(2- and 3-day versions available)

This program provides senior executives with a comprehensive, research-based examination of the key issues of strategy and strategizing. Strategy is defined as a systematic set of planned actions and contingency measures designed to achieve one’s ultimate goals.

Therefore, the first major phase in the development of an organizational strategy logically begins with a very careful, far-reaching decision analysis to determine what those ultimate goals will be. What kinds of results is the organization dedicated to producing, and how can they be measured? How do we set long-term goals for these results and how do we know that we are not setting our goals too high or too low? Who are the stakeholders or beneficiaries of those results? Any organizational strategy will exist in the context of multiple markets – for money, products and/or services, labour and expertise, materials and resources. It will also exist in the context of other external influences such as the legal system, government, public opinion and politics.

This program first examines cases and examples that demonstrate the utility of “mapping” this organization’s “environment” of stakeholders, customers and other market participants, competitors, suppliers, and external agents, and using it as a tool to develop a truly comprehensive and realistic set of strategic goals.

Second, the course turns to determining what is needed to produce the strategic goals by a sort of “reverse engineering:” what kinds of work performances are required, who performs them, and with what resources, technology and expertise? In this phase it is also important to determine which of the four fundamental performance processes (deciding, persuading, maximizing or innovating) is involved in which parts of the strategic effort.

Participants will analyse case materials that show how appropriate process-specific principles have often been the keys to strategic success, and that ignoring such principles or using the wrong process has often led to disastrous consequences.

In the third and final segment of the program the weaknesses of some traditional concepts of strategy will be examined in view of research and case histories.

The most serious defects of old-school strategic thinking are:

1)            Lack of flexibility; and

2)            The related lack of robust provisions for decentralized decision making and adaptive control.

Applied research indicates that strategy should not be treated as a static object possessed by top management or any central entity. It is better to think of strategy as an ongoing, flexible and iterative process whereby information is gathered, decisions are made, processes are adapted and the changes are communicated across many levels.

Strategy therefore relates to the idea of preserving learning – lessons about achievements, problems that have arisen and preventive, adaptive and contingency measures that the organization has learned to put in place to make strategy a dynamic evolving entity.