From Plans to Progress in Business School Strategy

• Business schools often treat strategic planning as an infrequent exercise lacking clear purpose and stakeholder engagement, resulting in limited institutional buy-in.
• To develop effective strategies, schools should create urgency around change and engage constituencies of faculty, staff, students, and alumni in the planning process.
• For strategic plans to become actionable frameworks, rather than attractive marketing materials, schools need to monitor them and implement accountability systems.

Transcript

Corey Phelps: [00:14] There are a few challenges that business schools face when it comes to strategic planning. I like to think about the process of strategic planning, and the process that business schools use episodically.

[00:23] It's done maybe once every five years. It's rarely updated. As a result, there's not a lot of built-up institutional knowledge. There's no sense of urgency around doing it.

[00:34] There's not a lot of focus on it. As a result, the purpose of the strategic planning is often unclear.

There's often little expertise inside the business school to pursue the strategic planning process.

[00:45] Oftentimes, stakeholders, faculty, staff, alumni, and students don't really want to engage because they don't see the need to do it.

[00:53] There's often little expertise inside the business school to pursue the strategic planning process. As a result, there's not a lot of buy-in when it comes to the most important part of strategic planning, which is actually executing the strategic planning process.

[01:10] So, when I think about how we can do it better. We need to get as broad a base of stakeholder engagement in the process as possible. And that starts with creating a sense of urgency.

[01:22] We need to convince this broad stakeholder audience—again, faculty, staff, students, alumni—why are we doing this? What's the importance of it? Why is it significant? Oftentimes, we resort to what's happening in the world around us.

[01:34] In other words, if we don't change, what's the threat to the organization? We need to mobilize people's engagement, and then we need to create a big tent.

We need to get as broad a base of stakeholder engagement in the process as possible.

[01:42] How do we get multiple, hundreds, if not thousands, of voices involved in the strategic planning process?

[01:48] From understanding the competitive context, both internal and external, to generating ideas for potential strategic initiatives, evaluating those ideas, making choices about the initiatives we're going to pursue, and then executing them.

[02:03] How do we mobilize those voices? Finally, I would say that what often happens with strategic plans is that they're really nice brochures or great websites, but nobody takes any action on them.

[02:15] What do we need to do to monitor progress, allocate resources, and align incentives for the individuals who are going to be responsible for executing those initiatives in the plan and making progress?