Staying Focused: Strategy for Small Schools

It'd not often that a paragraph of text comes along that perfectly captures what one has been thinking - but poorly articulating - of late. Such is the case with the item below from 800CEOread, a business book review and curation web site. Reviewing Strategy That Works: How Winning Companies Close the Strategy-To-Execution Gap by Paul Leinwand & Cesare R. Mainardi, with Art Kleiner (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016), 800CEOread said:

"Define the underlying identity and strengths of your company and the people in it, align your strategies to the unique and idiosyncratic value that exists in that strength, support and spread the authentic storylines and behaviors within your company that support those strengths, cut bait and costs on everything else so you can invest in what you do best, and build the future of your business on that unique vision and value you have to offer your customers and the world."

While useful to many schools, this paragraph should be the touchstone for strategy at most small schools. Smallness brings many advantages, but human resource bandwidth and deep financial pockets are rarely among them. These limitations mean that coherence is at a premium; that is, the school can ill afford to take on extraneous or non-value-adding initiates. Everything has to hand together to make a unified whole. It is the opposite that either gets small schools into trouble (insufficient differentiation in their markets) or leads to me-too, lackluster strategic plans.