Strategic Position 167
Gift and Grant Capacity
The ability to generate gifts and grants has become a defining strategic issue
for all institutions, whether public or private. Successful institutions, regardless
of the wealth of their constituencies, are those that know how to capture a high
proportion of their potential support. Effective fund-raising is always systemic
because it depends on everything from good organization to a powerful story. The
ability to generate resources has become a foundational core competency at many
institutions, and where it has not, it may represent a lost opportunity or a telling
strategic deficiency.
Strategic Leadership and Campus Decision Making
The flaws and weaknesses that are often noted in campus decision-making
systems and cultures, and that have been described at length in this work, are
not a matter of fate but of capacities that can be changed and improved. No
matter how brilliant the idea or promising the innovation, it will go nowhere
without a method of decision making and leadership that can implement it.
Institutions with ponderous or dysfunctional governance systems mired in dis-
trust are not only wasting time and energy, but they are also damaging them-
selves by their inability to respond to change. Effective systems of strategic
governance, leadership, and management have become a critical capacity, a key
success factor, in the contemporary world of higher education. Institutions that
can develop core competencies in strategic decision making have a powerful
competitive advantage.
These examples of core competencies from both the academic and adminis-
trative spheres could be multiplied in many directions, including the vital area
of student life and co-curricular programs. One of the important methods that
connects the illustrations is the strategic differentiation of strengths and weak-
nesses in terms of levels and forms of fundamental capacity. There is a natural
strategic order to the logic of self-assessment that judges a program or service to
be (1) deficient, (2) adequate, (3) a distinguishing capability, or (4) a core com-
petency. The process of analyzing strengths and weaknesses can be given more
focus and pertinence by these kinds of distinctions. A strategic weakness is tell-
ingly dangerous when it prevents an organization from mobilizing its capacities
to respond to its threats and opportunities.
Although the differentiated assessment of levels of strength and weak-
nesses is a necessary step in strategic planning, it is not a sufficient one for
the work of strategic leadership. Seeing strengths and weaknesses in terms
of capacities and competencies brings them within the context of human
agency and choice, opening them more clearly to the influence of leadership.
The shift in perspective empowers people to take on problems that otherwise
seem impenetrable. The chance to develop a set of generative competencies
is deeply motivating for it enables people to take initiatives that include them