Thursday, 09 September 2010 07:56
As another school year gets underway, many superintendents are starting the year already concerned about the upcoming budget process and the continuing fiscal crisis. Working to succeed in a world of dramatically reduced resources is the “New Normal.”
While many superintendents may resolve to focus the upcoming year on improving their districts’ operational performance or “doing more with less,” we firmly believe that, while commendable, this will not be enough. Superintendents may want to use the fresh start of a new year to think not only tactically about operational effectiveness, but also more broadly and creatively about strategy. In the end, innovation and careful strategic planning will be the key to successfully navigating this changed world.
Though both are necessary, operational effectiveness and strategy are quite distinct. As the difference was most prominently captured by Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School, “Operational effectiveness means performing similar activities better than [others] perform them.” Strategy, in contrast, means “performing different activities than [others] or performing them in different ways.” Enhancing operational effectiveness is necessary to remain competitive, but, as Porter points out, the gains from it are short-lived because competitors can learn and imitate the same process improvements. Therefore, creating a unique position and aligning activities to reinforce that position-the essence of strategy-is necessary to perform at a consistently high level.
From the private sector, one of the most oft-cited examples of a company that understood and acted on the importance of strategy is Southwest Airlines, which carved out a defendable niche basically by doing the exact opposite of the major airlines: point-to-point versus hub-and- spoke, no-frills versus amenities, regional airports versus big cities, etc. Whole Foods similarly emphasized differentiation. While other supermarkets concentrated on improving how they sold the same products, Whole Foods targeted a group of customers not well served by traditional supermarkets.
School districts of course do not have the same ability as Southwest Airlines or Whole Foods to craft a strategy from a blank slate. But it is still possible for districts to act strategically by looking beyond their innumerable activities to focus on the most critical challenges and to organize their resources around one distinctive and overarching objective, such as setting a minimum bar of performance in core subjects or stipulating a maximum gap in student achievement. For an example of a definitive strategy in the public school context, please follow the link to a case study of the Montgomery County (MD) Public Schools, which established a “North Star” for student performance. Then, in what truly distinguished its work, the district organized all its operations around this strategic touchstone.
Helping districts create, implement, and achieve such real strategies has been a principal area of DMC’s recent work. It is the subject of the Spotlight and Toolkit articles in the just-released issue of The District Management Journal, and it will also be the topic of our January 2011 Superintendents’ Strategy Summit.
