CHAPTER SIX
Integral Strategy: Narratives and Identity in Strategic Leadership
Reprinted with permission from the American Council on Education. © 2007
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Morrill's Ideas of Strategic Leadership Carry Lessons Far Beyond the Academy

Feb. 7, 2008

"We don’t talk much about leadership in higher education," said Chancellor Richard L. Morrill, who served three universities as chief executive.

He was speaking on a campus, in the Jepson School of Leadership Studies, to an audience of university faculty and administrators present to hear more about Morrill's book Strategic Leadership: Integrating Strategy and Leadership in Colleges and Universities. (Published by the American Council on Education and Greenwood Publishing Group.)

Morrill's book makes the case that strategy is more than a method of management, but can be a discipline and process of leadership. "That might sound implausible, but once anyone suggests that strategy has to do with an organization’s purpose and vision, with setting its direction for the future, it has to be about leadership."

This thinking has applications beyond universities, said political scientist Thad Williamson, one of the Jepson faculty members who spoke at the book talk event. "The dream of every democratic theorist is a world without coercion, a world governed by the unforced force of the better argument rather than by sheer fiats of authority figures."

The university is certainly not such a place but nor can its leaders rule "in the manner of an authoritative CEO," said Williamson, who went on to describe universities as communities "in which there are multiple sources of power, and in which the faculty in particular have the ability to block the best-laid plans of their presidents."

This structure and reality call for collaborative strategic planning of the sort detailed in Morrill's book, suggested Williamson. 

Morrill has standing and experience for writing so authoritatively on this topic. Morrill became Chancellor in 1998, following his 10-year presidency of the University of Richmond from Sept. 30, 1988, to June 30, 1998. Prior to his association with the University, he served as president of Centre College from 1982 to 1988 and as president of Salem College from 1979 to 1982.

On campuses, discussions about strategy can become uncomfortable. "Strategy seeks to define the way organizations create value and gain advantage in a competitive world," Morrill said. "However, in colleges and universities the educational value we create is intrinsic and self-sufficient. Learning is good for its own sake because it transforms human capacities and at its deepest levels it is hard if not impossible to measure

"As academics, we are typically put off by language that would reduce academic values to commercial values, and by hierarchical models of decision-making. Positioning our brand in the marketplace is not how we like to describe the power of liberal education. So, we have to reconstruct and translate the meaning of strategy and the collaborative processes of decision-making that we use in academic communities."

Morrill turns to scholarship in leadership studies to make sense of how strategy can become collaborative leadership. "One [resource] is the centrality of narrative in understanding personal and organizational identities. Both as individuals and institutions, we live as agents who determine the shape of our lives by the values to which we are committed. Our stories of whom we are, of whence we have come and where we are headed, vividly display what matters decisively to us, those things that we cherish, and to which we hold ourselves accountable as agents of choice. Organizations and communities do the same thing as they build a culture and create a sense of their own identity and aspiration for the future. Strategy is rooted in the values of the narrative, which have to be collaboratively excavated and articulated. Our stories are not invented but discovered."

Morrill outlined these basis steps: "Take each step in the strategy process—the environmental scan, the statements of position, mission and vision, the selection of strategic initiatives and imperatives, the development of goals and actions--and re-fashion each of these around the motifs of collaborative leadership. You do the same things as in most strategic planning, but with a different intent and emphasis and coherence.

"Collaborative and dispersed leadership becomes genuinely possible. ... Strategic leadership rooted in values and narrative provides the integration that is necessary in academic communities, and I suspect, in many others."

Jepson's Williamson agrees. He said: "Studying how leadership takes place, or should take place, in the context of the university carries lessons about how other kinds of organizations might be governed more collaboratively and less autocratically. Obviously there are other kinds of institutions besides universities—namely nonprofits and the public sector—where some of the same challenges about forging a coherent narrative and mission that pulls everyone together are present." Williamson imagines applying some of these ideas to businesses.
 
"We have some evidence that nonhierarchical firms of this type are possible and can be viable, but we don’t know enough yet about how and why they succeed or fail or how they go about carrying out core leadership functions, one of which of course is forging a credible narrative. Rich’s book, however, provides a hopeful message—first, that even organizations in which authority is circumscribed, in which power is widely distributed, and in which usually no single actor can impose their will on everyone else, can in fact work and work well—even though it’s not easy, and second, that examples of successful forms of non-authoritarian leadership are far more common that those who associate leadership with 'bosses' and ruthless CEOs generally recognize—indeed often we need only look in our own back yard to find positive examples."

Morrill with Jepson Dean Sandra Peart
 

CHAPTER SIX
Integral Strategy: Narratives and Identity in Strategic Leadership
Reprinted with permission from the American Council on Education. © 2007.
PHOTOS FROM THE BOOK TALK
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