2  Strategic Framework Sketch

2.1 Dean Yao’s Vision for Lerner

Lead the Lerner College to become a top public college in the nation that:

  • educates future business leaders with innovative programs.
  • produces high-impact research that addresses grand challenges.
  • values a diverse, equitable, inclusive, and welcoming community.

2.1.1 Notes On Acheiving Vision

Team work and a common framework for building and working towards Lerner distinction will be essential to achieve the above vision.

Many headwinds exist including:

  • Affordability: College is becoming less affordable as tuition increases continue a decades long trend of outpacing median income.
  • Demographics: From 2025-29, a 15% reduction in college-going students is anticipated.
  • Reproducibility: Estimates from a former editor of The Lancet, perhaps the most prestigious medical journal, estimates that 50% of all research findings are simply not true.1

Hence, it is essential that the Lerner community collectively pursues excellence to achieve Dean Yao’s vision. This pursuit all starts with this direction-setting process, namely creating our strategic plan. The strategic plan will be used to craft Lerner’s identity; three to five themes used to communicate Lerner’s distinction and guide our collective efforts.

2.2 Background

The initial conceptual framework for sketching out a strategic plan borrows from “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t”2, an influential book written by Jim Collins and originally published in 2001. Two concepts from the book will be subsequently drawn upon:

  1. The Hedgehog Concept: The idea to focus on one or a few really big things where sustained and disciplined effort leads to accumulating ever-improving results. The few efforts worthy of focus should meet at the intersection of three criteria:
    1. A Well-Understood Economic Engine - understanding of the fundamental factors and mechanisms that drive a company’s profitability and sustained financial success.
    2. The Potential to Be The Best in the World - if you can’t be the best in the world at it, leave it to others; this does not necessarily mean big, it just means best within a specific community.
    3. Purposeful Passion - without passion you cannot persevere to be exceptional.
  2. The Flywheel Effect: - a flywheel represents a cyclical progression of actions where each action naturally propels the next, creating a self-reinforcing loop to sustain and amplify organizational success. The Flywheel Effect is the observation that great organizations use disciplined long-term effort to slowly increase organizational momentum which eventually catalyzes into prolonged breakthrough results; accumulating small wins that compound over time as opposed to relying on one breakthrough to yield success. Continued pushing in the direction of economic sense, potential for excellence, and palpable passion is the only way to sustain organizational momentum and growth.

For simplicity of communication and to avoid the cutesy terminology, we will say there are four criteria for choosing Lerner’s points of differention:

  1. Economic Engine Viability,
  2. Potential to Be Distinctive / World-Class,
  3. Passion or Sufficient Enthusiasm for Excellence, and
  4. Flywheel Potential - the ability for scholarship, education, community, and impact to be mutually intertwined and self-reenforcing.

2.2.1 Lerner College’s Economic Engine

The simplicity of Lerner’s economic engine aids our ability to align it with other criteria. There are only four categories of revenue sources and two substantial categories of expenses.

Sources of revenue to Lerner’s college’s economic engine are largely tuition-based, roughly 75% of revenue is generated from tuition; hence, educational excellence and associated communities must be of paramount direct importance to Lerner’s future success. Other notable revenue sources include gifts, which account for less than 10% of revenue annually, and fee-for-service/grant-based revenue which accounts for less than 5% of annual revenue. Worth noting, given dormitory capacity limits, future revenue growth at the graduate level is less bounded than at the undergraduate level.

In terms of expenses, Lerner’s college’s economic engine is largely salary-driven; with faculty compensation/benefits comprising upwards of 75% of Lerner’s total expenditures. Adding in the salaries of staff, Lerner college’s expenditures on salaries/benefits are around 90% of total expenditures.

The concentrated sources of revenues and expenses make it easier to crystallize what must be done to sustain and improve Lerner’s economic engine. To maintain and grow revenue, Lerner must:

  1. Celebrate and reward educational excellence as fueled by the other pushpoints in Figure 2.1 to sustain and grow tuition revenue.
  2. Increase donor participation, possibly by allowing donors to participate in and shape the type of momentum Lerner is seeking to build.
  3. Explore more funded activities, possibly through win-win arrangements with outside industry and/or increased focus on grants.

And, in terms of expenses, we must ensure that the large expenditures on our collective labor are spent in ways which contribute momentum to Lerner’s flywheel. Disjoint, unfocused, and disparate faculty engagement contributes little to negative momentum; we must act using coordinated teams to gain distinctive and sustainable momentum.

2.2.2 The Potential To Be Best In The World

Directionally-speaking, the choice of how Lerner chooses thematically inter-connected pushpoints should suggest a framing where Lerner can reach distinctive, and potentially world-class levels. For now, Figure 2.1 provides an underlying logic, yet more specificity is certainly needed to be an implementable strategic plan.

2.2.3 Purposeful Passion

Outstanding performance is closely tied to passion; without genuine motivation, the determination required for excellence is likely to diminish. Imagine what excellence looks like: communities of students and scholars sustained by unified purpose; funded by donors, tuition dollars, industry and government; all aligned through vision and sustained enthusiasm.

2.2.4 Flywheel Potential

Lerner should pursue efforts that build and amplify organizational momentum. This is discussed further in the next section.

2.3 Underlying FlyWheel Logic for Lerner College

In broad strokes and echoing the language of Lerner’s mission, Lerner college’s flywheel moves through four pushpoints:

  1. Pioneering scholarship leveraging leading-edge theories, analytics, technology, and diversity;
  2. Inspirational education fostering curious, globally-minded lifelong learners with a leadership mindset; and
  3. Inclusive communities capitalizing on Delaware’s proximity to major centers, fostering collaboration with industry, deploying faculty who enthusiastically share their expertise, engaging alumni to inspire excellence, and personalizing success through dedicated advisors and staff.
  4. Business and Societal Transformation that engages our community to push the frontier of knowledge and capabilities.

Building a sustainable flywheel where these inter-connected pushpoints lead to ever-increasing mometum for Lerner’s success is an illuminating exercise. Figure 2.1 shows one proposal of the underlying logic that most research-intensive business schools should be following.

Figure 2.1: Underlying flywheel logic of a research-intensive business school.

Notice that each pushpoint of the flywheel almost inevitably leads to the next. Pioneering scholarship leads to world-class teaching methods, leading-edge solutions to business and societal problems, and transferable skills/capabilities being brought into the classroom; almost inevitably leading to inspiring education. Next, when inspirational education is available, it is almost inevitable that a community of people accumulates to be collectively inspired and educated. And then, having a community through which innovation gets diffused and talent emerges, its almost inevitable that business and society will be positively impacted. Through the relentless pursuit of business/societal impact, pushing the frontier of knowledge, scholars inevitably validate and refine their ideas and theories; inevitably leading to even more valuable scholarship.

Figure 2.1 is prescriptive as underlying logic, but it does not specify how Lerner applies this logic, nor how to align efforts within the pushpoints. For example, pursuing pioneering scholarship in funeral home management, creating educational offerings for pet store marketing, having communities of tech-entrepreneurs, and seeking impact on climate change would likely be a completely unaligned scoping of pushpoint efforts.

A more (hypothetical) aligned-strategy might be created for a community interested in “revolutionizing global payment processes”. One can imagine these types of aligned pushpoints for this community:

  1. Scholarship in regulatory environments, healthcare payments, fin-tech platforms, and financial regulations.
  2. Educational/co-curricular offerings that shape the next generation of fin-tech and healthcare professionals with a focus on bringing innovation into the classroom and integrating the Lerner community with industry.
  3. Community-building through institutes, symposiums, clubs, etc. all surrounding global payment systems.
  4. Impacting business and society by engaging industry/academic partners in a way that leads to deployed payment systems that are more equitable and more efficient.
Note

In the above example, alignment is largely achieved by subject; this is not a requirement. Any skills/capabilities in one pushpoint that can generate momentum in a subsequent pushpoint might be considered to aid alignment. For example, if manipulating large data sets is required for scholarship, then that skill can build momentum in an educational setting where technical competency is promoted.

Revolutionizing global payment processes might be completely inappropriate for Lerner, but to discover which communities are appropriate, we use the four criteria of economic engine, world-class potential, passion, and flywheel potential to decide how Lerner chooses to build momentum; we cannot do everything.

2.4 Applying the Underlying Logic

In the next section, we explore how the Lerner community will come together and apply the underlying logic to identify aligned pushpoint loops.

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  1. Horton, R. Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma? [Accessed: Feb. 1, 2024]. Available from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60696-1/fulltext.↩︎

  2. Collins, J. (2001). Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t. New York,NY. HarperCollins Inc↩︎