Saturday, August 30, 2008

Role of 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, the 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.



Strategy is the way in which a company orients itself towards the market in which it operates and towards the other companies in the marketplace against which it competes. It is a plan an organization formulates to gain a sustainable advantage over the competition. The central strategic issue: why different companies, facing the same environment, perform differently.
Strategy answers the following questions:
what are the sources of the company's sustainable competitive advantage?
how a company will position itself against competition in the market over the long run to secure a sustainable competitive advantage?
what are the key strategic priorities?


Strategy is an agreed-on guide to action that should lead business to success in the marketplace by satisfying customer needs better than the competition does. Strategy formulation is the major task for the company entrepreneur and CEO, but it is the task of middle managers and project managers to carry this strategy out and turn it into results.


Strategic Leadership
As a strategic leader your prime responsibility is to ensure that your organization is going in the right direction. To be able to identify the right strategy and pursue it to the desired result, you need to master two important functions: strategic thinking and strategic planning.


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 Schools8... More


New Approaches to Strategy Formulation
The currently dominant view of strategy is the resource-based theory. Traditional strategy models, such as Michael Porter's five forces model, focus on the company's external competitive environment. Most of them do not attempt to look inside the company. In contrast, the resource-based perspective highlights the need for a fit between the external market context in which a company operates and its internal capabilities. According to this view, a company's competitive advantage derives from its ability to assemble and exploit an appropriate combination of resources. Sustainable competitive advantage is achieved by continuously developing existing and creating new resources and capabilities in response to rapidly changing market conditions.
In relation to the 10 traditional approaches, today, strategy formulation should also be a combination of them - judgmental designing, intuitive visioning, and emergent learning; it should be about transformation as well as perpetuation; it has to involve individual cognition and social interaction, co-operative as well as conflictive; it must include analyzing before and programming after as well as negotiating during; and all of this must be in response to what can be a demanding environment.8


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



Empowered Employees (Metal):
People are sharply aligned with corporate vision and strategies... More


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


SWOT Analysis: Questions To Answer
What is your strongest business asset?
What unique resources do you have?
What do you offer that makes you stand out from the rest?... More


New Goals for Strategic Planning
In a business environment of rapid changes, heightened risk and uncertainty, developing effective strategies is critical. They prepare executives to face the strategic uncertainties ahead and serve as the focal point for creative thinking about a company's vision and direction.
Many companies get little value from their annual strategic-planning process however. To meet the new challenges, this process should be redesigned to support real-time strategy making and to encourage 'creative accidents'1


Your Strategic Intent
Strategic intent is a high-level statement of the means by which your organization will achieve its vision. It is a core component of your dynamic strategy. Strategic intent cannot be planned all in advance. It must evolve on the basis of experience during its implementation... More


3 Market Leadership Strategies
The market leader is dominant in its industry and has substantial market share. If you want to lead the market, you must be the industry leader in developing new business models and new products or services. You must be on the cutting edge of new technologies and innovative business processes. Your customer value proposition must offer a superior solution to a customers' problem, and your product must be well differentiated... More

Case in Point 7-Part Competitive Strategy of Microsoft
Although Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft, built his empire on technological products, his business mastery is even more important than his technical skills, and his competitive urge is a huge driving force.
The early success of Microsoft was founded on the company's 7-part competitive strategy... More


Your Innovation Strategy
The innovation portfolio provides visibility that allows your firm pace the introduction of new products and services.


You should balance the introduction of revolutionary products with incremental improvements in others so as to maintain a steady flow. By having a comprehensive view of your initiatives over time, you can avoid either overwhelming or underwhelming the marketplace.

3 Primary Criteria to Assess Your Innovation Portfolio
Besides assessing each initiative individually for risk, investment, return, and timing, assess your total portfolio to ensure that you have the right initiatives in it:
Stretch and strategic fit. How much does your portfolio push the industry frontiers, and how well does it fit with your business goals and strategy? ... More

Case in Point Silicon Valley Companies:
Deciding If Your Innovation Portfolio Has Enough Stretch
Adapted from Relentless Growth, Christopher Meyer
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

The Owl and the Field Mouse
A little field-mouse was lost in a dense wood, unable to find his way out. He came upon a wise old owl sitting in a tree. "Please help me, wise old owl, how can I get out of this wood?" said the field-mouse.
"Easy," said the owl, "Grow wings and fly out, as I do."
"But how can I grow wings?" asked the mouse.
The owl looked at him haughtily, sniffed disdainfully, and said, "Don't bother me with the details, I only advise on strategy."

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