Abstract
Strategy is the pattern of decisions that set the long-term direction of an organisation. For a university it guides and coordinates its principal operations of research, education and engagement with the community and industry. The strategy framework described here highlights the roles of vision, objectives, operations, business model and organisational design. All these elements must be present and aligned for the strategy to be comprehensive and coherent. However, most university strategies only contain some of these elements. There is an overemphasis on vision and objectives, and very little mention of the business model of the institution. As such they are deficient.
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Notes
- 1.
Much of this consulting is done on the private account of the academic.
- 2.
D. McDonald, The Golden Passport (New York: Harper Business, 2017).
- 3.
For example, McDonald (p. 533) notes that in 2015 the school serviced more than 10,000 managers through 79 executive education programmes to raise $168 million. Also, the publishing division made $203 million. MBA tuition and fees raised $120million. A further $216 million came from endowment distributions, gifts and housing rents. And at this time its endowment was $3.3 billion.
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A large part of this success has come from its strategic alliance with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company who recruited heavily from the school. One writer called this alliance McHarvard.
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D. Sull, S. Turconi, C. Sull and J. Yoder, “Four Logics of Corporate Strategy, MIT Sloan Management Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (2018), 136–142.
- 6.
Brian Schmidt, “A great university is first made by its students”. From http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/a-great-university-is-first-made-by-its-students.
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R. Andrews, G. Boyne, and A. M. S. Mostafa, “When Bureaucracy Matters for Organizational Performance: Exploring the Benefits of Administrative Intensity in Big and Complex Organizations”, Public Administration, Vol. 95, No. 1 (2017), 115–139.
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Devinney, T., Dowling, G. (2020). What Is Strategy?. In: The Strategies of Australia’s Universities. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3397-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3397-6_4
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