Strategy, Boiled Down

Strategy. The topic is the subject of treatment by thousands (maybe tens of thousands) or articles and a vast array of books. Some are short, clearly meant to read on an airplane, and others (see Lawrence Freedman's 600+ page tome) are a bit more dense. None comes anywhere close to capturing the essence of strategy for an academic institution than these two from Edward B. Burger, President of Southwestern College, a small liberal arts school in Austin, TX:

No. 1, make sure students are getting the most profound, life-changing, life-enhancing educational experience they can, and, No. 2, make sure that 100 years from now, whoever’s sitting in this chair will have the resources so he or she can do the exact same thing. That’s all. Everything else is noise.

I particularly like the "everything else is noise" bit. Too often, we over-complicate strategy by making it highly tactical.