incorrectly — as a small piece of their autonomy. Every vehicle I removed was a negotiation, and every negotiation was a test of whether the data was strong enough, and whether I was trusted enough, to make a defensible call. You cannot right-size a fleet if people believe you are doing it to them rather than with them. Lowering asset-carrying costs was the outcome. Building the credibility to make those cuts stick was the actual work.
Systems don't fix operations. They reveal them.
In 2018 we deployed a fully integrated fleet information management system. In 2019 we added telematics; a few years later we migrated to a better platform. Each time, the temptation was to describe the technology as the solution. It never was. The software did not reduce our costs. It made our costs visible — which is a very different and far more uncomfortable thing.
Telematics does not care about your explanations. It shows you the vehicle idling for three hours, the route that doubled back on itself, the asset that hasn't turned its wheels since spring. A good system is a mirror. The leadership question is whether you and your team are willing to look into it and act on what you see, or whether you will find reasons the mirror must be wrong. Most operations already have the data. Very few have built the culture that lets the data change a decision.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
What I'd tell a new operations leader
Three things, learned the slow way. First, pick the one number that captures the health of your operation and make it impossible to ignore — for us it was cost per mile, but every operation has its own. Second, treat every efficiency decision as a relationship decision, because in an institution it always is; the math earns you the right to the conversation, but the conversation is where the change actually happens. Third, buy the mirror before you buy the fix, and then have the discipline to keep looking into it after the novelty wears off.
Twelve years taught me that operations leadership is not about controlling the fleet. It is about being the person in the room who keeps asking the question everyone else has stopped asking — and who has done the work to make that question hard to wave away.