Mission and Vision 137
Being all things to all people can be a ploy to gather resources or hide from
hard choices, but it cannot be sustained as a purpose. In time such a standard will
consume the organization that submits to it. Humans cannot live or think with-
out specifiable purposes, at least not well. As Leslie and Fretwell suggest, “The
freedom to be whatever the imagination suggests is also the freedom to be nothing
in particular” (1996, 173).
Mission and Strategy
As colleges and universities have negotiated the challenges of the past several
decades, the issue of purpose has been transformed into a constant strategic chal-
lenge. As we have seen in our analysis of various models of decision making from
the academy to the corporate university, virtually every turn of the clock brings
new forms of change in the social forces and market realities of the wider society.
Coming to terms with change responsibly lends a new urgency to the old question
of institutional mission.
Our earlier exploration of the ideas of story and identity provides the appro-
priate context for the explication of institutional mission as a primary point of
reference for strategic leadership. The narrative of identity provides the depth and
meaning, the texture and context, within which purposes have been enacted. As
the institutional story is translated into the broad themes and values of its identity,
so does identity disclose itself explicitly in a defined sense of purpose.
Not everything concerning the organization’s identity—its unique life as a cul-
ture and its forms of community, its full range of memories and hopes, assets and
achievements will be explicit in its purpose. In considering purpose, we focus more
on why we exist, and less on the specifics of how we came to be. The emphasis
is primarily on the content of what we do. The strategic discipline of leadership
that explicates purpose is focused. It aims for precision in unfolding the distinc-
tive values, aims, and capacities of the organization. In doing so, it engages the
institution in continuing reflection on its self-definition as it differentiates itself
within the wider world of higher education.
Although the discipline of purpose is sharply concentrated, it yields findings
that are crucial for the exercise of leadership. The need to fulfill purposes is built
into the nuclear structure of human inclination, so it comprises a central compo-
nent of the sense making that participants seek in an organization and the sense
giving that they ask of its leaders. In turn, purposefulness provides leaders with
a powerful rallying point that creates energy and commitment to common goals
(Hartley and Schall 2005). The sense of conviction, commitment, and calling
that belong in the idea of mission can be recaptured and then released.
Developing a Mission Statement
Before a college or a university’s mission can become a component in a process
of strategic leadership, it first has to be raised to lucid awareness. The SPC or