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CHAPTERCHAPTER

Implementation: From Strategic

Leadership to Strategic

Management

T

he popular literature on leadership sends the message that management
is mundane and blind to change, while leadership is noble and visionary.
Practitioners, however, know that the relationship between the two is much
more complex. In describing strategic leadership, I have tried to fill the managerial
frames of strategy with new images of leadership. Yet I have sought as well to show
that a leadership vision must create a clear picture of the tasks of enactment. In
sum, leadership without execution creates an empty vision, while management
without leadership is nearsighted.
In order for strategic leadership and management to work reciprocally, the first
task is to analyze the resources, practices, structures, and culture of an organization
to find vehicles for the implementation of strategy. The key to strategic effective-
ness is a new intentionality that continuously seeks ways to incorporate a strategic
orientation into the workings of the institution. Practically every facet of college
and university operations presents itself as a possibility for reconceptualization and
reformulation. In discussing a diverse series of successful steps to move the plan off
the shelf and into action at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Kathleen A.
Paris notes: “For the plan to be taken seriously, faculty, staff, and students must
see it as infused throughout the organization. It must be part of routine academic
life” (2004, 124). Her thoughts parallel other recent motifs in the literature on
strategy that emphasize the importance of linking institutional research with ini-
tiatives to improve quality, plans with budgets, goals with teams responsible for
attaining them, and strategies with control systems. An emphasis on the trans-
lation of strategic thinking and planning into action has come to characterize
contemporary strategy programs (Dooris, Kelley, and Trainer 2004).