Tag: Strategic Plans

Don’t Mention the Monsters

Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is a useful (if lengthy) book if for whatever reason you are thinking about going into a strategic planning process.  It traces the history of the concept of strategy through its initial application in the military, then through politics, and eventually – post World War II – into the world of business.  Along the way it continually asks the question “what is strategy, anyway”, before eventually landing on a definition which is basically around leveraging strengths to

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The University of Calgary’s New Strategic Plan

Back to Alberta.  I know, some of you may be sick of me talking about Alberta, but a) it’s the most interesting policy scene in Canada right now and b) this is how the rest of the country feels when I talk about Ontario, so fair’s fair.  Back, specifically, to the University of Calgary, which has – in response to significant government cutbacks and government complaints about the province’s universities being unresponsive to changing economic priorities, more or less decided

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What do Strategic Plans Actually Say?

Today’s post is co-authored by Alex Usher and Michael Savage Yesterday’s blog focused on the structure of strategic plans, asking whether they are built from the mission statement backwards or from upwards from a checklist of ideas people had without looking at the overall picture?  (answer: for the most part they are built from checklists and hence are not particularly strategic, though they as planning documents they may work perfectly fine).  Today we’re going to dig into the substance of

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Buckets and Pillars

We’ve been working hard at HESA Towers the last couple of weeks on strategic plans (currently at Queen’s and Memorial).  One of my colleagues, Michael Savage, has been working on some comparative work on strategic plans, some of which we’ll tell you about tomorrow.  But I wanted to talk about something we’ve noticed in the way Canadian strategic plans are put together.  And that is the difference between “bucket” plans and “pillar” plans. Generally, strategic plans all contain three things. 

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Re-Setting Strategy After a Punch in the Mouth

A great nineteenth-century expert on strategy, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, credited his success over Napoleon to resiliency.  Bonaparte, he said “planned campaigns just as you might make a splendid set of harnesses. It looks very well; and answers very well; until it gets broken; and then you are done for. Now I made my campaigns of ropes. If anything went wrong, I tied a knot and went on.” There’s a twentieth-century equivalent, too.  In the words of the great twentieth-century

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