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Tag: Strategic Plans

Strategy in an Emergency

I’ve had a couple of people say to me recently that in light of the current carnage, I must be having trouble getting business. “No time for strategy right now, huh?” Wrong. You see, “strategic planning” isn’t one single thing: it encompasses a huge variety of activities. And some of them, no, you probably don’t want to mess around with during an emergency. But others, you really, really do, and failure to do so is likely to make the carnage

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October 29, 2024 No Comments

Ball State vs. Stanford

When higher education wants to talk about itself in positive terms, the story it likes to tell is a story like the one of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. You can read about Stanford’s history in books like Annalee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage and to a lesser extent Rebecca Lowen’s Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. The story goes something like this: “we do lots of great scientific work here, and businesses interested in our Intellectual Property

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February 14, 2024 2 Comments

Stratégie a la Québecoise

Located only a few hundred kilometers away from one another along the St. Lawrence, l’Université Laval and l’Université de Montréal are the province’s two biggest and most research-intensive French-language institutions. Both released new strategic plans in the past year or two. Université de Montréal’s plan runs from 2022-2032 and Université de Laval’s was released this past fall and runs from 2023-2028. Bound to some extent by similar political, economic, and social conditions, you might expect the two institutions to have similar types of styles and objectives. You

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January 29, 2024 1 Comment

Strategy Should Hurt: Ways to Make it Bearable

Long-time readers will know my views about the difference between strategies and strategic plans.  A strategy is a course of action, a set of beliefs about how to succeed.  A plan is, above all else, a list of goals to achieve over a given period.  One does not require the other.  Sometimes plans can change from one edition to the other with no change in actual strategy (though bits of meta-strategy – vision, mission, etc. – get some light editing

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November 14, 2023 1 Comment

Strategic Actors, Strategic Planning, Strategic Hiring

Why do universities keep writing strategic plans?  It sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t.  Every institution has a strategy, in the sense that it has a sense of “where it wants to go” and how to get there in a tolerably efficient manner.  These strategies aren’t always written down, but they exist nonetheless: that is to say (to get all Mintzberg for a minute) that strategy can be “realized” without being “intended”.   Writing a strategic plan is – in

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June 1, 2022 4 Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

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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