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"Ruminations" from the President
weekly message to the community
from Dr. Robert Myers
(July 15, 2005) — Why Is
“The Vision Thing” Important?
 Dear Colleagues and
Friends of Daniel Webster College,
As the members of my
Cabinet and I prepare for our retreat next week, I am aware of the
following: There are perhaps a few of you who wonder why I’m putting so much
early emphasis on our collective development of a shared vision for the
College. There are, of course, the obvious reasons: the Board has clearly
articulated this as a personal performance objective for me, members of the
faculty have signaled a desire to both understand the vision and perhaps
more importantly to participate in its creation, and as I’ve noted before
there is a general sense of excitement and expectation that we will develop
a compelling vision among our many internal and external stakeholders.
Regardless of how
important are those reasons, they are somewhat reactive. Let me share with
you some more compelling, practical and proactive reasons why I believe this
exercise is so important for all of us.
A strong institutional
vision is mandatory if we are to have a strong sense of direction.
Without a strong sense of
direction, we risk at best wandering in the fog for a generation or two and
at worst flying into the side of a cloud-enshrouded mountain. We know we
can’t afford the latter, but we can’t at this critical juncture afford the
former either. The opportunities facing us may never pass this way again.
So timing in all regards is important.
But in addition, a vision
is a logical and necessary link in the chain that will define our success.
Weaken or remove that link and we won’t succeed. Let’s start with the first
link in the chain: effective leadership. I have a responsibility to build a
first-rate leadership team, to nurture that team as a living and highly
visible symbol of our values and our mission, and as a “buck-stopper” – to
face the hard issues and make the tough decisions that inevitably will
arise.
That logically leads to a
second set of responsibilities or link in the success chain: getting the
right people on the plane, and getting the wrong people off. Fortunately,
and I am truly blessed here, I’ve got the right people and I haven’t
encountered any “wrong” people. We have a great leadership team here that
embodies character, competency, commitment, and a special chemistry that is
marvelous to behold.
This brings us to the
third leadership responsibility, the vision. I’m not looking here for
platitudes, or a snazzy slogan, or an exercise in creative writing. What I
am seeking is careful, clear, disciplined, mature and stasis-aversion
thinking. If the result of our engaging in that kind of thinking gives us a
sense of direction that our stakeholders can understand, commit to, and in
turn dramatize to others, we’re halfway there. But there’s more. As one
consultant I’ve worked with notes, our sense of committed direction must be
viewed as important – not just to us, but to others – and it has to be
believable and distinctive. The real litmus test for “importance” is
simple: when we articulate our vision, are we describing an aspiration to
fill an indispensable niche? If the niche isn’t important, then neither
will our aspirations to fill it be viewed as important. “Believability” is
simple as well: do we have a snowball’s chance of ever achieving what we say
we aspire to? If not, we may be congratulated on our chutzpah and
simultaneously derided for lacking common sense. The test for
“distinction”: does our vision set us apart from others? If our sole claims
to distinction are we have caring, nurturing faculty and staff, we’re
student-centered, we value quality, and we focus on the integration of
theory and practice in our curriculum, I would challenge you to show me
other institutions that DON”T believe in these qualities. It is this latter
category, distinction, which will be in my estimation the most difficult
conceptual and conversational nut for us to crack. Successful integration
of all three – importance, believability, distinction – should lead us to a
powerful place: relevance. And isn’t relevance what we want to portray to
prospective students and to potential donors?
A fourth link in the
chain: focus. Without the vision, how do we know what is important to focus
upon? Without a clear sense of destination, how do we determine the
“waypoints” on the journey? And, perhaps, more critically, without knowing
the waypoints, how do we know if we have sufficient fuel to get to the first
or second one, how much power and altitude to employ, or what obstacles to
avoid? Focus, based on clear vision, helps us to avoid the problem of
trying to be all things to all people. In fact, we’ll know we’re getting
some real focus when we comfortably decide to be fewer things to fewer
people. Great colleges focus; they get very specific about things like
geography, a specific kind of student, a unique approach to teaching, or a
narrowly defined discipline or related family of disciplines. We can grasp
the concept of resisting the natural temptation to be vague; the interesting
question for all of us is “specific in what sense?”
A fifth link: strategic
planning. This, and root canals, typically vie for equal billing as paths
to pain. The reasons are probably as numerous and varied as each of our
individual personalities. But one overarching frustration most of us have
encountered: the tendency to make that which is fundamentally simple overly
complex. Our strategic planning (as opposed to moldy plans) should be
simply designed to provide the means to an end; it is the vehicle to help us
achieve the vision. No vision, little rationale to plan; no planning, the
vision is at best a hollow set of platitudes. I would like us to resolve,
therefore, to the following: in planning, the goal is not the plan but the
successful integration of direction and activities to get us to our
destination; in executing on the plan, we should constantly ask ourselves if
what we’re doing is advancing us towards the vision; in making sure that
important things get done as part of the plan’s roadmap, we should remember
that what gets measured gets done and therefore we need to be precise in
quantifying what we plan to do. It is my unalterable intent as we go
forward to link our planning to our budget and our actions to rewards.
As I think about all of
these important links before I and the members of the Cabinet go into
retreat, I am reminded that unless we get this “vision thing” nailed we will
muddle through the next few years together. And, muddling is no way to
fly. Or, as one esteemed member of the Cabinet might say in a different
context and for a different purpose Never let an airplane take you
somewhere your brain didn’t get to five minutes earlier.
Please, let me hear from
you.
Sincerely,
Robert (Skip) Myers
President
remyers@dwc.edu
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