Working Toward Strategic Change

This nuts-and-bolts workbook is designed as a guide for members of strategic planning committees in higher education. The book is filled with information, tools, and visual material that complement the companion book Strategic Change in Colleges and Universities. This workbook offers a concise background to the strategic planning process and focuses on the ten critical steps of the process, from developing performance indicators through implementing, evaluating, and revising the strategic plan. Each section helps users work carefully and thoughtfully through the tasks of assembling, interpreting, and making decisions about critical information relating to the process.

In From Strategy to Change-the last in a series-Daniel James Rowley comes full circle in defining his unique vision of the strategic planning process. Written with Herbert Sherman, From Strategy to Change shows how to take the next step after a strategic plan has been formulated. The authors clearly show how to implement a strategic plan that will meet the myriad challenges of today's complex higher education environment and spell success for the academy."It is amazing that while sports teams of colleges and universities meticulously plan their contests against their opponents, their institutions' administrators don't spend nearly enough time or effort in creating andimplementing a strategy. Institutions of higher education seem to be missing the requisite tools to develop and activate their 'play book.' With this new age of globally available real-time information, it becomes increasingly more essential to have a map to help go over and around obstacles, avoid the ever-present pitfalls, and effectively aid in selecting the best route. Rowley and Sherman provide such tools in this exciting and comprehensive new book. I wish that when I was a department chair, president of a faculty senate, and dean that this superb work was available. My function in planning would have been so much easier and more rewarding."--Barry R. Armandi, Distinguished Teaching Professor, SUNY - Old Westbury

Focusing on educational leadership and school administration, offers over six hundred alphabetically arranged entries covering theories, terms, concepts, and histories.

This hands-on workbook develops the models presented and explained in Strategic Change in Colleges and Universities and gives participants the tools they need to develop, implement, and sustain a strategic plan that is both timely and vital. Offering a wealth of information in the form of guidelines, suggestions, and worksheets, this accessible workbook details the ten-step process from developing performance indicators through implementing, evaluating, and sustaining the strategic plan.Each chapter of Working Toward Strategic Change highlights one of the ten strategic planning steps and contains both individual and group exercises and forms. The authors explain the central purpose of the step, discuss what results to expect, offer helpful suggestions for working with the materials, and include a set of reproducible forms or exercises that guide the process. These tested tools are designed to make the strategic planning activities more effective and streamlined.The practical material in the workbook can be applied to the wide spectrum of university and college settings, and the flexible exercises can easily integrate elements and practices that an institution may have already identified or implemented. Working Through Strategic Change is designed to help users work carefully and thoughtfully through the tasks of assembling, interpreting, and making decisions about critical information relating to the strategic planning process. In addition to its application in college and university settings, the book is also a valuable teaching aid and can be used to simulate a strategic planning exercise to give students a clear understanding of this complex process.

This book focuses on strategic staff development in higher education, a sector in which it has been largely viewed as an operational activity with little organizational relevance. The book demonstrates how staff development needs to be based on modern theories of 'organizational learning', aligning itself with institutional and departmental needs as well as the wants and needs of individual staff.

The role of an academic dean is extremely complex, involving budgeting, community relations, personnel decisions, managing a large enterprise, mastering numerous details, fundraising, and guiding a school or college toward a compelling vision for the future. But no academic dean can quickly master all of the intricacies involved in this challenging position. For instance, how do you build support for a shared vision of your unit's future? How do you interact effectively with all of the different internal and external constituencies that a dean must serve? How do you set, supervise, and implement a budget? How do you handle the volume of documents that cross your desk? How do you fire someone, ask a chair to step down, respond to a reporter on the telephone, and settle disputes about intellectual property rights? How do you know when it's time to consider leaving your current position for another opportunity? The Essential Academic Dean is about the "how" of academic leadership. Based on a series of workshops given by the author on college administration and management, each topic deals concisely with the most important information deans need at their fingertips when faced with a particular challenge or opportunity. Written both as a comprehensive guide to the academic deanship and as a ready reference to be consulted when needed, this book emphasizes proven solutions over untested theories and stresses what deans need to know now in order to be most successful as academic leaders.