Learning Resources

Abstract: Management author and professor Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” Given the extraordinary demands on higher education to adopt strategies that deliver better results with fewer resources and the common resistance of our institutions to strategic change, leaders and planners would do well to actively engage in processes of cultural change. This requires three things: a genuine understanding of the origins of institutional culture as expressed in the “deep architecture” of our colleges and universities; a systematic approach to initiating “courageous conversations” throughout the institution, leveraged by evidence that creates both hope and despair; and a willingness to reengineer the deep architecture around a new set of design principles, displacing the old culture with a new, intentional, emerging culture built on new working theories.

Abstract: University strategic planning is typically well structured with attention to both process and outcomes. However, plans are frequently not implemented in an equally process-driven manner. As a result, the product of planning efforts may not lead to the anticipated change or may even remain “on the shelf.” This article describes how Philadelphia University is using “action research” during strategic plan implementation in order to optimize campus commitment, facilitate organizational learning, and support the sustainability of change.

Abstract: Ten recommendations outline a strategy for departments to make gradual, visible, and rewarding improvements in the learning outcomes of their degree programs. Time is a crucial factor. Change occurs slowly in universities, so the strategy needs to be persistent and cumulative.Among the levers for improvement: familiar technology used by students and faculty to save time on core disciplinary tasks, curricular change, and group work; peer support among faculty; short, accessible increments of faculty development; extensive use of assessment and evaluation to help make glacially slow change visible and subject to conscious control; and careful development of coalitions inside and outside the academy.

Abstract: A Guide to Planning for Change summarizes the new and emerging challenges facing leaders of colleges and universities; discusses new techniques and tools (most notably, analytics) to create an enhanced model for planning in higher education; takes the reader back through the history of planning and strategy execution in higher education by outlining its many eras and stages of development, and highlights the latest thinking and writing on the topic on integrated planning. The enhanced planning model in this book recognizes the many internal, external, up, down, and sideways forces, challenges, and opportunities facing higher education. In the end, it is the successful execution of strategy that will have a lasting impact on the institution.

Abstract: College students have changed dramatically, and the skills needed for productive employment have changed as well. But colleges and universities have been slow to respond, often innovating in only small ways while leaving the core practices of undergraduate education the same. This article examines the barriers to transformational change in higher education in five categories: structure, information, incentives, finance, and culture. It suggests that the initial approach to overcoming these barriers involves generating better information in the form of feedback concerning student learning processes and outcomes.

Abstract: New subscribers to the Harvard Business Review receive as a bonus with their first issue a compilation of fifteen classics, which appeared in previous HBR issues. One article, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail”, by John P. Kotter, first appeared in the March-April 1995 issue and is often referenced as a guide to strategic change in organizations. It is the purpose of the article to evaluate a change process undertaken at a large comprehensive baccalaureate institution in the context of Kotter’s suggested eight steps in transforming an organization.