Join Higher Ed Marketing Lab host Jarrett Smith as he explores the essential elements of strategy. Learn how strategy differs from activities like planning, why strategy doesn’t begin with goals, the importance of selective over-performance, and how to recognize a true strategy over something that merely sounds strategic.
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Transcript
You are listening to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m your host, Jarrett Smith.
Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m Jarrett Smith. Each episode, it’s my job to engage with some of the brightest minds in higher education, in the broader world of marketing to bring you actionable insights you can use to level up your school’s marketing and enrollment performance.
Today, it’s just me, and we’ll be talking about strategy specifically. We’ll be asking the question, do you actually have a strategy, Now I think we can all agree that strategy is one of the most overused buzzwords in the professional world. And what I hope to do today is get beneath the buzzword.
I wanna explore what strategy really means, why it matters, and how we can begin to tell the difference between a real strategy and something that just sounds strategic. So if you’re someone who has seen the word strategy thrown around a lot and maybe thought it was kind of overused, but never really stopped to ask what does this actually mean?
And how is it different from things like goals or plans or big picture thinking? Well then this episode is for you. I. So I wanna start by just admitting that I think we all have a love affair with the word strategy. Universities spend months developing and then rolling out their strategic plans. we podcast and write and present on things like brand strategy and social media strategy and enrollment strategy.
There are consultants who offer strategic assessments. In agencies that produce creative strategies and media strategies, there are people like me who literally have strategy in their job title. But as much as we love strategy, much of what we in higher ed and honestly, the broader world of business, much of what we call strategy just isn’t.
We have goals. We have plans, we have aspirations. Sometimes we have magical thinking, but more often than not, we don’t have strategies. So. What is a strategy exactly? Well, it seems like there are many definitions of strategy, as many definitions of strategy as there are of something like brand. A lot of what I have come to believe about strategy comes from studying what some very smart folks, have had to say about it over the years.
Folks like Richard Rumelt, Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen. These may be names that you’re also familiar with. What I’ve always found confusing is that each of them talks about strategy in very different ways. Porter is going to really lean into competitive forces. Rummel talks about guiding policies and coherent action, and Christensen emphasizes disruption and jobs to be done.
On the surface, these ideas are all pretty different, but I think when you look a little bit deeper, there are common themes that cut across all of them, and it’s those themes that I think can help us arrive at an understanding of what strategy is really all about. So in the next few minutes, I’m gonna share four of those themes, four elements that I believe are essential to understanding strategy and how it’s different from other activities like planning or goal setting, or just thinking broadly.
Of course, these will be based in part on my reading of those smart strategic thinkers, but also on my own firsthand experience observing and participating in strategy development and implementation. So let’s jump in. The first theme I wanna share is that strategy is best when it starts with problems and not goals.
Goals and aspirations are important. Mission and vision are important, but those things are not Strategy. Strategy starts really when you’re facing a meaningful challenge that doesn’t have an obvious solution. I. Now this idea that you start with the problem, not with the goal, is a real break from what we often do in higher ed.
Think about the way we articulate our institution-wide strategic plans. We typically list our mission, our vision, our values, and then we have this laundry list of objectives.
We want to strengthen our brand, become the institution of first choice, improve student supports, attract the best and brightest faculty, improve our finances, and so on. And those are all perfectly fine aims, but articulating the desired state of affairs that you hope to achieve tells you nothing about how to go about achieving it.
There is a reason that those goals in the strategic plan haven’t already been achieved, but most strategic plans gloss over that and they jump straight from the goals to a laundry list of initiatives. And I think this is a real mistake. I. For one, it allows the creators of that strategic plan to skip over the very necessary work of figuring out what is actually going on under the hood.
Why aren’t you already an institution of first choice? Why isn’t your brand already as strong as it should be? Why aren’t you already attracting the best and brightest faculty skipping past those uncomfortable questions? Opens the door to overly optimistic thinking, and it also leads to creating a scattershot list of initiatives that are good at generating a lot of activity, but may not be adequate to actually achieve the goal.
So what I’m saying is goals are good, initiatives are good, but if you jump from one to the other without diagnosing the problem, then you’re sort of missing the heart of strategy. So. If you say we want to grow enrollment and improve our financial resilience, then right after that, I would say we need to acknowledge the challenge, at least in a sentence or two.
Maybe it’s something like our enrollment and financial struggles are the result of not a lack of mission or quality, but from a combination of low visibility, a diffuse program portfolio, and operational complexity. Articulating that deeper challenge. The challenge that stands between you and achieving your goals helps to create focus and clarity, and it does a lot to help explain why the initiatives that you’re recommending all ladder up to that goal and how they were chosen.
so start with the challenge, not the. goal. The second theme I wanna share is that strategy requires real choices and trade-offs. This is partly because, well, resources are finite. You simply cannot afford to invest heavily everywhere, but beyond just the question of investing resources, you have to make choices and trade-offs because organizations become stronger and more competitive when they have focus and they become weaker and less competitive when they lack focus.
There is a reason that Western governors in Southern New Hampshire University aren’t also trying to be highly selective R one institutions, and it’s because what you need to do to be a successful, large scale online university that really caters to working adults, it’s very different than the things you need to do to be a highly selective leading research institution.
Pursuing one path cuts off another, and that’s okay as long as it’s an intentional trade off. Another way to think about this is the idea of selective over performance. I. It is acknowledging that you can’t be superior everywhere. So instead of trying to be superior everywhere, it’s about selectively overperforming in a few key areas that really matter.
One of my absolute favorite strategy minds, Dr. Chuck Bamford, who is actually a guest on the show a few years ago, is super smart. On this particular point, he points out. The, the vast majority of what organizations do doesn’t lead to any kind of competitive advantage. Every university, every college has to run payroll, it needs IT infrastructure, it has a managed facilities.
You have to do these things and you have to do ’em well. But no perspective student is gonna be excited that your web team rolled out a new Agile workflow. The real strategic question is what could you double down on that would set you apart in a way that students actually care about? And this idea of selective over performance doesn’t just apply at the institution level.
It applies on smaller scales too, like developing a new academic offering or a new promotional campaign. So imagine hypothetically you got the lovely task of launching a new MBA program, right? One of the most oversaturated and competitive academic areas you can imagine. If you were doing that and you wanted to be successful, you would have to acknowledge that you cannot compete with every MBA program out there, and for every type of student that might be interested in pursuing an MBA, you cannot be amazing everywhere.
I. So the only chance you have is to be smart about over-indexing in a few key ways that might set you apart from your core competition and appeal to a particular type of student that you’re particularly well suited to serve. That idea, this idea that we can’t be amazing everywhere we have to selectively overperform can actually be a surprisingly hard thing to accept, but that’s part of what makes strategy, strategy choices, and trade-offs.
The third theme I wanna share with you is the notion that strategy is a working theory. It’s not a guarantee. So I said earlier that strategy starts with a meaningful problem that doesn’t have a clear solution, and that lack of a clear solution is a clear marker strategy. Because if a problem did have a clear solution, well then you wouldn’t need to waste your time devising your strategy.
You would just make a plan and execute it. But strategy asks us to step out into the unknown and to make strategic bets, to have a theory of how we’re going to create success. And those bets, that theory could be wrong. In the process of developing your strategy, you might miss some important hidden dynamic.
The solution you come up with might be inadequate to overcome the challenge. There’s really no way to know until you start executing a strategy. I. Yeah, but if you think about it, that’s the allure of strategy, the possibility of failure. That’s why we study strategies of companies like Zappos or Ikea or Southwest Airline.
It’s because they made these unusual strategic bets that either other people couldn’t see or they saw, but just weren’t willing to pursue. So uncertainty and the potential to fail is baked into the idea of strategy. The last theme is that strategy creates coherent action. And this is an idea that I first came across in reading Richard T’s really great strategy book, good strategy, bad strategy.
The idea is that strategy doesn’t just create a long to-do list, but it results in a series of coordinated activities and investments that are designed to reinforce one another.
It’s sort of the the one plus one. Equals three. That happens when the message in your ads supports the program design. And that program design supports employer engagement, which in turn supports fundraising. And that fundraising supports infrastructure, which ultimately supports student outcomes. And those outcomes build your reputation.
Which improves your ability to recruit students and faculty, and that makes your advertising that much more effective. You see how there’s that reinforcing set of behaviors and investments and activities that create sort of an upward spiral that’s coherent action at play, and it’s very different from what happens when every department is pursuing its own priorities in parallel, but with no unifying logic to knit it all together and to make it more effective.
So to recap, here are four questions you can ask to test whether you really have a strategy. Number one, are we solving a consequential problem that doesn’t have an obvious solution?
Number two, have we made clear choices in trade-offs in deciding how we’re going to address that problem? Number three, are we operating from a hypothesis that has a chance of turning out to be wrong? And number four, are our actions and resources aligned in a way that they’re mutually reinforcing to one another?
If you can’t answer yes to those questions, you might be doing something extremely important. You might be doing something that is valuable for your organization, but you may not have a strategy. So let me close with this strategy, I believe is one of the most powerful tools that we have, but only if we treat it with the seriousness that it deserves.
That starts by being honest about what strategy is, what it isn’t, 📍 and what it really demands of us.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope it was useful and maybe provided you with a few ideas and maybe a little bit of inspiration as you develop your own strategies. Take care, and we’ll see you next time.
