On university strategy or: A tale of two plans

Strategy is one of those words that gets bandied around a lot and means so many different things to so many different people that I sometimes wonder whether it should be gracefully retired like an old pair of shoes past their prime. Sadly its unlikely to happen and every organization & its constituent units seems obliged to come up with a strategic plan periodically. After all, how could any serious organization not have a plan?
The problem is what these plans look like and what they translate to in practice. I think many academics are deeply cynical about such plans but then we're a pretty cynical bunch and most of us have never had to run a big organisation or justify our existence or our funding to stakeholders. To be clear, I am not averse to a bit of strategic planning myself & am one of the contributors to my own school's plan.
So I had a look at the plan for the University of Kentucky ("UK" where I am currently on sabbatical) and compared it with UCD's (links below). I have to say I thought UK's was significantly better for one simple reason: it could fail and we would know it. By that I mean, if you look at UCD's it has lots of fine sounding objectives. Nothing unusual there: they all do. But the "key actions" are equally vague, a seemingly endless repetition of "develop", "design", "refocus", "strengthen", "identify", "promote", "enhance". There is no way of knowing whether the institution has succeeded in achieving these aims. Cynics will have a field day- or a coronary- reading it.
Contrast that with UK's: along with a set of five goals, there are a slew of metrics. That is there are clear numerical targets under different headings e.g.:

Metric 1-2. Reduce the undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio to 17 to 1.

Metric 1-3. Increase the first-to-second year retention rate to 85 percent.

Metric 2-2. Increase the five-year total for journal publications to 10,000.

Metric 3-4. Increase the percent of staff at the appropriate point between the minimum and mid-point of the pay grade, based on performance and years of experience, to 90 percent.

I am not saying the UK plan is necessarily better in terms of ambition or practicality and I have no idea whether it is more likely to be achieved than UCD's (which I don't think is atypical by Irish standards). I am saying that it is a far far better thing to have a plan with precise targets so everyone knows whatever it has been achieved or not.

http://www.uky.edu/Provost/strategic_planning/plan.htm

http://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/ucd_strategic_plan%20web.pdf