one of its important organizational aspects is a collaborative process of strategic
decision making that engages an academic community in defining and achieving
a vision for its future.
THE RENEWAL OF STRATEGIC PLANNING
From any number of perspectives, it is clear that “strategic planning” has
become the standard term to define the work of strategy in higher education.
In point of fact, as we shall see, planning represents just one of several forms of
strategy. Nonetheless, this is the terminology that is primarily used on campus.
As we shall review and document at greater length in several contexts, there is
no matching or parallel consensus about how strategic planning should be prac-
ticed, nor the worth of doing so. Although the broad outlines of the process
are often similar, the similarities end there. It is more a category than a specific
method, and planning often functions as a figure of speech. Ironically, the term
became popular in the corporate world in the 1960s to designate a process of
detailed programmatic design and control that few colleges and universities have
ever actually used.
If the form of planning can vary, so do the opinions about its worth. Critics
lament its vagueness and the absence of empirical evidence for its effectiveness,
even as governing boards and others on campus find it to be a useful or even
invaluable process. Many faculty members, and not a few administrators, see it as
a managerial threat to academic governance or as a colossal waste of time. Perhaps
the most common lament is that strategic planning fails to make any difference
in the way institutions actually do things.
One of my primary motivations is a desire to respond to this mixed experience
with the use of strategic planning in higher education. I prefer the more basic
terms “strategy” or “strategy process,” although I also use and differentiate
the meaning of “strategic planning” in various contexts. If we can take George
Keller’s influential work Academic Strategy (1983) as a point of reference, we can
see the 1980s as the period when strategic planning emerged in higher learning
as a method of projecting future goals in response to a changing context. With
the help of Keller and others, colleges and universities began to see strategy as a
distinctive form of decision making differentiated from long-range planning and
ad hoc choice. As strategic planning became widespread in the late 1980s and
1990s, it evolved into a comprehensive collaborative process that increasingly
shifted its attention to the implementation of plans through strategic manage-
ment. We might think of this shift as a second major phase in the evolution of
the process in higher education.
In the early years of the new millennium, it has become clear to this author
that strategic planning and management, or better, the strategy process, needs to
be reconceptualized and reformulated. When it fails, it is often because it has not
been clearly defined and related to the values, mental models, and complex lead-
ership and governance systems of colleges and universities. To do so has become
xii Preface