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Tag: Strategic Plans

Institutional Strategic Plans: Control v. Vision

Here are a couple of quick thoughts on institutional strategic plans and how they tend to fall into two big categories. Most institutions typically prefer plans that are about control.  That is, they want the plans to focus people’s agendas within an organization on a few key goals.  Sometimes these plans take the form of task-lists; other times they are focussed on a few institution-wide goals, complete with metrics (not surprisingly, these are the kinds of plans that the big

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April 19, 2022 1 Comment

Those Two New Laurentian Reports

What Laurentian reports are we talking about now? Last summer, after the big round of layoffs at Laurentian, the administration said it wanted to do three big reviews before exiting CCAA protection – one for its real-estate portfolio, one for its overall operations, and one for its governance.  The first one, to my knowledge, has not been released, but the second and third were released last week.  You can see them here. Ok – anything you want to disclose before

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March 7, 2022 3 Comments

University Strategy Safari

I recently had the pleasure of reading the book Strategy Safari by Henry Mintzberg, Bruch Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel.  It’s both an interesting overview of the history of strategic planning and a taxonomy of strategic planning styles.  Of course, I read it with a view to thinking about how planning works in universities and colleges and found it says some interesting things about how universities and colleges think about planning and where there is room for improvement. Strategy is not

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January 27, 2022 1 Comment

Smash the Calendar

The north side of Edmonton’s downtown is maybe the most amazing couple of square miles in Canadian post-secondary education.  You’ve got Norquest College (15,000 students) on 102nd.  There’s MacEwan University (another 15,000) between 104th and 105th, and then starting around 115th you’ve got the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT), which adds another 20,000 students or so.  That’s a lot of teaching and learning. So why isn’t it better known?  I’d say the concentration doesn’t get the love/notice it should because there

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December 7, 2021 5 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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