148 Strategic Leadership
widely available documents. When an institution intends to become the best, it
must be clear about how it intends to fulfill its ambition, or it will quickly lose
credibility. As often happens, if the terms lack definition or local meaning, they
will become empty phrases that will be benignly ignored or, worse, will echo in
cynical asides around the campus.
Combining Being and Doing the Best in a Strategic Vision
One of the most effective ways to ensure that superlatives have strategic force
is to combine reflections about being the best with disciplined explorations of
“doing the best.” A critical weakness of ambitions that are not specifiable is
that they block the processes of precise knowledge, focused reflection, linguistic
richness, and integrative judgment that are required to create a sustained and
powerful vision. Strategic creativity often has humble beginnings as people with
detailed contextual knowledge interact with peers daily to explore organizational
problems and opportunities. They start with a sense of what they do best, not
of how they can be the best. These issues lead to specific and determinable
areas of competence and achievement, the latter into a whole series of complex
assumptions that, as we have seen, may be hard to define and measure. Finally,
of course, the two forms of “best” should merge, but the order in which the issues
are pursued is a critical part of a vision and of leadership.
We touched earlier on the discussion of this issue in Collins’s Good to Great
(2001), and it will be helpful to consider it in greater depth. As we have noted,
this study of corporate success has broad implications for other types of organiza-
tions, including, unexpectedly perhaps, colleges and universities. Collins discov-
ered that great companies are often built around stunningly simple ideas on which
they stayed tightly focused. But it is not just any idea. It “is not a goal to be the
best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best. It is an understanding
of what you can be the best at” (Collins 2001, 93). In all the cases of moving from
good to great, the company made a passionate commitment to being the best
in the world in a particular activity or competency. Further, “The good to great
companies focused on those activities that ignited their passion. The idea here
is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate” (Collins
2001, 96).
The concentrated effort to find the areas in which academic organizations have
an intense level of commitment and capacity to excel is typically a different
process than in business, although there are analogies. A college’s greatest claim
to talent and distinctive quality may well reside in the values, methods, relation-
ships, resources, and characteristics exhibited in the total educational program
and in the campus ethos. These factors cross disciplinary lines and may define
the underlying dimensions of a distinctive and powerful approach to learning. To
locate its sources, one asks: Where do the people in the organization show sub-
stantial and enduring passion for greatness? Where have they built greatness into
the middle of the organization without being directed to do so? (Collins 2001).