Strategic Leadership
If a new approach to strategy is to prove successful, it has to be carefully
situated within the models of thought and responsibility of educational communities, especially given what we have learned about the complexities and
value conflicts of academic decision making. Strategy processes often yield less
than they might, or they fail, because they have not been preceded by the hard
work of clarifying assumptions about the use of strategy in collegiate settings
(cf. Alfred et al. 2006). For academicians, the concepts and tools of strategic
planning often resonate suspiciously with the language of marketing and commerce. Time invested in defining and translating the meaning of strategy is
well spent.
In order to find the right place for it, this chapter will examine four broad
themes that prepare for the work of strategy. By starting with a brief analysis of
the evolution of strategic planning in higher education and the corporate world,
I will trace several models of strategy and place in evidence emerging trends that
implicate a method of strategic leadership. Then, I will explore some of the deeper
issues in situating strategy by examining several conflicting paradigms that reveal
the underlying tensions in contemporary academic decision making. Next I offer a
detailed framework for an integrated strategy process that draws together methods
and meanings that are often tacit or disconnected and that places identity and
vision at the core of the approach. Finally, I will develop a brief typology of various
patterns of strategic decision making to aid academic institutions in situating and
assessing their own uses of strategy.
56 Strategic Leadership
STRATEGY IN HIGHER EDUCATION
AND THE CORPORATE WORLD
By the end of the 1970s, it had become clear that the long cycle of growth and
prosperity in American higher education was coming to a close. The end of the
Vietnam War and the oil shocks of the 1970s ushered in a period of economic
uncertainty punctuated by stagflation and soaring interest rates. Financial support
for higher education from both state and private sources started to become grudging and erratic and increasingly tied to restricted use. Universities also began to
see the first stirrings of more intrusive external control, both in federal regulation
and in accountability to state governments and accrediting agencies.
Academic Strategy
In his 1983 book Academic Strategy, George Keller struck a vital chord for a
large audience in describing how strategic planning could respond to these ominous changes in the environment. Long in use in the military and in corporations,
strategic planning was just emerging in colleges and universities. Keller did not so
much describe the details of the process as situate and articulate a new possibility
at just the right moment.
Of course, universities had been involved in planning for many years and still
are. Larger institutions had long created planning staffs to help manage their
growth. Virtually every institution possessed a facilities master plan, and formal
planning had been applied to finances, enrollment management, and human
resources. In most cases, however, these forms of planning were one-dimensional
forms of linear projection. The only variables in the equation were under the
control of the institution itself. The motifs of contingency, of responsiveness to
change, and of coming to terms with a turbulent environment had been largely
absent.
At the other end of the spectrum, many institutions were accustomed to making decisions piecemeal by responding to internal and external political pressures
and the dynamics of organizational culture. For them, however much data they
collected and however many projections they made, decision making was largely
driven by an opportunistic model fueled by growth and defined by the art of the
possible (Keller 1983).
It was in contrast to "ad hocracy" and static models of linear thinking that
strategic planning began to appear on campus, its methods and language largely
borrowed from the world of business. Whatever form it took, strategic planning
most importantly brought with it a new paradigm of self-understanding for academic institutions, whether recognized or not. Their identities were now coming
to be seen as taking form at the point of intersection with the competitive and
changing world around them. This new contextual model shifted the whole pattern of collegiate planning and decision making. At the heart of the new way of
thinking was the presupposition that successful institutions would have to respond
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 57
effectively to the driving forces of change and be in alignment with them. That
basic assumption clashed rudely with the way colleges and universities had always
thought about themselves as intellectual preserves committed to academic ideals
for their own sake.
The Critique of Strategic Planning
Over the next two decades, triggered by the expectations of accreditors, state
officials, governing boards, and foundations, strategic planning moved into a
central place in the management processes of many campuses. As it took hold,
collegiate strategic planning created an enormous diversity of positive and negative appraisals of its worth. Some campus leaders extolled its virtues and traced
their institutions' viability back to "the plan." Others saw it as a massive waste
of time that by nature produces nothing more than wish lists. R. Williams's vivid
metaphor captures this sentiment: strategic planning "lies still and vapid like a
tired old fox terrier on the couch. An occasional bark but no bite" (quoted in
Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer 2004, 8). Frequently, too, strategic planning was and
is still perceived as threatening established patterns of governance by taking away
control away from the faculty or the administration (Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence
1997; Wilson 2006).
The diverse ways in which strategic planning is done more than match these
clashing perceptions of its usefulness. Most practitioners of the art have learned
that the famous SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis is
a de rigeur step in the process. The creation of some sort of statement of mission
and vision, as well as a set of variously defined goals, appears to have become
nearly universal (cf. Schmidtlein and Milton 1988–1989). As to process, strategic
planning typically seeks to satisfy collegial norms by involving a cross-section
of the academic community in its work. Beyond these formal common features,
however, no orthodox version of strategic planning exists in higher education.
The enormous variations in the way institutions do environmental scans, if they
do them at all; set goals, if they really are goals; develop narratives, if they write
them down; create financial models, if they use a model; or incorporate a vision, if
they have one, touch upon many issues related to strategy in higher education.
Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer (2004) nimbly trace many of these characteristics
and recent trends in strategic planning and management and conclude that its
value depends on how skillfully it is practiced. They emphasize recent attempts to
feature more flexible and creative models of planning as well as those that focus
sharply on the implementation of plans. Keller (1997) also analyzes recent trends
and underlines the importance of communication, while Peterson (1997) differentiates what he calls "contextual" or more proactive planning from other forms of
strategy. Birnbaum (2001) chronicles and sharply criticizes various approaches
to strategic planning in Management Fads in Higher Education, though he creates
something of a straw man by identifying strategic planning with all forms of
strategy. Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence (1997) also trace the many political pitfalls
58 Strategic Leadership
in planning in higher education as they review the literature and discuss their own
travail in trying to implement a process at the University of Northern Colorado.
Wilson (2006) does the same in describing a failed academic planning initiative
at Cal Poly Pomona. In analyzing some of the weaknesses of strategic planning
in the nonprofit world, especially from the governing board's perspective, Chait,
Ryan, and Taylor (2005) note that many plans lack traction, pattern, realism, and
input from the governing board. In addition, strategic plans often fail to contend
with the pace of change and unforeseen outcomes.
One of the challenges in understanding the process is the use of the term
"strategic planning" itself. The phrase necessarily brings to mind the rational
activity of first formulating and then separately implementing a sequence of steps
to achieve a projected goal. We plan a house by first designing it, and then execute
the blueprints and specifications by coordinating the delivery of materials and the
work of a variety of trades. If planning is truly strategic, however, it defines itself
in terms of changing realities in the competitive environment. That is the very
meaning of "strategic." This brings contingency, responsiveness, and the need
for resourcefulness and creativity into the ways we both conceive and carry out
strategies. The definition of strategic planning as a rigid series of linear steps and
schedules invariably leads to frustration.
Although the word "planning" continues to be used to describe the strategy
process in higher education, it is often stretched beyond its ordinary meaning
and has come to function as a term of art or figure of speech, defined more by use
than formal definition. In this text we often use the terms "strategic planning,"
"strategy," "strategy process," and "strategic decision making" interchangeably,
though we believe the last three terms are preferable.
Given the wide variability in both its use and effectiveness it is time to take
a fresh look at the possibilities for using the process of strategy in higher education (cf. Newman, Couturier, and Scurry 2004). After several decades, it has
become a bit stale and perfunctory, or rigid and cumbersome. It often becomes
politicized and unsure of itself. This is a logical moment to seek the renewal and
reconceptualization of strategic planning and strategic management in terms of
strategic leadership.
Evolving Concepts of Corporate Strategy
Many business leaders and students of management have also questioned the
worth of strategic planning because of the rigidities to which it became subject in
earlier decades. For a time, beginning in the 1960s, many large corporations created central planning systems that ran in parallel with operational management.
An array of planners specified in advance every facet of the financial, marketing,
sales, and production cycles of all products or services. Strategic planning systems
took on a life of their own through the elaborate programming of sequences of
events around rigid goals, actions, and timetables. Yet the detailed plans were
often out of date even before they were completed, let alone implemented.
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 59
Projected events did not occur as anticipated or crises made the plans irrelevant
(Mintzberg 1994).
Many of the problems of strategic planning as practiced in these ways have
been explored in depth by Henry Mintzberg (1994) in The Rise and Fall of Strategic
Planning and in other writings, such as the jointly authored work Strategy Safari
(Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel 1998). He claims that strategic planning rests
on a series of fallacies including the beliefs that it is possible to predict the course
of the future, that thinking (as the formulation of plans) can be detached from
action (as the implementation of plans), and that formal systems of data collection
and analytical thinking can replace the intuitive and synthesizing skills of human
experience and intelligence. These flaws reduce to one grand fallacy: "Because
analysis is not synthesis, strategic planning has never been strategy making. . . . [It]
should have been called strategic programming" (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, Lampel
1998, 77).
The excesses of programmatic planning do not, of course, undercut the more
basic notions of strategy as strategic thinking and decision making. Mintzberg and
his associates identify a large variety of "schools," or approaches to strategy, including strategic planning and its variants. One of these schools emphasizes strategy
as the analytical positioning of products in a market, and another as a cultural
process of collective decision making. Others see it as a method of negotiation
for power, and yet others as establishing a vision. Some methods understand strategy primarily to be a form of cognition, or, alternatively, as a way to enact a process
of organizational transformation (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel 1998).
Mintzberg gives considerable attention in various contexts to "emergent" strategy
as a form of learning. In emergent strategy, what we plan to do is not a function
of what we rationally calculate in advance, but what we discover we are already
doing. Our strategy may be born of a combination of both formal analysis and
intuitive understanding of promising directions that emerge in the normal course
of business (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, and Lampel 1998). The notions that strategy is
discovered as much as it is invented, that it emerges from practice as much as it
is designed, and that it is grasped by intuition along with reason are all eminently
relevant in the world of thought and in the practices of universities, especially as
places that house many autonomous spheres of activity.
New Directions in Strategy: Integration and Leadership
What seems odd in Mintzberg's analysis is the designation of separate schools
for what often appear simply to be different aspects of a potentially integrative
approach to the strategy process. Perhaps for the sake of debate, distinctions
are hardened into differences that could easily be reconciled, especially in the
sphere of practice. After elaborating on the schools and critiques of them throughout a lengthy study, Mintzberg and his coauthors tacitly acknowledge this as they
outline an integrative approach to strategy development: "Strategy formation is
judgmental designing, intuitive visioning, and emergent learning: it is about
60 Strategic Leadership
transformation as well as perpetuation; it must involve individual cognition and
social interaction, cooperation as well as conflict; it has to include analyzing
before and programming after as well as negotiating during; and all of this must
be in response to what can be a demanding environment" (1998, 372–73).
Using different terminology, but covering much of the same intellectual ground
as Mintzberg, Richard Alfred classifies various approaches to strategic management
with an eye toward synthesizing their meaning for higher education. He claims
that the common strategic theme is the achievement of competitive advantage in
the marketplace through the creation of differentiated and sustainable value for
stakeholders. "Advantage is the end goal of any and all perspectives on strategy"
(Alfred et al. 2006, 83).
This language seems apt but presents challenges when we try to translate it
into the thought world of higher education. The work of translation hinges on
the meaning of "value," and the point of reference in terms of which worth is
established. In corporate strategy, the creation of shareholder value is a primary
goal, as defined by shareholder economic returns and the relationship between
supply and demand for the company's shares in the financial market. The company gains advantage when it creates economic value for customers by providing
high-quality products and services at the right price. In higher education, however, the meaning of these terms changes. Words like "quality" and "excellence"
become the primary terms used to refer to the intrinsic forms of value created in
the discovery and transmission of knowledge. Educational value is not in the first
instance determined by market forces but is an end in itself, a basic intellectual
and social good. "Advantage" remains a useful concept for thinking about the
strategies of academic organizations, but its relationship to educational value is
complicated by the enormous range of different types of educational institutions,
with their dramatically different programs, sponsorships, purposes, and prices.
As a result, it becomes clear that higher education is a peculiar marketplace:
"the relationship between price, product and demand is different for different
purchasers in different parts of the higher education market" (Zemsky, Wegner,
and Massy 2005, 35). When academic reputation is the prime value in a market
segment, there is little price discipline; but when convenience or credentials
define value, price becomes more influential (Alfred et al. 2006; Zemsky, Wegner,
and Massy, 2005).
Recent interpretations of strategy in higher education show that it continues
to evolve both in theory and practice, often in the quest for more integrative
models. Peterson has outlined a method of contextual planning to serve as a more
proactive, integrative, and meaning-oriented process than strategic planning.
Using the term "strategic leadership" only parenthetically, he offers interpretations that are broadly parallel to some of those suggested in this book, though
he focuses more on very broad macro-level changes in the system or "industry"
of higher education (Peterson 1997). Ellen Earle Chaffee and Sarah Williams
Jacobson (1997) have discussed a new approach to planning focused on vision
and the effort to change institutional cultures that makes it, in effect, a central
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 61
method of leadership. They advocate "a transformational kind of planning,
meaning that planning itself is an instrument through which organizations and
their cultures can change and grow" (1997, 235). In "Enhancing the Leadership
Factor in Planning," Anna Neumann and R. Sam Larson focus explicitly on the
need for planning to become a tool of leadership as "the act of conceptualizing
alternative ways of thinking about our organizations" (1997, 196). When leadership is not defined in linear and hierarchical terms, planning can be rooted
in a "process of institution wide conversation and interpretation" that crosses
administrative and faculty boundaries and that focuses on current activities as
the sources of a vision for the future (Neumann and Larson 1997, 199). In all
three cases, students of leadership and management in higher education are
making both implicit and explicit connections between strategy and leadership
as a process of change and motivation.
SITUATING THE WORK OF STRATEGY: THINKING ABOUT
STRATEGIC THINKING
We have examined several of the major constraints, complexities, and fundamental conflicts in the way academic organizations understand leadership and
construct their systems of values and academic decision making. Given what we
have learned about both academic culture and the suppositions and methods of
strategy, it is clear that a lot of preliminary work is required to bring two quite
different ways of thinking together. To be successful, the work of strategy has to
be situated both conceptually and practically in the academic thought-world and
the culture of each institution. To do so, it helps to find the roots of several of the
conflicts and confusions that we have explored in our analysis.
STRATEGY AND MODELS OF ACADEMIC REALITY
Max DePree opens a chapter in his masterful little book, Leadership Is an Art,
with the declarative sentence "The first responsibility of a leader is to define
reality" (1989, 7). The "reality" he has in mind has nothing to do with production
quotas or corporate politics, but everything to do with values, beliefs, and people.
In one of the most influential books on management theory of the 1990s, The
Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge (1990) offers conclusions that parallel DePree's claim.
He targets the powerful influence of what he calls "mental models," the hidden
patterns and assumptions behind our thinking that shape the interpretations and
decisions we make in organizational life. The attitudes and assumptions can apply
to many different types of judgments, from a vision statement to ways of interpreting numbers. We may hear a comment or two about a situation or a person,
or perhaps read some figures, and unconsciously interpret the issues in terms of a
fixed pattern of thought, or a mental model. So, when asked about declining applications in admissions, we may respond that "numbers are off everywhere," using
a pattern of fixed thinking that blocks our ability to reach other explanations,
62 Strategic Leadership
perhaps out of a mind-set shaped by defensiveness or arrogance. The "learning
organization" about which Senge writes is one that has found ways to think about
its own thinking, to penetrate fixed sets of assumptions with self-awareness, conceptual openness, and continuing inquiry about its own effectiveness. Again, it
is the definition of reality that is crucial and that decisively connects to issues of
strategy and leadership (Senge 1990).
We have seen that institutions of higher learning have complex layers within
their identities, including value systems that are split at the root between academic and organizational commitments. These systems of values are interwoven
with narratives of identity, patterns of belief, and ways of constructing reality that
filter experience as to what counts as relevant, true, and worthwhile—thus the
tasks of strategic self-discovery, decision making, and leadership encounter paradigms that precede them. Through our models of thought and judgment, we pick
out and privilege the features of our experience that are consistent with what we
value and tell in our stories, all within an integrated and layered process of sense
making. These deep paradigms are often unconscious and unquestioned assumptions of thought that shape the whole landscape of judgment and decision making in academic organizations. They provide the hidden criteria for the ways we
think about mission and vision. They define as well the deep standards of moral
legitimacy for the exercise of authority and the criteria for evaluating performance
and programs. All these presuppositions are expressed through the intricacies of
each individual's and institution's enacted culture and thought world, so the web
of local reality is dense and complex.
Academic leaders and planners who understand paradigms and their connectedness with values and narratives will be far better equipped to introduce
strategy as a discipline of change and sense making into a world where it is often
not welcomed or appreciated. They will be able to encourage thinking about
strategic thinking, and a process of continuous learning about the true terms
of collegiate reality as preliminary steps in a productive approach to strategic
decision making.
One way to begin to find a place for strategy is through the analysis of several
images that display different patterns of thinking about the purposes of higher
education. We shall offer three such images, each of which connects a set of
assumptions, values, and narratives to construct a paradigm or model of reality.
The models are stylized and fanciful versions of types of educational organizations and are presented largely as narratives. Even with their whimsy, they
are intended to capture values and beliefs that are widely influential in both
traditional and contemporary higher education. Many of the current debates
about the purpose, worth, and future of higher education in a competitive
global marketplace echo in these sketches. Let us turn first to an examination
of the paradigms of the academy, the corporate university, and the educational
shopping mall. Subsequently we shall explore more conceptually the motif of
the responsive and responsible university, or, more precisely, the paradigm of
responsibility.
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 63
The Academy
As a young faculty member representing my colleagues, I found myself discussing a serious financial problem with the governing board. I insistently and
righteously emphasized that the academic program should be exempt from any
proposed cuts, especially the loss of faculty positions. As the conversation began
to turn sour, the board chairman offered a gentle but pointed rejoinder that still
echoes in my thoughts: "It seems that the faculty wants the board to build a little
white picket fence around the campus to protect it from danger and evil. We are
not able to do that."
The imagery of the white picket fence brings to mind a whole set of associations and symbols for one of the traditional visions of the academy as a protected
domain, a place apart from the getting and spending of the world, one that serves
fundamental values in which the good is rational inquiry. Behind the imagery, one
finds a powerful paradigm. Even if it is mythic, it is of the structural variety that
touches deep sources of meaning because it describes the purposes of academic
communities. As we enter it, the academy seems to be a timeless place with immutable purposes. We see teachers engrossed in study for the joy of it, or engaged
in deep conversations with one another or with students. They are elaborating
ideas in elegant detail. Everyone assumes that rational inquiry and discourse will
produce virtue and wisdom, though its usefulness in the wider world is of little
concern. Even when they are highly skeptical of all received truths and are energetically engaged in deconstructing every idea and text that they encounter, the
academicians believe that their own ideas are good for their own sake. People
enter and leave the academy as they choose; it charges no fees, and no one is
compensated. Since no accrediting society has yet tracked it down, nothing is
measured, except by the standards of rigor and originality. If anyone uses the
word "strategy," it is to refer to warfare. As the generations succeed one another,
some teachers begin to worry about the place. A number of little white fences
have come to dot the landscape to discourage people from venturing out of their
intellectual domains and to keep away students who are not serious about the
conversations, or who are looking for jobs.
The Corporate University
For reasons that no one can remember, the academy experiences a series of
cultural revolutions and it disappears. In its place there is now a vast university
on a campus with sweeping lawns and towering buildings filled with laboratories,
classrooms, studios, and offices, all stacked with books of policies and procedures
and filled with endless rows of computers. Thousands of students and teachers
and legions of staff members are rushing to and fro or circling the campus in
their automobiles, looking for a place to park. Different schools, colleges, programs, centers, and institutes are everywhere. Each of them is expected to secure
revenues by seeking gifts, enlarging enrollment, raising prices, cutting costs, and
64 Strategic Leadership
pursuing contracts for research and professional services with government and
business. Some of the newer contracts are especially promising because they may
lead to the university's ownership of start-up companies or licensing of processes,
with the prospect of large cash flows. A large new sports stadium is expected to
be another source of revenue, though many shudder at its cost and fear the influence of business sponsorship that it entails. Clearly, an entrepreneurial model of
choice animates the university.
With all these developments, people wonder often and aloud whether the
institution itself has not become another kind of industry—University, Inc. Has
it become a creature of the market, a corporation producing entertainment and
knowledge for anyone who will pay for it? To many, the university has reached
the point of compromising its deepest values of open inquiry to serve the proprietary needs of its research customers. Its purposes seem splintered and incoherent,
and its values expedient and vulgar.1 It seems no longer sure how to think about
itself and its purposes. Strategies and plans are everywhere, but they reflect a wild
variety of aims and pursuits that have no center. These very questions show that
the paradigm of the academy, in spite of its mysterious disappearance, continues
to serve as the touchstone for the values and beliefs of many of its university
descendants. The golden age lingers in memory and in hope.
The Educational Shopping Mall
There is no ambiguity about the language and values in the paradigm of the
educational shopping mall, for they are borrowed unabashedly from the world of
commerce. Its conceptual scaffolding is structured by the logic of strategy, markets, customers, pricing, and branding. The primal assumption in the mall is that
a successful organization finds its niche in the market by attracting and satisfying customers. Strategic planning is a discipline of management that guides the
process of branding and marketing. Whether the customers ever experience the
academy's love of knowledge for its own sake is of little consequence as long as
they are satisfied and keep coming. Here value is contingent and instrumental and
is measured by the calculating logic of marginal benefit to the consumer.
The imagery that accompanies this pattern of pragmatic presuppositions depicts
education as a form of commerce. In our mind's eye we see a mall with students
choosing from among the educational equivalents of boutiques, specialty shops,
and department stores. Charging markedly different prices, the stores advertise
with catchy slogans such as "Learn more, pay less" and "Useful education for
today's world." The taglines are based on extensive market research that shows
that customers want job training and are increasingly inclined to bargain over
prices. They also want the stores to be open at all hours, meeting the needs of the
customers, not the teachers. The mall offers programs and credentials that can
be completed in short periods of time to fit the busy lives of the students, most of
whom work full-time and have family obligations. As a result, customers complain
loudly if too much is expected of them, so little is.
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 65
All the stores are nicely decorated and have ready access to the best in modern
information technology, and some have an exceptional array of Internet, audiovisual, and telecommunications capabilities, including online courses with good
courseware. In one large store all the offerings are online and are supported by
extensive Internet materials and other information resources and study guides, so
no teachers are on the site.
Everyone agrees that the mall is an exciting place because people of all ages
and social backgrounds are coming to the educational stores. Although many
of the customers stay only a short time, most claim that they intend to return
later and often. To cover their costs, the stores only offer popular and practical
programs that require modest investments in part-time teachers' salaries and that
avoid overhead expenses for laboratories, libraries, arts facilities, and the like. As
a result, the stores do not sponsor or expect any faculty research, and majors in
the basic disciplines of the arts and sciences are not offered.
These three fanciful accounts of education in the academy, the corporate university, and the mall paint pictures with clashing colors. Yet even as images and
fables, they reveal contending paradigms of thinking and valuing that are shaping
the future of higher education. Each of them builds its system of value around a
different point of reference. As leaders and planners approach the work of strategy
in a college or university, they are well advised to consider how the institution
thinks about and enacts the meaning of its own enterprise. If the strategy process
fails to address beliefs at this fundamental level, it will lose much of its potential to
gain commitment, credibility, and influence, especially as a tool of leadership.
The Responsive and Responsible University
As we have seen before, and as glaringly evidenced in the three models, strategic
thinking in colleges and universities has to reconcile two conflicting approaches
to reality. It must simultaneously honor a commitment to intrinsic academic values and to organizational viability. Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy (2005) call this
being "mission-centered" and "market-smart." This may be, but we need a variety
of conceptual resources to resolve the value conflicts in these two phrases. If we
are to achieve a durable reconciliation of these mind-sets, the solution has to
respect each part of the equation. Without doing so, we will end up considering
higher education as either an isolated world of contemplation or a marketplace of
commerce, not ideas. To effect the reconciliation requires many things, including
appropriate ways of thinking about institutional identity.
Strategic thinking itself presupposes that an academic organization's identity
is situated, not abstract; responsive, not fixed. A responsive and responsible institution takes its specific form at its point of interaction with the wider world. It
brings its fundamental intellectual values into specific formative relationships
with particular circumstances, and influence flows in both directions. Just as an
individual's identity is constituted by an integration of basic elements of the self
with the circumstances of time and place, so do the academic values of colleges
66 Strategic Leadership
and universities both influence and carry the imprint of the various social purposes
and practical realities that differentiate them. The paradigm of responsibility (or
response-ability, as the capacity to anticipate, create, and respond) provides the
most hospitable pattern of assumptions for the work of strategy.
Colleges draw life from their values and purposes as well as from the constituencies and social institutions that sponsor them, whether these are government,
alumni, foundations, local communities and businesses, or donors and board members. Countless colleges are the product of religious denominations, and they
variously bear the marks of that relationship in their identities as they cope with
various forms of change. Most universities are creatures of state governments, perhaps designed in the land-grant tradition to teach the "mechanical and practical
arts," to give priority in admission to state residents, and to serve the agricultural
and business enterprises of the state through teaching and research, all in the
context of a shifting economic and social environment.
To respond effectively and congruently to the diverse fields of forces in which
they live and to which they must respond, leaders as agents must first interpret
the strategic issue at hand and ask, "What is going on?" They do this typically in
dialogue with others and through the use of a wide variety of ways of thinking
and knowing, from empirical analysis to storytelling. As agents, we respond both
through our interpretation of the action on us and in anticipation of the response
to our action, and "all of this is in a continuing community of agents" (Niebuhr
196, 66). The paradigm of responsibility takes us beyond the ideas of legal and
moral accountability and suggests the notion of response-ability as open, creative,
and anticipatory responses to the challenges and opportunities that the world
sends our way (cf. Niebuhr 1963; Puka 2005).
As a paradigm, responsibility tries to find an integrated, authentic, and fitting
response to the stream of life in which it finds itself. It does not dismiss instrumental values, as the classical academic model is prone to do, but tries to make sense
of them in a continuing pattern of interpretation and responsiveness. Nor does
it reduce its sense of value to commercial norms, as happens in the educational
shopping mall. Unlike the corporate university, with its fractured identity, responsibility seeks integrity and authenticity through dialogue and interaction with
the world around it. The paradigm of responsibility is pluralistic, with many valid
patterns and syntheses of values, not relativistic, where any value is as valid as any
other. The task of responsible leadership is to integrate values by staying riveted
on both the guiding purposes of the organization and the meaning of change.
Contextual Academic Identity
Strategic planning programs often spin their wheels because they lack the concepts and the language to interpret the integral strategic identity of the institution. As a result, they shuttle back and forth between being mission centered on
some issues and market smart on others. Where the challenge of conceptual presuppositions becomes most difficult is with regard to the strategic understanding of
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 67
the academic program itself. The natural academic tendency is to enhance quality
and improve programs through the elaboration of the evolving professional canon
of each discipline, the addition of more specialties and brighter students being
the surest way to add value and to bring a department to a new level of excellence. This natural pattern of thought is not wrong, and often it is appropriate.
The problem is that it is frequently misplaced, for it lacks vital connection to the
strategic possibilities of the institution or of the academic field itself.
A responsive and responsible university situates its academic programs in other
ways by differentiating its competencies and purposes contextually. Just like the
institution itself, academic programs have a situated identity. As such, they consist of a repertoire of academic resources and capabilities by which the college or
university responds uniquely to a demanding and changing environment. More
than just various sets of course offerings, however complete or sophisticated, the
academic program represents as well a series of organizational and faculty competencies in the design and implementation of programs, and in differentiated
approaches to teaching, student learning, and research.
To see academic offerings and the talents of faculty in this strategic light is to
open oneself up to contextual ways of thinking about educational value. From the
strategic perspective, connections to the larger purposes and worth of education
come more quickly into view, linkages in self-understanding create novel possibilities, and the sense of shared communal enterprise is made visible and vital. The
distinctiveness of the institution emerges from the way its organizational body
combines with its academic soul to create a unique identity.
A FRAMEWORK FOR AN INTEGRATED STRATEGY PROCESS
In the framework that follows, our goal is to suggest the essential components
of an integrated strategy process that bears the imprint of the paradigm of responsibility. Nothing especially elaborate or innovative is contained in the steps that
are presented here, and they are not offered as the definitive or orthodox version
of strategy. Decision makers who have experience with strategic planning will
find it familiar, but those who do not can use it as a point of reference for part 3.
We should note that this model suggests a more comprehensive and integrative
approach to strategy than most of the textbook models. It does so by placing values
and vision at the core of the process and by making quantitative strategic indicators, financial issues, and the tasks of implementation explicit parts of the work
of strategy itself. As we shall see time and again, everything relates to everything
else in both conceiving and enacting strategy, so it is systemic, especially as a tool
of leadership.
The proposed centrality of identity and vision in the work of strategy may
seem obvious, but many institutions fail to capitalize on its significance as a way
to transform the process into a vehicle for strategic leadership. As I have been
at pains to indicate in both the preceding argument and the following sections,
strategy has to be placed within the appropriate conceptual framework for the
68 Strategic Leadership
power of identity and vision to take hold. They have to connect with the values,
narratives, and possibilities of a place in order to be authentic and motivating. In
precise terms, a vision is a narrative of aspiration. It announces meanings that are
to be lived, not just contemplated, so the cognitive form of a vision is the same as
that of a narrative. The shift from management to leadership also turns precisely
on the ability of a strategy to create a shared sense of the future that motivates a
community to make commitments, set priorities, and take actions. If strategy is
about purpose and vision, then it has to be a form of leadership.
Interpreting the Work of Strategy
Those who are familiar with effective strategy programs know that the suggested relationship to leadership is often quite real, though not explicit or systematic. Successful efforts to set new directions in colleges and universities can
often be traced to the deliberations and discoveries of a strategic plan, or to the
less formal but very real influences of a consistent pattern of strategic thinking.
Intentional strategic change may come about as much as a result of the process
as the content of strategic planning when it serves as a touchstone for effective
dialogue and decision making among campus constituencies (cf. Birnbaum 1988,
1992, 2001).
Of course, strategic planning often does not succeed in these ways for a variety
of reasons. Our interest is in finding, articulating, and systematizing the characteristics of effective, though often implicit, syntheses of strategy and leadership. In
doing so, we start with strategy as a given set of both tacit orientations and explicit
practices and try to draw out their implications for leadership by placing them into
a larger conceptual framework. We will be guided by the model of engaging relational leadership as we do so. As in much academic work, our aim is to discover
meanings and possibilities that are hidden in familiar activities, in continuing
conversations, and in emergent practices by interpreting them in a new light. If
we are successful in tracing the contours of what can become a formal process and
discipline, then it can be used consciously, systematically, and effectively in many
different contexts throughout an academic organization.
As the workings of the method are systematized and communicated, it creates the basis for a coherent process of decision making that involves each of
the groups participating in the governance system. When strategy processes are
influential and effective, they function in a variety of ways: as a form of learning
that uses cognitive methods, as a way to transform the organization by creating
a collaborative vision of quality, as the positioning of the organization and its
services in its competitive environment, and as a vehicle for leadership and
management (cf. Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer 2004). In a word, the process is
integrative both conceptually and procedurally. At its best, strategic leadership
will be incorporated into the ongoing collaborative work of each level and unit
of the university as it becomes a center of leadership, initiative, and strategic
decision making.
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 69
Drawing again on the relational model of leadership, we become sensitive to
dimensions of strategic leadership that we otherwise might not see. An effective
strategy process can itself embody a sense of collegiality and procedural fairness
that creates trust and mutual commitment among and between participants and
the formal leaders of the process and of the organization (cf. Kezar 2004; Tyler
2005). When it is projected against the needs and values of human beings, we
can understand how the work of strategy becomes leadership as it establishes
background conditions that empower and motivate participants.
When practiced systematically as an applied discipline, the strategy process is
inherently integrative. It connects the internal and external contexts as well as
heritage with change, plans with actions, and needs for resources with a rationale
for attaining and using them. It integrates planning with budgeting, data with
meaning, and goals with measurements. As used here, strategy is an integrative
and collaborative process of sense making and direction-setting that designs and
implements initiatives, goals and actions based on an analysis of organizational
strengths and weaknesses, and the threats and opportunities of the wider context.
It creates a vision of the best possibilities to create educational value and institutional advantage for the future. The framework presents a comprehensive model
of strategy that includes both the activities to prepare for the process and its major
steps and procedures. As I shall try to show in the following chapters, when transacted through a method of engaging leadership, the content becomes integrated,
the method flexible, and the implementation systematic. Each institution will
find ways to customize the process to fit its needs, touching lightly on some steps
under some circumstances, and emphasizing others as appropriate. In some cases,
the environmental scan may be a dominant feature of the work, while in others it
will be the analysis of identity and vision that will be central. On some occasions
the academic program will receive the predominant focus, while at other times it
may be financial issues that are the preoccupation. Strategy is intended to serve
the institution, not the reverse. In all cases, institutions will choose carefully the
number of strategic initiatives and projects to develop in each of the intensive
phases of planning lest the process become overwhelming. The framework can
serve as a preliminary checklist to sort out topics that deserve attention in an
upcoming round of planning. Each entry should bring to mind the issues, policies,
and programs that are or could be of strategic significance in that area.
An Integrative Strategy Process
1. Situating the Strategy Process
Strategy and Models of Thought: Thinking about Strategic Thinking
Strategic Diagnostics: The Elements of Strategy
2. Designing the Mechanisms and Tools of Strategy
Strategic Governance, Strategic Leadership, and Strategic Management
Role and Responsibilities of a Strategic Planning Council
70 Strategic Leadership
Role of the President, other Officers and the Governing Board
Preparing for the Work of the Strategy Council: Dialogue and Process
Strategic Indicators: The Metrics of Identity, Performance,
and Aspiration
3. Identity, Mission, and Vision
Narratives of Identity: Story and Values
Mission
Envisioning
Vision
4. External Environmental Scan
Driving Forces and Trends: PEEST (Political, Economic, Educational,
Social, and Technological)
Scenarios
5. Internal Scan
Organizational Problems and Opportunities
Governance and Decision-Making Systems
6. Strategic Position
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT)
Core Competencies
7. Strategic Initiatives/Imperatives
Selecting Strategies: Key Strategic Programs and Projects
Academic Programs
General Education
International Education
Teaching and Learning
Faculty
Staff
Diversity
Research
Institutes and Centers
Academic Services
Technology
Libraries and Collections
Admissions/Enrollment/Retention
Cultural and Intellectual Climate
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 71
Student Life
Residential Programs
Athletics
Facilities and Equipment
Fund-raising
Alumni Relations
Communications and Marketing
Government and Community Relations
8. Goals
Content
Measurement
Accountability
Deadlines
9. Actions
Establishing and Communicating Agendas for Implementation
10. Financial Model and Resources
Using a Financial Model: Costing the Goals and Actions
Financial Equilibrium
Setting Priorities
Connecting Planning and Budgeting
Tuition Policy
Financial Aid and Discount Policy
Capital Funds and Other Sources
Using Existing Assets
State and Federal Subsidies
11. Implementation: Systemic Strategic Management
Communication
Implementation
Assessment
Momentum
SITUATING THE ELEMENTS OF STRATEGY
As leaders introduce a strategy process to a campus, they learn that it requires
more than the involvement of a few staff members who know the techniques of
strategic planning. If it is to be productive, it cannot just be dropped from on high
72 Strategic Leadership
into the work of an organization. The initiators of the process need to understand
the way strategy has operated within the decision-making history, politics, and
culture of the institution and to explain how they anticipate the work will be carried out. For most of the faculty and staff, strategy will be identified with whatever
positive or unhappy experiences the campus has had with strategic planning in
the past. Discussing and distinguishing the characteristics of the strategy process
with campus decision-making bodies is a crucial part of the work of situating strategy. Every campus has a governance system that is variously codified in bylaws,
documents, and agreements negotiated over the years. It is folly to ignore campus
protocols and expectations for governance in designing the details of a strategy
process.
A complex process never works by itself but draws on the energies of many
people in many different ways. The work of strategy pulls on ideas, proposals, and
conversations that occur all across the campus or in the unit using the process.
Yet there are designated administrative officers and faculty members who will
do the work of leading and coordinating the process and producing its products,
starting with the president or chief administrative officer of a unit. The concepts
and methods proposed in this book are addressed first to those who will define,
describe, initiate, and answer for the process, and next to those will participate
in it in various ways. In the initial stages of communicating about the work of
strategy, it is essential to have a sense of how people will be involved, as explained
in the next chapter.
Elements of Strategy
The literature and my own experience as a practitioner and consultant demonstrate that the work of strategy tends to sort itself out along a spectrum of
approaches characterized by different purposes and conceptual models, as well as
by various degrees of systematization and comprehensiveness. As a way to prepare
for the tasks of strategy, we suggest analyzing it within a diagnostic framework. The
categories help those responsible for the process clarify their intentions as they set
and communicate goals for what they hope to achieve (cf. Chaffee 1991).
Tactical Thinking and Tacit Strategy
Although it has been in ascendancy for two decades, some institutions do not
rely significantly on strategy formally or otherwise, so they can be said to have
a tactical orientation. One typical pre-strategic practice involves decision making that reacts to issues, problems, and crises more than it anticipates them. The
model of choice is more political and extemporized than purposeful. Substantial
tactical skill and insight may be in evidence, but it is difficult to discern the
design of a strategy. In contexts like these, individuals often complain that they
have little sense of where the institution is headed, as it responds to a continuing
series of problems and crises. Often an ad hoc orientation reflects the unavoidable
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 73
realties of an environment that is filled with turbulence, as when budget crises
overwhelm the plans of an institution, or other crises befall an organization. At
other times, the avoidance of strategic planning can be traced to the reluctance of
administrators and faculty members to cede authority and influence to a process
that they distrust and that might take directions that they cannot control (Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence 1997).
Experience also shows that there are a number of institutions that cluster around
the position of tacit strategy. Although they do not use a formal method of planning, they nonetheless demonstrate a tacit pattern of coherent strategic thinking
and decision making. It may well be rooted in a vivid sense of institutional story
that gives direction to the work of the organization. Often smaller institutions or
academic units of larger ones have highly differentiated purposes and values that
are driven by a vision or by a saga of distinctive achievement.
The problems with tacit strategy are many, including the difficulty that it presents in responding systematically to change in the environment or within the
institution itself. If a strategy is not explicit, it becomes less useful in providing
an orientation for coherent decision making throughout the institution and over
time. It fails as well to provide the basis for systematically communicating goals
and priorities to the continuing stream of new faculty and staff members and
students who join the institution.
Strategic Planning
As we enter the area of strategic planning, we find ourselves in the most
populated sector of the spectrum. Although, as we have learned, the method
cannot be defined with precision in higher education, as a concept it separates
the design of goals from their implementation. Although the conceptual gap is
often closed through the way it is practiced, many times it remains a method
of projection.
In many cases the approach involves an episodic or periodic planning process, often triggered by a change in the presidency, an accreditation review, or
the preparation for a capital campaign. Typically a special committee or commission with membership from many constituencies is appointed to prepare a
plan, and the group ceases to exist after it has issued its report. If the moment
is right and the report receives strong backing from the governing board, the
administration, and a critical mass of faculty, the strategic plan can have a
decisive influence.
Strategic planning can also be practiced as a continuous discipline in which
plans are constantly under review or development, and goals are revised periodically and distributed widely across the campus. As a continuous discipline,
it becomes much more likely that planning will be more than the projection of
goals, because they will be regularly proposed as items for implementation. Conceptually, though, a gap still exists between the formulation and implementation
of goals.
74 Strategic Leadership
Strategic Management
At this position along the spectrum, strategic planning has become institutionalized by forging connections with the organization's operational systems of decision making. The goals of strategy are made into administrative responsibilities
and combined with continuous methods of evaluation that are fed back into the
system of strategic management. As institutions have experienced the frustration of planning as a form of projection, the profile of strategic management has
sharpened in the last decade.2
In many institutions there is an uneven and segmented pattern to the tasks of
strategic management. Some offices and programs ignore or sidestep the process
and fail to develop methods for ensuring that goals are satisfied. The full integration of the strategy into the management system occurs as key administrative
leaders develop control systems and protocols to integrate operational and strategic decision making.
Strategic Leadership
Among institutions that use strategy consistently and continuously, it often
functions as a vehicle of reciprocal leadership—as an interactive directionsetting process, not just as a system of control. In this position on the spectrum, the strategy process focuses clearly and authentically on a vision for the
future. Strategic leadership is often relatively centralized and dependent on the
commitment of the president, other top officers, and the effectiveness of a central
committee or council. Strategic leadership occurs as a continuous process that
drives the institution's systems of evaluation, decision making, and communication at all levels, including the work of the governing board.
In a few institutions, strategic leadership appears to be embedded in parts or all
of the organization as a cultural and organizational disposition, not only as a set of
formal procedures of deliberation. When this occurs, a position has been reached
that shows itself in the distribution of leadership throughout the organization.
New ideas surface in many places, initiatives are taken by a large range of groups
and individuals, and the differences between leaders and followers becomes hard
to define, since they are always changing places. Those with authority follow
those with the most compelling ideas and lead by mobilizing people and resources
around the best possibilities. The story and the vision have been widely internalized, and leadership is a transparent process and presence in the ways decisions
are made and executed.
Even as hypotheses, these positions offer a set of reference points for charting
an institution's experience and its goals for the tasks of strategy. As a college or
university decides to inaugurate or to refashion a strategy program, it benefits
significantly from situating its approach and defining its intentions. It should
ask itself two basic questions: How have we used the strategy process in the past?
How should we use it now? Those who lead the process need to know what they
Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 75
intend and what they expect: of the process, of themselves, and of those who will
give it their time and energy. Whatever the opportunities for the use of strategy,
many of which may be limited by circumstance, a careful consideration of the
organizational dynamics and models of thought that define the context makes
the prospects for success far more likely