Strategies 181
but they must as well be adequate to change and unpredictability, to conflict and
challenge. They will be able to motivate others only if they relate to the story
and values through which individuals and organizations understand themselves
and fulfill their purposes.
As we have seen and will see again, although management and leadership are
different phenomena, they are intimately related. Management sets the condi-
tions and provides the procedures without which strategic leadership could not
function. Yet through the context provided by the larger horizons of leadership,
management is able to find greater coherence and purposefulness for its own
processes. In the real world, the promptings of leadership usually migrate into
management to protect it from becoming deductive and mechanistic. Beyond that
implicit relationship, management needs leadership to deal with tasks that are
beyond it, including the capacity to motivate people to reach demanding goals.
The Choice of Strategies
From a purely theoretical point of view, there is no reason for a strategic plan
not to cover every office and program in a college or university. To develop full-
blown strategies for each of a dozen or more major spheres of activity (see “Frame-
work for an Integrative Strategy Process” in chapter 4) and then do the same for
five to ten major subcategories in each area is logical but not possible. The results
would be a largely unusable catalog of staggering size and complexity that could
never be implemented.
Ideally, the selection and development of strategic priorities is a highly disci-
plined, not expedient, process. This is true both in terms of the rigor and coher-
ence of strategic thinking and the more practical considerations of the form of
the final planning document. Colleges and universities have to follow the law of
parsimony in developing their strategic initiatives. Time and attention are the
scarcest commodities on a campus, and there is no special “research and develop-
ment” or “project engineering” department for the academic program, and, at best,
skeletal ones for the administration. Strategic initiatives often die a quick and
ignoble death from neglect because too much has been loaded onto an operational
system that is already fully charged. Those with the responsibility to implement
the strategies can only correlate, integrate, and control a limited number of pri-
orities. Faculty members in particular are appointed to be teachers and scholars,
not strategists.
In describing the characteristics of the eight organizations (including one
university) that were recent Baldridge Award winners in the category of effective
planning, John Jasinski notes that they were able to “identify a manageable number
of strategic objectives (perhaps four to six), tied to inputs that systematically
address the challenges that they face” (2004, 29). To be sure, unusual circum-
stances and institutional variability in size and complexity make any hard-and-fast
rules about the number of strategic initiatives ill advised. Yet it is far better to
succeed on a small set of essential and manageable initiatives than to flounder