Sustainable Growth:

Strategic Leadership

Strategic Achievement

Successful Strategy Formulation and Implementation

Linking Creation of a Strategic Intent with its Implementation

Strategic intent must evolve on the basis of experience during its implementation. "Separating strategy creation from strategy implementation by using corporate planners or consultants for the former activity is thus a hindrance to the evolution of a successful strategy. Linking creation and implementation supports the overall process, and thus a dynamic strategy emerges and evolves."²

Managing for Results

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

Leadership and Management

Build 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

Mobilizing Your Organization

In an opportunity-focused organization, dynamic strategy process is both top-down and bottom-up. Opportunity-driven business development "is in large measure a result of the pursuit of opportunities by people at all levels that creates the building blocks for the strategy finally synthesized by top management. Thus mobilizing the organization is vitally important."¹... More

The Biggest Impediment to Strategy Implementation

The biggest impediment to strategy implementation is the traditional functional mindset of many senior executives. "The traditional functional mindset, prevalent since the industrial revolution, promotes attitudes and behaviors that are counterproductive in the current business environment.

Functional thinking is based on an inside-out view in which departmental focus, reporting relations, and the flow of authority are predominant factors.

This drives a disproportional preoccupation with company structure and leads to frequent restructuring in the hope that if the organization chart were properly defined and filled, the organization's performance would automatically improve. Functional view also reinforces the traditional view of performance measurement in which the dominant factors are actual-vs.-budget performance by department and a conservative view of technology."¹

Organizational Capability Approach

Organizations that excel at strategy execution know how to create sustainable value for customers and shareholders through defining key organizational capabilities and applying a balanced approach to business systems. In the capability model (or resource-based model, "senior managers are predominantly concerned with issues about quality of products and services provided to customers (external and internal), the flow of value-added work, and roles and responsibilities. The dominant view of performance measurement shifts from the traditional focus of actual-vs.-budget to a more balanced model that includes the timeliness, quality, and cost of providing products and services to customers.

Allocation and budgeting of resources moves from the traditional practice of individual units vying for resources based on their own needs towards cross-group teams that jointly assess resource needs based on the flow of work needed to create value for customers. Problem solving would seldom involve situations in which unit managers had to compete with each another; instead, organizations would adapt to departmental interdependence, recognizing that issues are best addressed through cross-group problem-solving sessions focused on providing services to customers and the required flow of work."

"An organizational capability approach nurtures three of the most critical factors essential to achieving superior, sustainable results:

1. Strategic focus

2. Organizational alignment, and

3. Operating discipline.

Conversely, taking action to achieve strategic focus, organizational alignment, and operating discipline develops capability thinking."¹

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Strategic Learning...

Strategic Thinking...

FutureStep - a New Strategic Management Process...