Morrill describes how to understand and use the strategy process as a form of collaborative leadership in colleges and universities. Strategic Leadership is the first book to propose the integration of leadership and strategy as a discipline of practice in academic institutions. The book's unique aspect is that it integrates current ideas about leadership, governance, values, narrative, and strategy into the process of strategic leadership. The author argues that strategy is not just a method of management, but can also be a process and applied discipline of collaborative leadership. In drawing upon contemporary theories of leadership, the book sees leadership primarily as a relationship of sense-making and sense-giving, which mobilizes and sets directions for the future.

Strategic Leadership addresses deep and continuing issues relating to strategy, governance, management, and leadership in higher education during a period of rapid change. Each of these themes is at the heart of current debates about the capacity of universities to respond to new expectations, market realities, reduced state funding, globalization, technology, and a long list of other challenges. Dealing with these issues can immobilize colleges and universities, or it can cause them to become so market-driven that they will sacrifice their own legacy of academic values. This book places strategic planning in a new conceptual framework that is oriented to interactive leadership rooted in human agency and values. It will assist academic professionals, stakeholders such as trustees, and students of higher education to better understand and use strategic planning as an effective process and as a method of collaborative leadership.

Morrill combines theory and practice as he addresses the values and beliefs that are the underlying source of conflict in the culture and system of academic decision-making. In sum, the book provides the basic orientation that leads to an emphasis on organizational narratives of identity and aspiration--what strategy processes typically call mission and vision.

Richard L. Morrill serves on several corporate and not-for-profit boards and as a consultant on governance, leadership, and strategy to colleges and universities. Following ten years as president of the University of Richmond, he became chancellor and was also named Distinguished University Professor of Ethics and Democratic Values in 1998. He previously served as president of Centre College and of Salem College. He is author of Teaching Values in College (1980) and Strategic Leadership in Academic Affairs: Clarifying the Board's Responsibilities (2002). Morrill received degrees from Brown University and Yale University before completing doctoral work at Duke in religion and ethics.