Making Strategy Work: Three Simple Principles for University Leaders to Turn Vision into Action
THE STRATEGIC THINKER
By Massimo Garbuio
As an undergraduate, I fell in love with game theory. My professor offered a definition of strategy that has stayed with me ever since: "Strategy is about leaving instructions with your assistant, going on holiday, and trusting them to make decisions for you and in the benefit of your organization." That image captures something essential about what strategy truly is - not just a long-term plan or a commitment device, though it includes those things. At its core, strategy makes you replaceable. It enables someone else to make decisions on your behalf, confident they're acting in accordance with the organization's goals.
After years of engaging on strategy with university leaders and working alongside corporates as they develop their strategic plans, I've witnessed both the struggles and successes of universities trying to operationalize their vision. The good news? Creating effective strategy doesn't require sophisticated frameworks or extensive resources. It requires three things that are remarkably simple - though admittedly, they demand courage.
When universities get strategy right, they build trust throughout the organization. Staff and academics understand what's expected of them. They know what success looks like. They can make decisions aligned with institutional priorities without waiting for permission. This is the promise of good strategy: clarity that enables action.
The Three Essential Elements
1. Identify the Critical Challenges
The first step is to articulate the critical challenges your institution genuinely faces - both external and internal. Look at exemplars like Bocconi University Vision 2030 and Strategic Plan 2025, which clearly identifies its strategic challenges: technological innovation and globalization. Notice they don't shy away from calling challenges what they are, though you might also frame them as "opportunities" if that language resonates better with your community.
The key is specificity and honesty. Are you facing declining domestic enrolments? Increasing competition for international students? A need to modernize research infrastructure? Challenges in staff retention or morale? Name them explicitly. Your community already knows these challenges exist; acknowledging them builds credibility and creates a shared understanding of the strategic landscape.
2. Articulate a Very Limited Set of Priorities
We cannot work on everything at once. This is where courage comes in: you must choose.
Whether you're a small institution or a large one, you shouldn't have more than five or six strategic priorities. For smaller universities, this might feel generous. For larger, comprehensive institutions, this feels impossibly constraining - but that's precisely the point.
For larger universities, the extra work involves identifying synergies across units and achieving the right level of abstraction. Your priorities need to be comprehensive enough to encompass diverse activities while specific enough to guide decision-making. This requires moving beyond unit-specific goals to institutional priorities that transcend organizational boundaries. ETH Zurich plans have done an incredible job in articulating the impact priority first, then how they are going to address them through research, teaching and engagement.
When you limit priorities, you make trade-offs visible. You signal what matters most. You free your community from trying to excel at everything simultaneously - an impossible task that leads to mediocrity across the board.
3. Establish Clear Measures of Success
This is perhaps the most overlooked element of university strategy, and the most crucial for building trust.
When you say "we aspire to transform the student experience" you need to specify what that transformation looks like. These words mean different things to different people, sometimes in ways that are inconsistent. But even when they mean different things, making the differences explicit will allow the search for synergies.
Publicly commit to numbers. Be specific. If transforming student experience means reducing class sizes in first year, say so and commit to a target that is communicated to anyone in the institution. If it means increasing work-integrated learning opportunities, specify the percentage of students who should have access by when. If research excellence means moving up in rankings, say which ones and by how much. Again, Bocconi University provides an excellent example of this kind of clarity and commitment, but also the plan of The University of North Carolina.
Clear measures do something powerful: they reveal what you truly care about and where you'll allocate resources. This transparency enables everyone in the organization to understand how they can contribute but also how they can show contribution to the University strategy when they apply for promotion. People want to do a good job. They need to know what a good job looks like.
The Promise of Clarity
When you articulate challenges, limit priorities, and define success clearly, something transformative happens. Your strategy becomes operational. People throughout the organization can make decisions without navigating bureaucracy or waiting for approvals. They know what matters. They understand how their work contributes.
This clarity also illuminates opportunities to remove obstacles. Many university processes exist because of legacy systems, not because they're necessary. When priorities and success measures are clear, you can ask: "Does this process help us achieve our strategic goals?" If not, you have grounds to eliminate it.
Good strategy doesn't add complexity. Good strategy removes it. It cuts through the noise coming from an environment with unprecedented complexity – due to enrolment challenges, technological disruption and geopolitical uncertainty - to provide clarity about what matters most. And when done with courage and commitment, it builds the trust that allows everyone in your institution to act strategically, even when you're on holiday and your assistant is making decisions on your behalf.
The Ultimate Test
Want to know if you've written a good strategy? Try this simple test: walk around your campus and ask people - academics and professional staff at any level - three straightforward questions: "What's the strategy of the university?", "What's the strategy of your faculty or portfolio?" and "How do these two support each other?"
If they can answer these questions clearly, and if their answers are consistent among different individuals, you've done a great job. If they hesitate, offer vague platitudes, or give wildly different responses, your strategy hasn't achieved what it needs to achieve - no matter how elegantly it's written or how impressive the document looks.
This test cuts through everything else. A strategy that exists only in a PDF or on the website isn't really a strategy at all. A strategy that lives in people's minds, that guides their daily decisions, that connects individual work to institutional purpose - that's strategy working as it should.
That's the goal. That's what strategy should enable.