222 Strategic Leadership
Brown University Web Site
Brown University has created a superb Web site to communicate its “Plan
for Academic Enrichment.” In addition to the plan, it includes several backup
reports on the campus master plan, financial resources, and other strategic issues.
Some features of the site are distinctive and effective. Among these are links that
take the viewer to recent developments in each of the university’s ten strategic
initiatives. The excellent graphics and photographs, press releases and stories,
announcements of grants (including $100 million from one donor for financial
aid), and descriptions of new academic programs give the reader a vibrant sense
of the content and progress of the plan.
STRATEGY AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: NORMS,
STORIES, RITUALS, AND CEREMONIES
A central theme of our analysis is that collegiate organizations function as
cultures as well as formal organizations. Campus communities live by norms and
beliefs, customs and rituals, and stories and traditions that suggest what people
should know and do in order to fit into the organization. As we have seen, the
power of organizational culture has a strong influence on the effectiveness of
leadership both as an engaging process of influence and as a formal position.
The implementation of strategy depends on knowing the folkways, pathways,
and leverage points to get things done within the culture. Strategic leadership
is always looking for ways to read the meaning of these lived realities in order to
embed strategy with the grain of the organization’s understanding of itself and its
ways of doing business. In doing so, it brings a systematic and focused approach
to the cultural tasks of leadership.
The culture of a community also has a more visible way of enacting itself
through the formal and informal rituals and ceremonies by which it celebrates
its history and identity. Traditions and rituals are plentiful on many campuses,
less so on others. But virtually every institution has ceremonial moments when it
opens and closes the academic year, celebrates a founder’s day, provides students
and faculty with awards, and welcomes new members of the community. At the
University of Kansas, entering students participate in a powerful initiation into
campus lore and culture as they celebrate Traditions Night and learn songs and
chants and hear stories about the Jayhawk, a mythical bird that represents the
struggles of the early Kansas settlers (Kuh, Kinzie, Schuh, Whitt, et al. 2005; cf.
Toma, Dubrow, and Hartley 2005). All such occasions become ways for aspects of
the institution’s narrative to be presented and celebrated. Rituals and traditions
connect faculty, staff, and students with a lived expression of the community’s
heritage and purposes, reinforcing and deepening the formal definitions of iden-
tity and vision found in a planning document. Strategic leadership draws respect-
fully on these resources to relate its goals to the interwoven cultural dimensions
of the community.