The Sum of Ambitions Is Not a Strategy

How complex, multi-unit institutions actually narrow to a single strategy — and why most never do.

I would wager that most institutions never actually made a strategy. They are certain they did. But what they have, I would argue, is something else.

Here is what they have instead. Every college has a plan. Every program has a plan. The graduate school wants to grow, the online division wants to grow, the honors college wants to grow, athletics wants a new facility, and they have stapled all of it together and called it a strategic plan.

It's not a strategy. And without an overarching strategy, it isn't really a strategic plan either.

The strategists who built this discipline said so plainly, decades ago, about corporations that look more like your college or university than you might want to admit. Goold, Campbell, and Alexander (1994) put it this way: In most multi-business enterprises, what leaders call the corporate strategy is actually just the sum of the individual business strategies. Your central administration adds a mission, a few financial guidelines, and a logo, but the real strategy of the institution is whatever each unit decides on its own.

And here is the part that lands hardest — and it is their conclusion, not mine. A central administration does not justify itself simply by existing. It earns its place only by making its units worth more together than they would be apart. That is what a strategy is for: It is how the center proves it belongs. In their research, most central administrations fail this test. They are more likely to erode value than to create it. Is that what is happening at your institution?

The complexity is not the problem. Refusing to choose is.

People reach for complexity as an excuse. We're too multi-faceted for a single strategy. We serve traditional undergraduates and adult learners and graduate students and corporate partners. How could one strategy hold all of that?

It can't — if "strategy" means a plan that advances all of them equally. But that was never what strategy meant. Michael Porter (1996) spent a career on a single idea: The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. A strategy that tries to be central to every unit, fund every ambition, and disappoint no dean is not a strategy at all. It is the absence of one.

So the question is not whether your institution is complex. It is. The real question is what your strategy is — the single thing strong enough to hold the complexity together. And there are only two honest answers.

The two strategies that can hold it together

The first is the integrated institution. The units are worth more together because something real flows across them. A learner enters through a certificate and continues into a degree. A research center feeds a graduate program that feeds a workforce pipeline that brings the next cohort back through executive education. Shared advising, shared infrastructure, a single learner relationship that compounds over years. This is where Learner Lifetime Value lives — the recognition that the asset is not the enrollment, it is the relationship that moves across your units over time. If that flow is real, your strategy is to build and defend it, and every unit earns its place by what it contributes to the journey.

But you only get to claim this strategy if the integration is real. Most institutions assert it and don't have it. The certificate doesn't actually feed the degree. The center doesn't actually feed the program. The units sit in the same org chart and share nothing but a parking structure. Asserting an integration you haven't built is the most common way institutions fake a strategy.

The second is the anchor. You have one program or college that is genuinely strong — a real point of distinction in your region or your niche, the thing students actually choose you for. You lead with it. You resource it first. You build the institution's identity and its enrollment engine around it, and you treat everything else as extension rather than equal. This is, quietly, where most non-flagship institutions already live. They have a nursing program, or an education school, or one online degree that carries the place — and they refuse to admit it, because admitting it feels like an insult to everyone else. So they fund the anchor at parity with the also-rans and slowly starve the one thing that works.

Naming the anchor out loud is a strategic act. It is also a political one, which is why it so rarely happens.

Notice that both are real strategies, because both make a choice. The integrated institution chooses the journey. The anchored institution chooses the point of strength. The thing that is not a strategy — the thing nearly every institution defaults to — is the quiet assumption that all units are equally central, even if they are differently funded. That is not coherence. It is a refusal to choose, distributed evenly so that no one feels singled out.

The test that forces the choice

Here is the sharpest question in corporate strategy, and it translates directly to your campus. For any program, center, or unit you run, ask:

Would this be better off somewhere else?

Not whether it is good. Not whether people love it. Would it be more successful as a standalone, housed under another institution, or spun off entirely — than it is sitting inside yours? If the honest answer is yes, then your institution is not adding value to that unit. It is merely hosting it.

This is initiative drag in its purest form: The units and programs that consume leadership attention, calendar, and capital without being made better by belonging to you. Every institution has them. Most protect them — each one has a champion, an alumni base, a faculty line, a history — and starves the core to do it.

The strategy question is never whether a program is valuable in the abstract. It is whether the program is more valuable because it is here. When the answer is no, keeping it is not a strategy. It is a habit.

When units look different but aren't — and when they really are

Now the part that gets institutions truly stuck. Two units feel like they need completely different strategies. The business school and the nursing program. The residential college and the online division. The deans swear they serve different markets, face different competitors, play by different rules. We can't possibly run these on one strategy.

Most of the time, they are wrong, and the difference is operational, not strategic. Underneath, the value the institution actually delivers — the reason a learner chooses you, the thing you are genuinely built to do — is the same across both. What differs is the example you point to, the language you use in the room, the specific pathway. That is not two strategies. It is one strategy with two front doors. The duplicate staff, the parallel budgets, the quiet empire-building — that is waste dressed up as difference.

But sometimes the divergence is real. Different competitors. Different capabilities required to win. Different futures that pull in genuinely opposite directions. When that happens, hear it clearly: You do not have a branding problem. You have a strategy problem. You are one institution trying to build two different futures with one faculty, one budget, one operating cadence, and one leadership team's attention. You will not win both. You will half-build each and wonder why neither one lands.

The honest move is to choose the future you are actually built to win, and let the other go.

What you cannot do is keep them fused and treat the tension as a communications issue. That is the institution that builds two halves of two strategies and makes no one whole.

This — not shrinking, not simplifying — is what "narrowing to a single strategy" actually means. It is resolving the divergences: recognizing the shared core where it exists and ending the duplication, and making the explicit choice where the core is genuinely split. A complex institution earns one strategy by working through its contradictions, not by pretending it has none.

Who makes the strategy real

Strategy in higher education rarely fails in the design. It fails in the execution because shared governance means there is no single decision-maker, no CEO who can ratify the choice and simply move. So leaders try to build the strategy by consensus, and consensus quietly collapses back into the sum of ambitions. To get everyone to yes, you give everyone something, and now you are funding all of it again.

The way through is to recognize that the room is not a committee of equals, even though it is designed to feel like one. There is a champion — the president, the provost, the leader who owns the mandate — and that person is the one who can actually move the strategy forward.

Your energy belongs with the champion, and the work is to prepare the champion to engage everyone whose support the strategy will need. That means knowing, before the meeting, which concern each group is most likely to raise — the senate's question about process and governance, the board's question about enrollment risk, the dean whose program was not named the anchor — and walking in with a real answer to each one already in hand.

Mapping the stakeholder terrain is not a box-checking exercise, and it is not about managing people. It is about understanding, honestly and in advance, where the genuine friction will come from, so that the person carrying the strategy is never met by a concern they have not already thought through. In a shared-governance culture, that preparation is not a maneuver. It is a form of respect — and it is often the difference between a strategy that gets adopted and one that gets admired and then shelved.

The choice is the strategy

A complex institution does not become coherent by getting smaller. It becomes coherent by choosing: what holds it together, what would be better off somewhere else, which future actually gets resourced, and who you will equip to carry the choice through.

The institutions that can do this get to be both complex and strategic. The ones that can't aren't complex.

They're just complicated.

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Sources

The corporate-strategy framework drawn on here — "parenting advantage," and the test of whether a corporate center adds or destroys value across its units — comes from Michael Goold, Andrew Campbell, and Marcus Alexander, Corporate-Level Strategy: Creating Value in the Multibusiness Company* (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994). A shorter treatment appears in Andrew Campbell, Michael Goold, and Marcus Alexander, "The Value of the Parent Company," California Management Review 38, no. 1 (1995): 79–97.*

Michael Porter's framing of strategy as choosing what not to do is from "What Is Strategy?" Harvard Business Review*, November–December 1996.*