Strategic Position 169
Virginia Commonwealth University
In the early 1990s Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) embraced a
vision of leadership as an urban research university. Characteristics that might
easily have been defined as negatives, such as a dispersed urban campus, were
reconceived as strategic opportunities. The university resolved a lingering con-
tentious dispute with a neighborhood bordering the campus that feared absorp-
tion. VCU decided to grow on the other side of its urban location, adding new
economic life and opportunity to an otherwise unpromising commercial zone.
As VCU affirmed its distinctive urban mission, it also committed itself to the
economic development of the city and the region. The university addressed the
immense financial challenges of providing health care to low-income patients in
its hospitals. It developed an innovative new school of engineering and launched
an ambitious biotechnology research park adjacent to its downtown medical cen-
ter. By leveraging the traditional research strengths of its medical programs, it
brought over 1,500 new jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of capital invest-
ment to the city in less than a decade. In spite of an unpredictable cycle of both
substantial budget cuts and increases by the commonwealth, the university has
been able to grow to become the largest university in the state. It has substantially
enlarged funded research and private contributions and has received several
multimillion-dollar gifts. VCU has gained strength and prominence by affirming
the logic of its urban opportunities, emphasizing innovation, and framing issues
in the sphere of possibility. President Eugene Trani and his colleagues have consis-
tently used strategic planning and strategic leadership to enable VCU to be what
it is and might become, rather than pursuing a wistful search for what it is not
(Leslie and Fretwell 1996; Virginia Commonwealth University 1997).
In many of the other examples in chapter 7, we saw a similar process at work.
In mapping assets, the goal is to understand and unfold the promise that comes
with particularity, to unleash the significance of being who one is. Focusing on
assets does not deny the negative or hide it from view but places it in an action-
able context. The findings that show weakness and vulnerability are accepted and
confronted, but not considered in isolation. They are interpreted within a larger
pattern of meaning and responsibility, which are components of strategic leader-
ship as a discipline of possibility.
SWOT Analysis: Opportunities and Threats
The analysis of strengths and weaknesses prepares the way for a translation of
the environmental scan into a specific set of challenges and opportunities for an
institution. As we have suggested, the first step, which is to develop a systematic,
structural, and thematic understanding of the meaning of the driving forces of
change, should be completed within the scan itself. The next step is to analyze the
bearing of these factors on the institution’s strengths and weaknesses, understood