Mission and Vision 139
The clear and coherent articulation of purpose in a strategy process is a critical
task for many reasons. Among the most important is that it gives the organization
a template for systematic strategic decision making. It provides the focus for
the development of strategic initiatives and goals and for the establishment of
financial priorities. Achieving strategic wisdom in effective financial decision
making is critical in organizations like universities that are filled with talented
and ambitious professionals. In such places, perceived needs and good ideas always
outstrip available resources. A clear sense of purpose is a vital mechanism of good
management.
Mission and Strategic Leadership
A compelling sense of strategic mission provides more than just an effective
benchmark for decision making. It answers to deeper features of the human consti-
tution and the need for meaning. If people sense that any choice is as good as any
other, they soon become demoralized or confused. The loss of a sense of purpose
or development of meaningless systems of control in bureaucracies, including
academic ones, deadens people or makes them cynical or rebellious. On the other
hand, when people are able to shape the purposes of their organizations and know
why they are doing things, they become engaged. Lived purpose is a basic form of
sense making that contributes to the growth and the empowerment of a person. As
a consequence, the articulation of authentic purpose is a dimension of leadership,
not just of management.
As people in all organizations know well, a sense of purposefulness not only
empowers the individual; it also creates a sense of community (Senge 1990).
Just as an individual flourishes by understanding her work as a calling, so does
an academic organization empower itself by interpreting its life as a community,
which is a consistent theme in the historic narrative of higher learning. Com-
munities are created around many things—experiences, memories, values, and
common space—but they are always defined by shared purposes that create a sense
of common enterprise. Through awareness of a common mission, the members of a
community forge a fundamental relationship to one another created by service to
a common cause. The shared allegiance to the cause creates bonds between people
that come with mutual obligations and expectations and express themselves in
acts of reciprocal affirmation and correction.
In a time when market realities dominate higher education and its worth as
a public good has been has been clouded, it is important to emphasize that it
serves purposes that provide the foundations for a free society. One of the tasks
of academic leadership is to lift up and affirm these powerful values as a source
of commitment and inspiration. Though often perceived to be eternal skeptics,
academic professionals are fundamentally motivated by a commitment to the
power of knowledge and to the integrity that is required to pursue it. As Burton
Clark puts it in his masterful study, The Academic Life, “In our cultural world the
academy is still the place where devotion of knowledge remains most central,