Integral Strategy 113
strong or weak forms, the institutional story is the starting point for strategy. Those
institutions that cannot take possession of their life stories will find the work of
strategy and leadership frustrated at every turn. As the Association of Govern-
ing Boards of Universities and Colleges’ 2006 report on the college presidency,
The Leadership Imperative, puts it, “Only by embracing and building on... the
institutional saga... can a president span successfully the full range of leadership
responsibilities” (12) as one element of what the report calls integral leadership.
The story, as we shall see, enriches institutional self-definition through statements
of identity, mission, vision, and position, and, as a result, it fuels leadership as
a reciprocal process.
The Story of Centre College
The story of Centre College, a small liberal arts college founded by the Pres-
byterians in Danville, Kentucky, in 1819, can illustrate something of the signifi-
cance of narratives as they inform the strategy processes of an institution.
In the late summer of 1983, Rick Nahm, the vice president of Centre College,
called the president. He said excitedly, “We have passed 67 percent participation
in alumni giving for last year. I am checking with Dartmouth and Williams, but
I think that we have beaten them. We will have the best record in the country.”
The Centre story, as described in the strategic plan then being completed,
tells of a tiny college, 725 students at the time, with an exclusive commitment to
education in the arts and sciences, and a disproportionate influence in Kentucky
and the mid-South region of the country. The only small college in the state to
house a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, it has a remarkable legacy of preparing the
state’s and the nation’s leaders. Centre serves as a beacon of excellence and a
source of pride in a region that has always lacked resources for education. At the
turn of the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton,
commented about the challenges of measuring educational quality. Discussing and
questioning the proportion of alumni who achieve distinction as a measure, he
said, “There is a little college down in Kentucky which in sixty years has graduated
more men who have acquired prominence than has Princeton in her 150 years”
(quoted in Trollinger 2003, 13). What Wilson questioned became part of Centre’s
story of disproportionate influence, singleness of purpose, leadership, loyalty, and
achievement. By that time, Centre had awarded diplomas to dozens of state and
federal legislators, two vice presidents of the United States, and several Kentucky
governors and had established a tradition of producing leaders for the ministry,
the bench, and the bar. The “great dissenter,” John Marshall Harlan, the Supreme
Court justice who rejected the doctrine of separate but equal in Plessey v. Ferguson
in 1896, was a Centre alumnus. Later, another alumnus, Fred Vinson, would serve
as chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1946 to 1953.
The next year, the alumni-giving victory became complete. Dartmouth dis-
tributed a green-and-white button for alumni that read, “Go Big Green, Beat
Centre.” Not since Centre beat Harvard in football 6–0 in the upset of the century