Learning-Centred Leadership in Higher Education by Ralf St. Clair

Author:Ralf St. Clair
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030435974
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Uses of Strategy

Despite the ubiquitous discussion of the topic in business, conscious attention to strategy has only really been considered as a useful tool since the middle of the twentieth century. After being mentioned a few times in earlier publications, strategy was formalised in Ansoff’s Corporate Strategy (Ansoff, 1965). Over the last half-century, the role of strategic planning has been debated extensively, with Harvard Business School playing a leading role in the discussions. Indeed, it is probably not over-stating to say that Harvard Business School’s engagement with this issue is the source of its current predominance. However, there is no one “right way” of working with strategy, and businesses demonstrate enormous diversity in the way they are organised and make decisions. Strategy and strategic plans are by no means a given in business, but if present their development and their form can vary widely. Understanding strategy requires pulling back from the details to view the big picture. This section sets out to review some of the key ideas about strategy and consider how we can use them in learning-centred leadership.

In business, strategies are focused primarily on maximising shareholder value through two different approaches allowing the seller to position a product on the market (Stewart, 2017). The first is price competition, where the product performs identically to every other similar product on the market but is cheaper. Generally automotive fuel is like this. All brands are assumed to be more or less equivalent by most people, so drivers will choose the cheapest when they need to fill up the car. The second positioning strategy is differentiation, where the product is sufficiently distinguished from the others on the market to make a higher price viable. Apple computers used to have remarkable market differentiation, and I have paid double for a laptop with identical functionality to a cheaper one because I liked the way Apple approached design and the user interface. To this day, I find Windows looks a little square compared to OS, even though I know that they are running substantially the same code. Some rare companies manage to combine these two positioning approaches. A good example is IKEA, which is both cheap and distinctive.

The strategic approach of a corporation tends to begin from the initial commitment to one or the other marketing perspective, but there is often a desire to move from cost competition to differentiation. To achieve this, companies implement ways of managing resources and capabilities that reflect the acronym VRIN: valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable (Stewart, 2017, p. 1526). These attributes guarantee the marker differentiation of a product and explain why companies guard their intellectual property so jealously. If you have enough VRIN in your product, you can charge more! In the higher education context, there’s only one Oxford.

A recent idea shaping strategies within the corporate world is stakeholder theory, capturing the idea of maximising value not just for the firm and but for a range of constituencies as well. One of the neatest examples of how

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