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Tag: Strategic Plans

Time Horizons for Strategic Plans

One of the oddest conventions in strategic planning – in higher education, anyway – is that Strategic Plans should last for five years.  I know of no reason why five years is considered a standard length of measurement other than that when Stalin decided to resume planning in 1928 after the “pause” of the New Economic Policy and the defeat of his left-wing opponents Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev, he decided to do so in five-year increments.  After that, pretty much

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November 26, 2019 2 Comments

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

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

Critical Friends

A few times a year I get asked to help with the drafting a university or college’s strategic plan.  Usually nothing major: a little bit of environmental scanning, talking about industry trends, that kind of thing.  I think I do enough to get a decent sense of where the pain points are in academic and strategic planning.  The most important one I wrote about back here – the fact that strategic planning is often done around academics rather than with them, mainly

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June 1, 2018 5 Comments

UBC Strategic Plan

I don’t usually comment on under-development Strategic Plans, but I’m going to make an exception for the University of British Columbia because they’re doing something that is either going to be incredibly transformational or seriously catastrophic. Just a little bit of background.  The process (a full time-line and process notes are here) has been about as inclusive as you’re likely to see at a major university.  Which is to say, there have been a lot of test-the-water meetings but not necessarily

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January 16, 2018 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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