Dedicated students, distinguished colleagues and dear friends,

Happy Friday!

The process of developing strategy, even for an enterprise you might know well, reveals that you didn’t know it as well as you might have thought. So, what would be a good strategy for developing strategy? How do you develop a clear vision via a well-developed strategic plan for an aspiring university, shaped and nurtured in collaboration with internal and external stakeholders? Further, how do you ensure careful layout of the mission, values, objectives and implementation strategies complete with metrics, milestones and timelines to achieve them?

Clearly, a carefully crafted strategic plan is needed to discern gaps and to identify and allocate resources to fill them. Clear articulation of purpose, vision and plan of action is essential for a public university such as ours that depends on philanthropic resources to achieve scholarship goals. These scholarships support brilliant students with modest economic means. Further, the plan needs to be flexible to best exploit a rapidly changing technological higher education environment in the era of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and a changing geopolitical landscape.

To this end, this week, at a day-long retreat, we engaged the key elements of our newly developed strategic plan to ensure fit and function and to develop the corresponding implementation plans. We discussed enrollment, student success, academic excellence, research, innovation, entrepreneurship, external and internal bridges, employee excellence and success, financial health, and more. We contemplated how to ensure successful implementation of our strategies by identifying accountable and responsible task-specific individuals while recognizing that success depends on a culture of teamwork and collaboration. No one individual or office can succeed in isolation unless we, the collective we, are willing to transcend our own boundaries and help others achieve their goals as well.

Our discussions had one and only one constraint: maintaining the high quality of an S&T education! With that beacon in mind, we focused on our North Star Goals, and identified our research and educational pillars:

• Advanced Manufacturing Technologies – Manufacture Missouri Ecosystem.
• Bio-innovation and BioPlex – Engaging Engineering Minds in Addressing Health Care.
• Critical Minerals – Ensuring Reliable Supply Chain and Reducing Dependence.
• Hypersonic Materials – Contributing to National Security and Space Exploration.
• Geospatial – Providing Critical Contributions to Critical National Challenges.

Enabled by advances in AI, our newly identified pillars will propel us forward and, as we march to accomplish our goals, new pillar ideas will emerge that will entice us to engage. Of course, we anticipate and readily welcome the opportunity to pivot when the next big idea presents itself. To ensure focus, however, we must also subscribe to Michael Porter’s fitting statement, “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

During our discussions on implementation, we also recognized that our strategic plan is and will remain a living document. In fact, our discussions largely highlighted the value of possibility thinking and the importance of thinking about thinking. That is to say, never settling but always making sure we are thinking about ideas and strategies. As a result, and interestingly, many of the “roadmap” elements that were marginalized earlier gained great gravity during the discussions.

Finally, I think I speak for our team when I say our strategic strategy process proved to be beneficial, even essential, as we learned that what has gotten us here won’t get us there! Further, in creating our new and exciting future, we will not only perform and achieve our objectives, but also transform ourselves into our aspirational selves. 

Warmly,

-Mo.

Share your thoughts!

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Mohammad Dehghani, PhD
Chancellor
mo@mst.edu | 573-341-4116

206 Parker Hall, 300 West 13th Street, Rolla, MO 65409-0910
chancellor.mst.edu