Abstract
How to thrive in a complex and uncertain world?
Accelerating the growth of your business requires an evolved strategic approach.
Businesses with strategic practices that are agile and responsive will be able to thrive in environments underscored by uncertainty and fear, characterised by increasing volatility and discontinuous shocks.
Strategic agility is the key for growth and success in turbulent markets:
The spotting and seizing of game-changing opportunities requires probing the business environment by conducting small experiments while systematically minimizing the risk of upside bets.
Creating structural attributes that allow you to stay in the game (a strong balance sheet, diversification of cash flows; customer lock-in; low fixed costs) need to be combined with Managerial agility – the capacity to shift resources, including cash, talent, and managerial attention, quickly and effectively out of less promising business areas and into more attractive ones.
Focused business processes that enable rapid responses such as supply chain excellence, market savvy in product development, translating corporate priorities into individual objectives, and avoiding a proliferation of corporate priorities are another key element to growth.
But the key to growth is robust decision-making in the face of uncertainty. Swift, effective response to emerging conditions requires expanded strategic thinking that encompasses intuitive knowing and rational analysis.
This allows for swift, effective response to emerging conditions.
What is your approach to strategy?
Conventional strategic thinking can be divided into two segments: strategy formulation and strategy implementation. Strategy formulation by senior and specialised roles first, followed by implementation by lower-level and operational
staff.
When people think about strategy formulation, they usually mean ‘determining where you are now’, ‘determining where you want to go’ and then ‘determining how to get there’.
- Analysing both internal and external environments
- Creating vision and mission statements, corporate objectives, business unit and tactical objectives
- A plan providing details of how to obtain these goals.
The next phase, according to this linear model is the implementation of the strategy. This involves:
- Allocation of resources
- Establishing a structure
- Assigning tasks or responsibilities to specific people
- Managing the process, monitoring
results, evaluating, controlling for variances, and making adjustments to the process as necessary.
But there is a problem with this static model of the strategy process: it is not how strategy is developed in real life. Strategy is actually a dynamic and interactive process.
Read more in the attached PDF...
