28 Strategic Leadership
Kerr and Gade, 1986, p. 11) Humility about the role and its possibilities is the
beginning of wisdom.
LEADING WITH LIMITED AUTHORITY
Tactics of Administration
What finally, then, becomes of leadership when it is so limited and fragmented?
The answers come in several different forms, one of which is the systematic and
detailed counsel to employ “tactics of administrative action” (Cohen and March
1986, 205). These tactics display “how a leader with a purpose can operate within
an organization that is without one” (Cohen and March 1986, 205).
The proposed tactics are conclusions drawn from the characteristics of the
university as an organized anarchy. In this case, knowledge gives birth strictly to
tactics of administration, not to processes of leadership. To gain advantage in deci-
sion making, administrators should (1) spend time on issues, because most people
will tire of them; (2) persist because circumstances may change; (3) exchange
status for substance and give others the credit; (4) involve the opposition and
give them status; (5) overload the system, ensuring that some things will pass;
(6) create processes and issues (to serve as garbage cans) that will take free-floating
interest and energy (the garbage) away from important projects; (7) manage unob-
trusively; (8) reinterpret history, since interest in the record of campus events is
usually minimal (Cohen and March 1986).
It is compelling that the recommendations of a highly influential study of
presidential leadership consist of potentially cynical tactics to manipulate the
practices of decision making. They represent the repudiation of most conven-
tional ideas of leadership, no matter how they are defined. The transactional,
transforming, engaging, interactive, or strategic forms of leadership described
in studies of political leaders or business executives are nowhere to be found.
There is a clear lesson to be learned from this methodology and its conclusions.
If we presuppose that holding authority is the defining form of leadership, it
becomes difficult to discern and describe the interactive and strategic forms of
leadership that are at work throughout collegiate organizations. We may be left
only with administrative tactics unless we change our assumptions about the
nature of leadership.
Lessons for Leadership
Having found limitations in the authority of the president that broadly concur
with the conclusions of Cohen and March, Birnbaum (1998, 1989, 1992) offers
a decidedly different set of interpretations about the possibilities of presidential
leadership. He presents his ideas as cognitive insights derived from empirical
studies of presidential attitudes, performance, and relationships with key con-
stituencies. They are lessons that can serve as guides to more effective presiden-
tial leadership, though they are offered as prudential principles rather than laws