Strategy, Part II: From Plans to Winning Moves

In Part I, I distinguished between strategy, planning, and strategic planning. Not because the distinctions are academic, but because collapsing them into a single exercise often leads to a substantial misinvestment of time and attention. In practice, strategic planning in higher education often produces expansive lists of objectives and tactics that are difficult to prioritize, harder to execute, and poorly suited to environments that demand adaptation. The result is not just a lack of clarity, but a failure to position the organization to make winning moves, absorb shocks, or respond meaningfully to change.

Execution and follow-through matter. But when they are anchored to diffuse goals and static assumptions, they do little to build the foundation required for resilience or long-term advantage.

Higher education is highly hierarchical and deeply segmented by function. That structure shapes how strategy is discussed, how plans are produced, and ultimately how institutions perform. Strategic language without hard differentiators or trade-offs is common in higher ed and often leads to plans that are not easily internalized or actionable. Any serious conversation about strategy must contend with these realities.

Why Strategy Disappears Inside Plans and Pillars

In higher education, “strategy” is often translated into planning artifacts rather than clearly articulated directional choices that faculty and staff can understand and internalize.

Sometimes this shows up as functional plans: research and compliance, education, finance, IT, HR, and engagement each produce their own roadmaps. Other times, it takes the form of high-level strategic pillars - five to seven aspirational themes intended to encompass everything the institution values.

Both approaches share the same underlying problem: they describe connection to values, not direction.

Institutions do not succeed or fail by function, and they do not move forward because they endorse universally agreeable ideas. They win or lose based on a focused number of system-level moves that change how the organization operates over time.

Future advantage rarely emerges from optimizing a single unit or naming broad commitments in isolation. It comes from choices that shape the system, such as:

• How quickly the institution recognizes and acts on opportunity
• Where friction between units is deliberately reduced or allowed to persist
• How decisions move, stall, or escalate across authority boundaries

When strategy is expressed as siloed plans or abstract pillars, what results is alignment theater rather than direction. At best, the organization achieves coordination. What it does not achieve is a shared understanding of:

• What must change now
• What tradeoffs are being made
• What “better” looks like in three to five years (critical)

This becomes visible through a simple test: how many employees can name even a single element of the plan, explain why it matters, or describe how their daily decisions should change because of it. Strategy that cannot be remembered cannot be executed.

Strategic Planning vs. Strategic Direction

Strategic planning is typically organized around coordination. It asks questions such as:

• What should each unit work on?
• Which initiatives fit within existing structures?
• How do we align activities and tactics to stated goals or pillars?

These are not trivial questions, but they are fundamentally managerial rather than strategic. They assume the current organizational shape, decision pathways, and capacity constraints are largely fixed and functional.

Strategy, by contrast, is concerned with position and leverage. It asks a different set of questions:

• What moves would meaningfully change our position or trajectory?
• Where are we structurally constrained, and by whom or what? What are the downstream effects of these constraints on reaching our goals?
• Which capabilities, if strengthened, would amplify everything else we do?

The moves that matter most in research organizations are rarely contained within a single unit or initiative. They often involve system-level changes, such as:

• Rewiring handoffs across functional boundaries
• Redesigning approval and decision pathways
• Investing in operational capacity that enables faster, higher-quality execution

These kinds of moves are difficult to express, and even harder to advance through unit-level plans or annual planning cycles. They cut across authority lines, disrupt established workflows, and often challenge long-standing assumptions about how work gets done.

As a result, institutions that rely primarily on strategic planning as an exercise tend to become anchored to prior commitments. Time, effort, and political capital invested in existing plans make it harder to adapt when conditions shift. What was once intended to create clarity can instead reduce flexibility and limit maneuverability precisely when responsiveness matters most.

The Undervaluation of Operations and People

One of the most consequential strategic blind spots in higher education is the persistent undervaluation of operations and people as strategic assets.

High-functioning operations are often treated as:

• Necessary but not strategic
• A cost to be managed rather than a capability to be built
• A support function rather than an outcome amplifier

This framing obscures a simple reality: operations and people determine whether strategy is executable at all.

Operational capacity directly shapes:

• Speed to opportunity and responsiveness to new funding or partnerships
• Researcher trust, engagement, and willingness to pursue complex work
• Compliance exposure and risk tolerance
• Staff sustainability, retention, and institutional memory

Yet operations are rarely positioned as a lever for competitive or positional advantage. Instead, they are expected to absorb increasing complexity without commensurate investment or authority. The result is not efficiency - it is fragility and the events of the last year should make that abundantly clear.

When operational systems are weak or overstretched, even well-conceived strategic intentions stall. Strategy becomes aspirational rather than actionable, constrained not by vision but by capacity.

Prestige Metrics as a Strategic Distraction

Compounding this issue is an overreliance on prestige-oriented metrics as proxies for strategic success:

• H-indices and citation counts
• Total research dollars
• Portfolio size as a signal of strength

These measures are easy to track and internally validating. They are also poor inputs for strategic decision-making.

Prestige metrics reveal little about:

• The resilience and anti-fragility of the research enterprise
• The sustainability of growth
• The institution’s ability to absorb policy, funding, or workforce shocks

More importantly, many of these signals carry far less weight outside the institution than leaders often assume. Sponsors, partners, and policymakers are more influenced by execution reliability, compliance confidence, and institutional readiness than by abstract indicators of scale or reputation.

When prestige metrics dominate, strategy shifts from positioning the institution for durable advantage to performing success for internal audiences. The organization optimizes what is visible and reportable, rather than what determines future capacity and adaptability.

What Putting Strategy into Practice Actually Looks Like

For research leaders, practicing strategy in today’s environment requires deliberate shifts in how decisions are made, measured, and resourced.

From unit plans to cross-cutting moves: Instead of asking each unit to produce a strategy, identify a small number of moves that require coordination across units and materially improve execution.

From long-range plans to rolling priorities and pilots: Use shorter planning horizons with clear decision points. Let evidence, not calendars drive adjustments.

From prestige indicators to operational signals: Track metrics that reflect execution quality: cycle times, rework and corrections, staff workload, and researcher experience.

From static structures to adaptive capacity: Invest in systems, processes, and people that make change easier, not harder, over time.

Strategy as a Discipline, Not a Document

When strategy is practiced well, it does not live in a plan. It shows up in:

• How tradeoffs are made
• How resources are allocated
• How quickly the organization can respond without chaos

In practice, strategy is less about documents and more about resilience. It’s visible in how organizations absorb shocks, coordinate across units, and pivot without losing direction, often in ways no strategic plan could have predicted. This is manifested when everyone in the organization understands the assignment.

Case Study: Navigating a Shifting Higher Education Landscape

The academic environment in higher education is facing multiple pressures: declining public trust, new federal classifications limiting loan access in certain professional degrees, and immigration policies affecting international students. In response, many institutions are making reactive, defensive moves:

• Cutting low-enrollment or “low value” programs
• Doubling down on marketing campaigns
• Expanding remote and online learning options
• Launching standalone AI degrees or concentrations

Individually, each of these may be defensible. Taken together and pursued without a clear view of future advantage, they risk trading long-term position for short-term optics.

Why These Moves May Undermine Future Advantage

Elimination vs. Repurposing
Programs that appear outdated or under-enrolled often contain valuable assets: faculty expertise, curricular building blocks, industry relationships, and experiential components. Strategic pruning may be necessary, but indiscriminate elimination forecloses the possibility of recombination, reinvention, or integration into new, more relevant offerings. Strategy requires deciding what to transform, not only what to remove. This also requires brutal honesty to let go when something is truly not working. 

Marketing Cannot Substitute for Value Creation
The problem facing higher education is not a lack of ideas or offerings; it is a growing skepticism about value. If ideas are becoming harder to sell, not harder to generate, then better marketing alone will not resolve the issue. Value must be demonstrable in outcomes, experience, and relevance. Marketing can amplify value, but it cannot manufacture it.

Remote Learning as Default vs. Differentiation
Expanding remote learning is often framed as a growth strategy, but in a crowded and commoditized digital arena, it frequently reduces differentiation rather than enhances it. As AI becomes ubiquitous and digital content easier to replicate, in-person, applied, and experiential learning may become more valuable, not less. Strategy requires deciding where physical presence, immersion, and human interaction create advantage and where they do not.

AI as an Amplifier, Not a Standalone Product
The rush to create AI-specific programs reflects imitation, not positioning. Without strong disciplinary foundations and real-world context, AI education risks becoming “garbage in, garbage out.” The more durable move is to embed AI as an amplifier of expertise: integrating it into curricula to strengthen judgment, application, and critical thinking rather than treating it as a self-contained credential.

Why This Is Strategy (Not Planning)

What distinguishes these choices as strategic is not the actions themselves, but the trade-offs and bets they imply.

• Are you betting that scale will matter more than differentiation or the reverse?

• Are you prioritizing speed to market, or depth of experience?

• Are you optimizing for short-term enrollment stability, or long-term institutional relevance?

Answering these questions openly and aligning actions accordingly is what turns reaction into strategy.

Strategy in action:

• Make deliberate bets based on what is likely to create future advantage, not simply what seems urgent.
• Consider trade-offs across programs, experiences, and investments rather than isolated cost-cutting or promotional measures.
• Leverage experiential learning and operational excellence as differentiators in a landscape where AI and remote options cannot replace human engagement.