May 21, 2004

How to Approach Strategic Planning

To the Editor:

I would like to thank Stanley Fish for his many fine contributions to The Chronicle over the years, and for recently bringing to our attention the important issue of strategic planning ("Plus Ça Change," Careers, April 2). As someone who works in the trenches of strategic planning at a university, however, I'd like to present an alternative view: The reason long-range planning almost never works is that it's almost never done as well as it could be.