Creating and Situating an Integrative Strategy Process 61
method of leadership. They advocate “a transformational kind of planning,
meaning that planning itself is an instrument through which organizations and
their cultures can change and grow” (1997, 235). In “Enhancing the Leadership
Factor in Planning,” Anna Neumann and R. Sam Larson focus explicitly on the
need for planning to become a tool of leadership as “the act of conceptualizing
alternative ways of thinking about our organizations” (1997, 196). When lead-
ership is not defined in linear and hierarchical terms, planning can be rooted
in a “process of institution wide conversation and interpretation” that crosses
administrative and faculty boundaries and that focuses on current activities as
the sources of a vision for the future (Neumann and Larson 1997, 199). In all
three cases, students of leadership and management in higher education are
making both implicit and explicit connections between strategy and leadership
as a process of change and motivation.
SITUATING THE WORK OF STRATEGY: THINKING ABOUT
STRATEGIC THINKING
We have examined several of the major constraints, complexities, and funda-
mental conflicts in the way academic organizations understand leadership and
construct their systems of values and academic decision making. Given what we
have learned about both academic culture and the suppositions and methods of
strategy, it is clear that a lot of preliminary work is required to bring two quite
different ways of thinking together. To be successful, the work of strategy has to
be situated both conceptually and practically in the academic thought-world and
the culture of each institution. To do so, it helps to find the roots of several of the
conflicts and confusions that we have explored in our analysis.
STRATEGY AND MODELS OF ACADEMIC REALITY
Max DePree opens a chapter in his masterful little book, Leadership Is an Art,
with the declarative sentence “The first responsibility of a leader is to define
reality” (1989, 7). The “reality” he has in mind has nothing to do with production
quotas or corporate politics, but everything to do with values, beliefs, and people.
In one of the most influential books on management theory of the 1990s, The
Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge (1990) offers conclusions that parallel DePree’s claim.
He targets the powerful influence of what he calls “mental models,” the hidden
patterns and assumptions behind our thinking that shape the interpretations and
decisions we make in organizational life. The attitudes and assumptions can apply
to many different types of judgments, from a vision statement to ways of inter-
preting numbers. We may hear a comment or two about a situation or a person,
or perhaps read some figures, and unconsciously interpret the issues in terms of a
fixed pattern of thought, or a mental model. So, when asked about declining appli-
cations in admissions, we may respond that “numbers are off everywhere,” using
a pattern of fixed thinking that blocks our ability to reach other explanations,