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Tag: Strategic Plans

Towards a Theory of Strategic Plans in Higher Education

I had an interesting discussion on twitter a few days ago about the nature of University strategic plans, and specifically, why they are rarely written in a manner that feels meaningful to faculty.  Having pondered it for a few days, I thought it would be worth jotting down some ideas. The university is, in most cases, a loosely-coupled organization.  For the most part, people in Fine Arts could not care less what is going on in the Faculty of Agriculture

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October 31, 2016 9 Comments

Innovation to Watch at the University of Sydney

Australian universities seem to do “Big Change” a lot better than universities elsewhere.  A few years ago, the University of Melbourne radically overhauled its entire curriculum in the space of about two years partly to create a more North American-like distinction between undergraduate and professional degrees and partly to reduce degree clutter by winnowing the number of different degrees from over a hundred to just six.  (For a refresher, I wrote about this back here). If you read press reports about

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April 7, 2016 4 Comments

How to Prepare for a Punch in the Mouth

Universities and colleges love their strategic plans.  Plans beget task lists.  Task lists beget work agendas.  Work agendas beget Targets.  Targets beget Annual Evaluations.  And all of it provides a serene sense of control: a belief that we can control the future simply by planning our future work flows. The thing is, it’s mostly nonsense. To see why, consider Dwight D. Eisenhower, who famously said “In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless.  But planning is

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October 9, 2014 4 Comments

Superior Strategy

You may recall that, a few weeks ago, I was somewhat harsh about Western’s new strategic plan for being a kind of Stepford-link strategy: generic, and utterly lacking in anything that suggested Western had its own strengths and personality.  If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen me make some similar remarks about Waterloo’s strategic plan.  Waterloo is one of the country’s few universities that genuinely has a unique value proposition, and deep strengths on which to build –

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October 7, 2013 No Comments

The Opposite of Strategy

The London Free Press recently published a summary of Western’s new draft strategic plan (there’s a longer version on Western’s website, but it’s password protected).  I urge you to read it.  It’s not uniquely bad by any means – there are lots of other institutions who have published similar sorts of documents – but it nevertheless represents a kind of quintessence of what’s wrong with university strategic plans.  It is a Stepford Wife of a strategy.  Nothing about it says, “Western”.  You

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August 28, 2013 8 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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