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Category: Governance

Strategic Planning for Ambiguous Organizations

I have been doing a fair bit of strategic planning work recently and one mantra that people like repeating when it comes this kind of exercise is “we’re not like a business, so we can’t plan like a business”.  I get why people say this, but they’re wrong.  Or rather, they’re right, but not for the reasons they think. When people say that “universities aren’t businesses”, mostly what they are thinking is that universities aren’t interested in profit, per se.  But

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November 25, 2019 2 Comments

The North American Higher Education Area

There was a fascinating little story last week about a contretemps at the American Association of Universities (AAU), where the executive committee made a controversial decision to expel McGill University and the University of Toronto, largely on the grounds of needing to spend more time focussed on “American issues”. I am sure this would have had an enormous effect on public opinion in Canada (wot, o my god, so nationalist, Trump/nativism gone mad, etc), if anyone in Canada had the

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October 18, 2019 4 Comments

Trudeau vs. Harper

As we move inexorably towards a fall election (21 October, in case you’d forgotten), it is time to try to evaluate how well the present government has done on skills, science and higher education and how its record stacks up against its main competitor, the Conservative Party.  We obviously can’t do a manifesto analysis now because the Conservatives don’t have a manifesto yet (though frankly, this recent set of policy speeches by Andrew Scheer are less than encouraging).  However, while

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June 4, 2019 8 Comments

Does My Institution Need a Strategic Plan?

As our company’s name suggests, we think a lot about strategic planning here at HESA Towers.  And after a decade of doing this job, I have come to the conclusion that while most institutions do not spend enough time planning, too many of those that do issue plans are under the mistaken that these plans are in any way strategic.  Let’s start with the first half of that sentence: there is not enough planning in Canadian institutions.  Remember, planning is

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May 27, 2019 No Comments

The Academic Oligarchy’s Kryptonite

Following up on yesterday’s discussion on the long-term rise of administration: it occurred to me after hitting send that there’s another aspect to the rise of administration I forgot to mention – budgeting.  Historically, administration has to some degree grown as a function of the complexity of budgeting, for some very good reasons. A hundred years ago, budgeting in higher education was a fairly simple affair because universities didn’t actually do much (by today’s standards, anyway).  A small number of

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March 28, 2019 2 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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