252 Strategic Leadership
changes are limited or minor adjustments in day-to-day management policies
and practices, such as a change in the prerequisites for a course or a modification
to the software in one office. Were the changes in the software system to affect
the whole campus, the project would become a broad change, though it may be
a superficial one. It affects a lot of people, but most of them in minor ways. Deep
changes affect basic organizational capabilities and characteristics, though they
can be limited in the scope of their influence and might apply to only one or two
academic or administrative units. If the change is so significant in both scope
and depth that it reaches the level of a basic competency across the institution,
then it becomes a strategic issue. Issues of strategic change can never be defined
with precision and finality because the meaning of change in the collegiate world is
fluid and symbolic. The different categories of change help us to understand that
strategic change takes us toward the deep and pervasive issues of change that
confront an institution.
Time and Strategic Change
When we consider the reference points of the time of change, we discover
characteristics of strategic change that are counterintuitive. Although strategic
change in the corporate world is often rapid, pervasive, and enduring (consider
successful mergers and acquisitions), the same ordinarily does not hold true for
the academic programs and identities of colleges and universities. In itself, there
is no reason to think that gradual (sometimes called incremental) change cannot
be enduring, profound, and pervasive. These characteristics are precisely the ones
that Burns (2003) uses to define transforming change, and he notes that it may
occur over long periods of time. Eckel and Kezar (2003) suggest that institutions
engaged in transformational change see it as a continuing process, even after five-
and-a-half years. In his study of entrepreneurial universities, Burton Clark (1998)
concludes that several decades were required for their transformations to occur,
and in examining several turnaround situations, Adrian Tinsley (2007) suggests
that transformational change is incremental.
Some writers on change tend to contrast transforming leadership with incre-
mental change, while the true contrast may be with rapid, temporary, and opera-
tional change that lacks a strategic focus (Lick 2002). As a case in point, consider
our earlier example of the internationalization of a university. If an achievement
is truly strategic and transforming, it represents a pervasive, deep, and endur-
ing change. Being pervasive or comprehensive, it touches most departments and
programs in the institution, and in being deep or profound, it will alter the way
that many courses are designed and taught, as well as the experiences of many
faculty and students. Its scope will show itself in a change in the population of
the university, and over time in deep shifts in the norms and culture of the orga-
nization. Yet the change process will not be rapid, but gradual and incremental.
It will take at least a decade or two for the institution to accomplish many of
the central tasks of strategic change of this magnitude, and the work will never