180 Strategic Leadership
As strategies of integrative leadership, the strategies cannot merely be sus-
pended in midair for all to admire and promptly forget. The ultimate goal of
strategy is to capture the best thinking of an academic community and to enlist
its members in a serious pursuit of shared aspirations. Agreement and enthusiasm
are not required, but a critical mass of the organization must find itself influenced
and even moved by the strategy. The community and the smaller communities
within it have to own the most important strategic directions and share a com-
mitment to enact them.
Anticipating a subsequent chapter on the implementation of strategy, I want to
emphasize that leadership as an applied discipline has to be integrally oriented
toward action. The conditions for successful implementation must be woven
into the strategies and goals themselves. The very act of choosing strategic pri-
orities requires an integrative understanding of the total circumstances of the
institution. To launch a strategic initiative is already to have considered the
actual or potential conflict with judgments about the significance of other wor-
thy possibilities, not all of which can be made priorities. As a discipline of action,
leadership anticipates the responsibilities and tensions of enactment. Since it is
rooted in narrative, it draws on this resource to resolve the drama of choice and
conflict in the strategies it chooses.
The Reciprocity of Leadership and Management
These thoughts and those that follow reveal another aspect of the relation-
ship between strategic management and strategic leadership. Like all disciplines,
including those in applied fields, strategic management gravitates toward meth-
ods that are systematic and rational. Its aim is to find a logic of decision making
that can be used similarly in all situations. Its methods of design, description,
measurement, evaluation, and control tempt it to think of itself as a science of
management. In its drive toward a deductive pattern of reasoning, however, it
begins to lose intuitive touch with the ever-shifting complexity of the real world,
or it tends to become mechanistic and pointlessly elaborate, as we have found in
some of the proposed models for strategic planning in higher education.
Strategic leadership does not eliminate the systems and methods of strategic
planning and management but reorients their meaning. It places them in the
context of human agency rather than rational deduction, of narrative rather
than description, thereby creating a discipline of engagement whose intention
is ultimately to motivate commitments and actions to fulfill common purposes.
Strategic leadership depends on logic, rational decision making, and measurement
to provide evidence and establish good reasons for action, but the case it builds
is addressed simultaneously to humans as subjects and as responsible agents of
choice. As a discipline, it honors the norms of truth and seeks out what is right,
but it translates its findings into patterns of enacted sense making and responsi-
bility, not just into decisions or propositions to which one might give just verbal
assent. The decisions that flow from strategic leadership follow a logical sequence,