Peg Board

LEARNING
FIRST
Sailing a Blue Ocean
In addition to the day-to-day responsibilities of ensuring that our students and staff are continually learning and
growing, my most impassioned work for 2017 has been in the realm of strategic planning.
Strategy, the art of making good decisions about the future, is not easy. There are 280 North American boarding
schools actively competing to recruit the approximately 40 new students Darrow needs to enroll each year.
Finding and acquiring those students requires a distinctive approach: offering an experience that people will
value, and telling the story of that experience in a compelling way. Although that concept may be simple to
articulate, executing it effectively demands a long-range strategy.
Toward that end, I’ve been using a framework outlined by Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim in their book,
Blue Ocean Strategy (Harvard Business Review, 2005). The blue ocean they describe stands in contrast to a red
ocean, i.e., the blood-filled waters resulting from aggressive, head-to-head competition for resources. Rather
than engage in protracted and expensive battles with competitors, an organization finding its blue ocean pursues
differentiation and low cost as a means of opening new, uncontested market space and creating new demand.
So how does a boarding school do that?
Last October, I visited the five boarding schools with whom Darrow most frequently crosses applications to see in
person what they look and feel like. At the same time, I’ve been interviewing parents and students to get a finer
sense of how they experience Darrow, particularly the joys and the challenges. With nearly two dozen interviews
done, I’m forming a more accurate impression of what our constituents value, expect, and need. The next step is
synthesizing this information to inform what we should be doing more of (and less of).
In December, Darrow’s Board of Trustees began to consider a few versions of a vision statement, which was then
submitted to the staff for feedback and refining. In February, we dedicated an entire school day to a new event
called Design Day, in which students and faculty contributed their talents and insights to designing parts of the
School’s future. The goal is to help us better understand possible paths forward and consider which of our values
will best support the realization of our vision. Gathering input from the students who will live most immediately
under those values day to day will be an essential part of our strategic plan’s ultimate success. Our goal is to
have the plan’s vision and values established by late spring. We will then begin to specify the focus areas that
will enable us to realize our vision. Although we have a general timeline for completion of this process, I have
heard repeatedly from strategy consultants that it can’t be rushed responsibly. A strategic plan has to steep over
a period of time. It needs to be done as soon as possible, but no sooner.
To properly conclude such an important undertaking, we also need the input and ideas of Darrow’s alumni and
friends. Please email me at holzapfels@darrowschool.org to let me know how you would like to be involved. We
won’t find our blue ocean without you.
SIMON HOLZAPFEL
HEAD OF SCHOOL
2
PEG BOARD FALL/WINTER 2016–17