Leadership & StratEDgy

A stellar content strategy starts with creating quality content. Then social media can be used to subtly deliver the content, creating a much more powerful connection than the megaphone approach.

As I was prepping for teaching the first session of Strategic Management and thinking of words to explain to students how the case discussion process works, it dawned on me just how much a good case discussion is like setting strategy. In short, both are team sports, involve a lot of information, require fresh perspectives and open dialogue – and are, at times, messy processes.

It’s the time of year when students must gather their course materials as classes begin. Long gone is the obligatory march through the campus store purchasing textbooks. These days, students can start their search online and their options have multiplied.

Strategy can be described as making purposeful choices about what to do and what not to do. Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy from Harvard Business Review Magazine deftly explains how two seemingly opposite approaches to strategy formulation – creative brainstorming and structured analysis - can work together.

What do chocolate chip cookies have to do with higher ed strategy?

Every so often we all get the sense that we might be stuck in a rut. Chances are, it’s probably true. From Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit – why we do what we do in life and business: “… a Duke University researcher in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of the actions people performed each day weren’t actual decisions, but habits.”

Teaching, consulting and blogging about strategy and competition in higher education means that there is an endless supply of reading material, themes to explore, people with strong opinions . . . and innovative ideas.

With all the talk about how our attention spans are suffering from our collective technology addiction, perhaps there is at least one positive consequence of thumb-typing and 140-character limits.