Corporate Strategy:

Strategy Innovation

Strategic Management

New Approaches for the New Era of Rapid and Systemic Change

"Our real problem is not our strength today; it is rather the vital necessity of action today to ensure our strength tomorrow."

– Calvin Coolidge

Why Strategic Management?

Strategic management is not a task, but a rather a set of managerial skills that should be used throughout the organization, in a wide variety of functions.

Enterprise Strategy

Successful companies are those that focus their efforts strategically. Strategy should be a stretch exercise, not a fit exercise. To meet and exceed customer satisfaction, your business team needs to follow an overall organizational strategy. A successful strategy adds value for the targeted customers over the long run by consistently meeting their needs better than the competition does... More

The Overall Purpose of Strategic Management Process

The overall purpose of the experimental strategic learning and management process is to establish which strategic options or elements thereof are robust across the scenarios and use the most healthy elements to develop your strategic intent - your core strategic focus or theme.

Strategic Cross-Functional Management

Strategic cross-functional management is central to capitalizing on functional excellence, and in order for functional specialists to make the greatest possible contribution, they must take a broader view of their functions and understand how they fit into the web of the organizational processes and, ultimately, into the overall strategy... More

Ten Major Schools of Strategic Management

Ten deeply embedded, though quite narrow, concepts typically dominate current thinking on strategy. These range from the early Design and Planning schools to the more recent Learning, Cultural and Environmental Schools⁴... More

New Systemic Approach

All the above schools, often fighting between themselves, favor different single-sided approaches to strategy formulation. They represent both different approaches to strategy formulation and different parts of the same process. Today's managers have to deal with the entire business systems – as opposed to dealing with its different parts independently - not only to keep strategy formulation as a vital force but also to impart real energy to the strategic process. They must practice balanced results-based leadership strategies and apply a balanced approach to business systems.

Certain positive moves in this direction have been seen recently. Some of the more recent approaches to strategy formulation take a wider perspective and cut across the above ten schools in eclectic and interesting ways, for example Learning and Design in the "Dynamic Capabilities" approach, or the "Dynamic Strategy" one based on knowledge working.

The currently dominant view of business strategy – resource-based theory – is based on the concept of economic rent and the view of the company as a collection of capabilities. This view of strategy has a coherence and integrative role that places it well ahead of other mechanisms of strategic decision making.⁵

Working On Your Business

"Most businesspeople are so busy working for their business or in their business that they never find time to work on their business. Thus they fail to anticipate what might happen or what they might be able to make happen."⁷ Unless you regularly schedule time (one-day out-of-the-office meeting a month at least) to work on your business and answer critical questions, you'll never achieve your stretch goals.

1. Creating, Communicating and Executing a Clear Vision, Goals and Strategy. An executive's success is affected by the ability to communicate a vision for a company's future, helping employees to navigate through change and motivating them to achieve specific goals... More

Essential Element #1: You must have a vision. And you must be great at thinking with a strategic purpose and creating a visioning process. Great strategic thinkers are visionaries... More

Building Your Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Sustainable competitive advantage is the prolonged benefit of implementing some unique value-creating strategy based on unique combination of internal organizational resources and capabilities that cannot be replicated by competitors... More

Blue Ocean Strategy: 6 Principles

Blue Ocean Strategy is about revolutionary value innovation.

The six principles drive the successful formulation and execution of Blue Ocean Strategy. These principles attenuate the six risks... More

To achieve results, you should develop a solid, sound, customer-focused, and entrepreneurial strategy, aimed at market leadership, based on innovation, and tightly focused on decisive opportunities... More

Operational Plan: "We don’t have a traditional strategy process, planning process like you’d find in traditional technical companies. It allows Google to innovate very, very quickly, which I think is a real strength of the company." – Eric Schmidt... More

 Lessons from Silicon Valley Firms  

Adapted from Relentless Growth, Christopher Meyer

1. Balance between revolutionary and evolutionary initiatives. First, Silicon Valley companies assess the overall balance between revolutionary and evolutionary projects. The ultimate arbitrator of portfolio stretch if the innovation leaders’ judgment, experience, intuition, and luck... More

Creating a Culture for Innovation

By: Soren Kaplan

Shaping culture, especially when it comes to creating a culture of innovation, is a daily task that involves elevating the mundane to the strategic.

By managing the strategic levers of culture, and by practicing the strategies of envisioning, communicating and sponsoring, it becomes possible to create a culture of innovation and drive long-term strategic advantage... More