Cheryl B. Schrader, who served as chancellor between 2012 and 2017, describes her approach to strategic planning and the impact of those efforts.

Audio transcript

What do you think are the biggest accomplishments?

I really think that our strategic plan is clearly one of the biggest accomplishments. And it’s not the plan, per se, it’s the people. And what the process of, you know, working together with thousands of people to come up with a way that we could focus our attention and really make things happen, is probably the most important piece of it. Because that required, at that point in time, it required us to sit down and think about where were we going, how are we going to get there. Like how do we take some of these challenges and say okay, you know if we raise the visibility of the wonderful things that are happening here, we help underscore the value we bring to the system, to the state, to the nation. If we can see the opportunities with regard to the, you know, fulfilling the workforce demands, being those research partners in areas that are really changing the world.