Most board of trustees' evaluations of a president's performance look backward, assuming that the challenges of the future will be pretty much the same as they've always been. But as every alert trustee now realizes, colleges and universities face problems more daunting than the familiar conundrums of the past. As a result, each presidential evaluation--whether an annual or more-comprehensive periodic assessment--should focus on the leader's capacity to enable the institution to adapt to a continually changing environment. The practice of presidential assessment needs to catch up with the new reality by shifting focus in three new directions: (1) The evaluation process should examine past performance as the key source of information on the executive's ability to lead change in an ambiguous and challenging future; (2) The criteria must include the kind of skills and attitudes conducive to engineering positive change in an academic setting, not just conventional leadership traits; and (3) Since every leader is, to varying degrees, incomplete, the evaluation must be joined to a presidential development program that will assist the president in doing a job often vastly different from the one he was hired to do four or five years earlier. (Contains 2 resources and 1 online resource.)