Imagine Colleges was founded by Dennis and Eileen Bakke. Eileen Bakke has been concerned with education for 30 years. Eileen Bakke’s obsession is to train teachers and creating such a culture at a college that engages students in significant and useful learning environment. Dennis Bakke, co-founder and CEO Emeritus of the AES Corp., a global power company, has brought Imagine Colleges an inspiring diligence environment, including a revolutionary loom to create a decentralized institute.

Dennis and Eileen are obsessive about marking a variation in teaching by applying an exceptional equipped formation that will create an energetic learning environment by placing college leader and teachers evenly responsible for the decisions affecting the colleges they work in. A good number of staff at Imagine Colleges is teachers.

Joy at Work

The tale of Imagine Colleges began with Dennis's wish to introduce the joy at work philosophy that he had originated while working at AES in more public targeted surroundings. Dennis' objective was to create a revolution in public teaching by putting the power of decision making and responsibility in the palm of the principals and teachers in accordance with the philosophy of "Joy at Work”. This philosophy entitles them to take decisive decisions about their accounts, their syllabus, their off the college activities, etc., without the hassle of going form one office to the other in order to get different approvals from different management departments.

Before opening Imagine Colleges, President and CEO Dennis Bakke was booming in government and business. After working as Deputy Assistant Administrator of the Federal Energy Administration in the Ford Administration, he co-founded AES in 1981. AES grew from a set up to the biggest global power company, they had power plants in more then twenty countries on the globe.

While working at AES Dennis created an exceptional managing philosophy. By dropping the power of decision making to the employees at the lowest level and they also had the acquaintance to make them. While AES enhanced decision-making and assured an extremely high level of employee contentment and commitment. This unique approach has also been featured in the business press (Forbes) Harvard and other leading business colleges have also adapted this approach. After his departure from AES, he published a business best-seller about his approach namely “Joy at Work”

Dennis' betrothal at Imagine Colleges of decentralization of the management, liability with liberty, making the most of each person's God gifted ability to their utmost limits, and the removal of middle-management from the command change and give most power of decision making to those people who are the closest to the work. This is a drastically innovative concept in the field of public education.

Since the college districts frequently demonstrate huge practical structures, inflexible rules and measures, and constraints on teachers' and principals' liberty to make significant decisions, one frequently finds a lack of interest in the teacher, low self-confidence, zero time management, and very few improvement in colleges. All of that merges to grounds on which colleges fail to effectively educate their students.

Mistakes and Recommendations

One of the biggest management challenges anywhere is how to improve student performance in America's urban public colleges. There has been no shortage of proposed solutions: Find great principals and give them power; create competitive markets with charters, vouchers, and choice; establish small colleges to ensure that students receive sufficient attention – the list goes on.

While these approaches have had a dramatic impact on individual colleges, they have failed to produce a single high-performing urban college system. Despite these initiatives and a doubling in annual public spending on education over the past 30 years, to approximately $450 billion in 2005, no one has figured out how to achieve excellence on a broad scale – at every college in a district. One reason is that educators, researchers, and policy makers often see the district office – the organization headed by the superintendent that oversees and supports all the colleges in the district – as part of the problem and not as a crucial part of the solution. This is a mistake.