I’ll be leaving town again this weekend for a quick work trip outside the US and then at the end of next week I’ll be headed to Woods Hole for my final stint of the year–two weeks. This time we’ll be making some fairly major decisions about the Journal–however, I’ll be available by telephone and email for any Krasnow issues that come up.
As I head off, I’d like to relate to you the general details of a very interesting meeting that I attended this morning: how to deal with the massive unintended consesquences of explosive growth at Mason. What I began to glean was that these issues (parking, magnetic fields etc. etc.) are the stuff of serious strategic planning….something I’m not sure we have engaged in enough, at least here at Krasnow.
One of my favorite books, Management of Research and Development Organizations, Managing the Unmanageable by Jain and Triandis (Wliey NY 1997) has a great chapter on strategic planning that I highly recommend. Here’s a concept that is in there that I think we might think about some more:
Strategy=Ends+Ways+Means
Where the ends are the objectives (What, Why? When), the ways are concepts (How, Where) and the means are of course the resources (with what? with whom?).
If we’re going to add a new program, what are the resources were going to use to pay for it?
You see where I’m going…
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 