Strategic Leadership – What Does Strategic Leaders Do?

Concept of  Strategic Leadership Strategic Leadership provides the vision and direction for the growth and success of an organization. To successfully deal with change, all executives need the skills and tools for both strategy formulation and implementation. Managing change and ambiguity requires strategic leaders who not only provide a sense of direction, but who can also build ownership and alignment within their workgroups to implement change. Leaders face the continuing challenge of how they can meet the expectations of those who placed them there. Addressing these expectations usually takes the form of strategic decisions and actions. For a strategy to succeed, the leader must be able to adjust it, as conditions require. But leaders cannot learn enough, fast enough, and do enough on their own to effectively adapt the strategy and then define, shape and executive the organizational response. If leaders are to win they must reply on the prepared Continue reading

Seven Strategy Questions

“The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of the wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong questions.” –  Peter Drucker Executing a successful business strategy often requires making tough, sometimes uncomfortable choices. But we frequently avoid making choices in the mistaken belief that we can have it all. Robert Simons, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, addresses this issue in his latest book,  Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution.  He identifies what he calls the questions that will “stress test your strategy”. The goal of this seven strategy questions is to help marketers identify the weakest parts of their business strategy in order to understand where confusion and inefficiency lie. Simons presents the seven strategy questions you and your team must regularly explore together: Who is your primary customer? Have you organized your company to deliver maximum value Continue reading

Key Elements of Strategic Management

Strategic management is defined as a process of specifying the objectives of the organization, developing policies and planning to achieve the objectives, and then allocating resources so that plans can be implemented. Strategic management is considered to be the highest level of managerial activity that the top management of the organization performs and also the executive team. Strategic management normally provides the overall direction of the entire organization. Strategic management is a set of actions and decisions that result to the formulation and implementation of approaches designed to achieve the objectives of the organization. This is a continuous process that is normally involved with the attempt of matching the organization with the changing environment in a manner that is advantageous. Strategic management is extremely critical in the survival of the organization. Elements of Strategic Management Organizations are supposed to select the directions in which it will move towards. Strategic management Continue reading

Organization Structure to Control Systems Design

A major factor differentiates the automatic control system from the management control system, is the exercise of control by human beings in the latter case. In automatic control systems, the human element is missing. It is for this reason that an understanding of organization behavior is important for the proper perception of management control systems and processes. Further, as the major focus of the control system is on the performance evaluation of the organizational sub-units, the control system designer should also have an undemanding of the organization structure. Structure refers to the way the enterprise’s organized so as to enable the total task of the organization to be performed in an efficient and effective way. The organizational structure is essentially the arrangement of its sub-systems with authority and responsibility relations. Thus, it refers to whether the organization is centralized or decentralized or whether it emphasizes line or staff or how Continue reading

Business Model Canvas – Business Model Generation

Business Model Canvas is the most popular tool for entrepreneurs  to create their business models.  The Business Model Canvas is an analytical tool outlined in the book  Business Model Generation  by Alex Osterwalder. It is a visual template preformatted with the nine blocks of a business model, which allows you to develop and sketch out new or existing business models.    It’s an amazing and powerful too and instantly creates a shared visual language while defining a business. A business model describes the rationale of how an organization  creates, delivers and captures value.  Using the Business Model Canvas, the business model is defined across 9 key areas. With a central focus on the value proposition facilitated groups are able to quickly capture (i) how the business will actually create the products, (ii) how customers will access the products, and (iii) how the business will monetize the transactions.  The nine building Continue reading

Jay Galbraith’s Star Model of Organizational Design

Organizational design is not simply about structure and the resulting organizational chart.  It is about the relationships between people, work, formal structures and informal practices and behaviors. It is about the way in which an organization structures and coordinates its people and process so it can benefit from its unique capabilities over the long-term.  It  determines who makes decisions and how those decisions will be made. It changes the role of the leaders as they become less decision makers and more decision shapers. Through organizational design, leaders become the shapers of the organization’s decision-making process. Organizational design and the resulting capabilities are the last sustainable sources of  competitive advantage. Star Model  of Organizational Design  is a well-known  model that has been used for decades to identify the key elements of an organization and focus  on the issue of strategy and strategy implementation. Developed by Jay Galbraith, an American consultant and Continue reading