What Is Your Strategic Orientation?

Every independent and international school has a strategic plan, but very few have a well-articulated, coherent strategic orientation. In its most simple form, a strategic orientation states the long-term way that an organization intends to thrive. For Southwest Airlines, famously, the strategic orientation has long been about being the lowest price option, whereas Emirates, Etihad and Qatar are all about luxury and amenities (such as the showers on board Emirates' A380 airplanes).Classically, four generic strategic orientations dominate the field: price leadership (be the cheapest, a la Southwest), product leadership (be unique or at least different from competitors in ways that add value, a la Emirates), innovation (be faster, newer or more notable), and operational effectiveness (execute better than anyone else). Conventional wisdom holds that no firm can successful compete along all four dimensions at once.A successful strategic orientation for private education may better be described by Kaihan Krippendorff's rubric taken from his Outthinker blog:Positioning and Customer Connectivity - "You connect with, understand, and react to your core customer(s) more profoundly than others do." This is very tough to do, and requires a non-defensive openness to feedback on the part of everyone in the school.Product Superiority - "You continually deliver an outstanding product or service," where outstanding is demonstrable in ways that matter to customers; e.g., elite university admissions, athletic performance, knowing and adapting to each student best, etc.People and Culture-Building - "You attract, engage, and unleash the power of human talent and culture better than your peers." I have long thought that the third rail in independent schools is the conversation about teacher quality. Just because we are "independent" does not mean we always and universally have the best talent to unleash.Operational Excellence - "You are geared to leading in operational excellence." Execution matters. Period. None of the other orientations really work if execution is hit-or-miss.Here's the rub: Krippendorff says that to be an organization in the top quartile of an industry means being great at all four factors. In which area(s) does your school excel and where are the gaps to close?