254 Strategic Leadership
be correct. Yet effective strategy programs provide the tools to avoid the worst
of a crisis before it takes hold. Strategy can and must be decisive when the times
require it, using its methods and insights to reveal both threats and opportunities
as they develop.
Some of these thoughts on strategic change can be illustrated by a quick glance
at institutional histories. Perhaps the most common pattern of fundamental change
is for institutions of higher learning to make a series of circumscribed but deep
changes that create an evolutionary transformation of organizational mission. As
major universities gradually emerged from small “colonial” colleges in the last sev-
eral decades of the nineteenth century, for example, change followed a common
pattern. New disciplines and new professional schools were added to the core of
existing classical fields, eventually creating the multi-universities that we know
today (Veysey 1965). In one regard the changes were circumscribed, because a new
school or program did not alter existing activities themselves. Yet the cumulative
changes over time created institutions that were drastic transformations of their
former selves. In more recent decades, many universities have transformed them-
selves in a parallel way by adding research institutes, interdisciplinary centers,
professional education programs, satellite campuses, and international affiliates.
The examples show that even though the time required achieving it may span
several decades, a transforming level of strategic change may be reached.
Change, Crisis, and the Limits to Strategic Leadership
As we have discovered, strategy is intended to discern and prevent impending
crises, and it should insist that risk management plans be developed systemati-
cally to prepare for emergencies. The attention to possible calamities is increas-
ingly a requirement of risk management and is a useful method for testing the
strengths and limits of organizational capacities. Deep knowledge of the strategic
identity of an organization includes sharpened sensitivity to threats to its reputa-
tion, finances, campus infrastructure, human resources, and leadership. Yet when
a state budget allocation is suddenly cut by 20 percent or a fire ravages “Old
Main,” a crime wave hits the campus, a controversy shatters confidence in the
president, or hurricanes and floods destroy the campus, long-term strategy gives
way to crisis leadership. The vision will have to be put on hold so that the crisis
and the pain that may be involved can be confronted.
As these examples make clear, the analytical and disciplined protocols of stra-
tegic leadership move in a different orbit than the rapid, symbolic, and unilateral
interventions often required during a crisis or an emergency. No doubt, some
groups and persons can be effective in both strategic leadership and crisis leader-
ship, others not. No doubt, too, the story of a place and its vision for the future
will need to be invoked to reassure a community in a crisis and to help it find its
bearings as the emergency subsides. Nonetheless, as much as strategy defines the
need to prepare for them, strategic leadership is not driven by unforeseen and
disruptive solitary events.