a pressing priority, as the issues that cloud higher education’s future require ever-
more adept forms of decision making. One of the tasks that this book sets for itself
is precisely this redefinition of the role of strategy in the participatory decision
making configurations of the academy.
CONCEPTUAL MODEL AND METHODOLOGY
Strategic planning needs to be renewed by being set into a much deeper con-
ceptual framework than ordinarily occurs. By moving the conceptual register from
management to leadership, we can achieve much of the intellectual repositioning
that is required. Yet to make the transition is demanding and requires the use
of insights from several sources and disciplines. No single language or method,
whether empirical, cultural, managerial, or otherwise, is adequate to this task. We
have to cross boundaries and integrate methods to see strategy as both an integrated
and integral process, one that is whole, complete, and entire in the range of its
intellectual foundations and practical applications. I ask readers to understand
that I am using the term “strategy” to include issues of fundamental importance
such as organizational identity, values, and vision, not only to refer to a set of
managerial methods or the competitive positioning of brands in a marketplace.
To refashion itself as strategic leadership, strategy has to consider deep ques-
tions, many of which have been raised by contemporary students of leadership
(Goethals and Sorenson 2006). There is no way around the complex issues of the
meaning of leadership and strategy with reference to human agency, the notion
that humans are in charge of their own conduct and determine the meaning
and direction of their lives through the enactment of their values and beliefs.
Considered in this light, leadership includes various forms of organizational sense-
making and sense-giving that depend on a process of mutual influence between
leaders and those led. Drawing on insights from Weick (1995), I emphasize two
dimensions of sense making. The passive motif of “sense” refers to our discovery
of the meaning of a situation, and the active dimension of “making” shifts our
focus to the agency required in constructing meaning, including the elements of
enactment. “Sense-making is about authoring as well as interpretation, creation
as well as discovery” (Weick 1995, 8). As becomes clear in many places in this
book, the conceptual model has several interwoven components. One of these is
the assumption that the deeper dimensions of strategy and leadership are centrally
related to the enactment of values as standards of choice concerning what mat-
ters decisively to us. Values are powerful in shaping the culture and the decision-
making patterns of organizations, especially colleges and universities. I am also
persuaded by both study and experience that organizational narratives of identity
and aspiration are critical dimensions of strategic leadership and are essential for
understanding human agency and leadership as interactive processes. Finally,
I find that paradigms as basic assumptions of thought and belief are the keys to
gaining awareness of the frames of reference that are often hidden in organiza-
tional decision making. The three intertwined motifs of values, narratives, and
Preface xiii