Strategic Management Upside Down: Tracking Strategies at McGill University from 1829 to 1980

Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences, Dec 2003 by Mintzberg, Henry, Rose, Jan

Abstract

A number of the fundamental premises of strategic management are put into question in a study that tracks the realized strategies of a prominent university over a century and an half. Amidst continual change in detail, there was remarkable stability in the aggregate, and nothing resembling quantum or revolutionary change in strategy ever occurred. This may be explained in some of the terms most popular in business today: "empowerment", "venturing", and especially "knowledge work". Thus, while the typical university may seem very different from the typical corporation, its behaviour may in fact contain sobering messages for the strategic management of businesses.

Resume

Le present article suit, sur une periode de plus d'un siecle et demi, l'evolution des strategies d'une universite bien connue et remet en question un certain nombre de premisses elementaires de la gestion strategique. Au cur d'incessants changements qui affectent les details, on note dans l'ensemble une remarquable stabilite et l'absence de tout changement global ou revolutionnaire dans la strategie. Cette situation peut s'expliquer par les termes les plus en vogue, de nos jours, dans le milieu d'affaires, asavoir : � autonomisation �, � developpement commercial �, et tout particuli�rement � travail intellectuel �. Donc, bien que l'universite type puisse paraitre bien distincte de la compagnie type, son comportement peut en fait contenir d'importants messages pour la gestion strategique des entreprises.

Frederick W. Taylor (1911) popularized the term "one best way" almost a century ago. It remains alive and well in the thinking of strategic management, which has stepped from one best way to another over the course of its short history: from the strategic planning of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Ansoff, 1965; Steiner, 1979), to the strategic positioning of the 1980s (notably Porter, 1980, 1985), to the core competencies of the 1990s (notably Prahalad & Hamel, 1990). That all of this has worked as prescribed remains an open question; that any of it has worked in the university setting is the subject of this paper.

There has certainly been a steady stream of calls over the years for universities to engage in strategic management and strategic planning (e.g., Holdaway & Meekison, 1990; Hosmer, 1978; Ladd, 1970; Lutz, 1982). Yet seldom have the fundamental differences in strategy been addressed between universities and corporate organizations, for which almost all of these prescriptions have been developed.

Consider mission and product-market strategy, the essence of positioning. The mission of the university is research and teaching: to create and to disseminate knowledge. Yet these, especially research, are largely under the control of individual professors (Hardy, Langley, Mintzberg, & Rose, 1983, 1984). A university of one thousand professors might be described as pursing one thousand different research strategies, and many different teaching strategies. Other key strategic issues-for example, the hiring of professors and the rules for tenure-are often determined collectively: not by the careful conception described in the strategic management literature so much as in the give and take of complex interactive processes. How, then, do prescriptions about central planning, core (namely common) competencies, and overall competitive analyses apply to universities?

This is not to conclude that universities do not have strategies. In fact, Hardy et al. concluded that universities are inundated with strategies, in the sense of consistent patterns of action: within programs and departments, about pockets of research and approaches to tenure, concerning the construction of buildings and the methods of teaching, and so on. We just do not understand the trajectory of such strategies: how they originate, evolve, change, and interrelate in the university setting. This study of a prominent Canadian university across most of its history seeks to address these issues.

In his will of 1811, James McGiIl, a successful fur trader, bequeathed �10,000 to establish a college in his name on his country estate. After a difficult start, during which the family contested the will, the college began with a medical school in 1829. A century and a half later, McGiIl University had emerged as an internationally known institution with a beautiful campus at the foot of Montreal's Mount Royal mountain (now a five-minute walk from the centre of downtown Montreal), offering an almost full slate of academic degrees to some 20,000 students.

This study tracks the strategies of this institution from 1829 to 1980, in the process addressing some rather unexplored aspects of the strategy-making process. With these dates, we focus on the history-the long trendsand avoid being influenced by what we know best, the recent years that we have lived. After a brief introduction to the research method and sources of data, the university's strategies are described in each of several key areas across the 152-year period, before final conclusions are drawn about strategy making in universities and beyond.