Global Strategy - blog

Relative to my recent critical account of public sector strategizing it is fair to offer at least some guidelines of what practical steps would be necessary for better performance in academic research and teaching. The key points deal with organizational architecture, strategic repertoire, personal development, and managing the past-present-future (illusory) continuum. Brought to the context of my own university, these would be the immediate actions I would undertake having the power:

1) Organizational architecture. Contrary to the strategy jargon in management textbooks, structure does not follow strategy – but other way round. Especially, in an environment in which the only meaningful outcome is the quality and innovativeness of research and teaching it is totally unnecessary maintain any extra constraints and boundaries. Lean and mean, thus, would be an optimal solution. In the Aalto context, light central administration could easily manage 50 research groups (each including 4-7 full professors) without any intermediate organizational layers. Add heavy incentives to focus on quality and the lean structure would allow research groups to do their natural tasks in research and teaching instead of allocating resources to manage the current 4-5 hierarchical layers between the focal activities and top management. New research groups could easily emerge, and less successful could be terminated with considerable ease compared to the current system.

2) After setting the structure and incentives, the only proactive way to nudge university’s evolutionary path is to recruit (and maintain) talents. With an ‘exit’ option (equally so with the research groups) taking risks would be possible and even necessary in the hunt of the ‘new-new’ things that world-class research requires (BTW: contrary what the Finnish special interest groups have argued, the three universities already were in world-class with more than one respect).

3) Although the research groups are needed for administrative purposes and in organizing teaching programs, the key production unit in any university is an individual professor, and her/his formal/informal research team. Consequently, a rapid improvement of quality and productivity would require massive supportive intervention that would engage all Aalto professors. As the previous research assessment was conducted at the level of departments (which is silly), we would actually need research assessment + mentoring of all 300 Aalto professors. 3 top scholars outside the Finnish borders working with one professor for two or three days should help to fine-tune skills and future prospects, and even save the careers of some of the more exhausted individuals. The message here is: the only meaningful way to accelerate learning and capability development is to concentrate on individuals instead of artificial administrative units.

4) Because we do not have the ‘psyche’ abilities (same with the SIG people), only way to prepare for future challenges is to (a) allow variation in research focuses and teaching offering; and (b) maintain ‘slack’ . That is, programs and projects that have no immediate function are desperately needed.