Conditions That Encourage a Strategic Programming Approach to
Implementation1 |
Necessity Conditions
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Simplicity
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Stability
Motivating Conditions
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Industry Maturity
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Capital Intensity
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Tightly Coupled Operations
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External Control
Jack Welch's 5 Strategic Questions
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Strategy Innovation vs.
Strategy Programming |
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In strategic
programming, you can realistically separate
planning and doing, strategy formulation and
implementation.
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In strategy innovation, you
assume that you cannot realistically tell in advance how the future
will unfold or what will work, and therefore intertwine
formulations and implementation, continually adjusting your strategy
as you gain new insights through an
experimental trial-and-error
process of learning by doing.9
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Strategic Programming
Defined
As a
leader,
you must ensure that your realized strategies are as similar as possible to
your deliberate strategies, which, in turn, should be as close as possible
to intended strategies.
Strategic programming is planning how your
deliberate strategy can best match the realized to the intended strategy.1
Corporate
Strategy: 2 Logics
Competitive
Strategies: 2 Types
Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean Strategy
Planning, Programming, and
Budgeting System (PPBS)
In the Strategic Programming model, plan
development and implementation takes place in a straightforward linear
fashion.
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Strategy Formulation:
based on a preestablished
mission and its
corresponding
goals
and objectives, you identify
alternative strategies and evaluate them before selecting the preferred
option.
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Strategy Implementation:
implement the strategy
through a tactics described by a series of increasingly detailed and
shorter range plans, programs, and budgets. Each level of plans should
have a corresponding level of budgets by which adherence to the plans is
enforced.
Strengths of Strategic Programming
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Strategic programming facilitates
communication about strategic issues and
achieving integration across organizational levels and functional
specialties.
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Properly done, rational strategic planning
provides your entire organization with a road map
that greatly facilitates personal individual initiative.
Limitations to Strategic Programming
In the
new era of rapid change, organizations
are limited as to how heavily they can rely on strategic programming as the
cornerstone of their overall strategic
management
process. Strategic programming is applicable only in certain stable
conditions, and these conditions are becoming rare.
There are four types of interrelated and
mutually supportive limitations to strategic programming.
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Required Conditions:2
strategic programming is most appropriate in organizations facing stable
and/or simple conditions.
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Stability:
businesses that operate in a
predictably ongoing ways, free from major unexpected shocks, are
defined as stable.
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Simplicity: using strategic programming is most
appropriate in businesses that are simple enough to know what the
right strategy is before the fact.
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Industry maturity: in mature markets, changes are
gradual and managers have years of experience to draw on.
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Capital intensity: Heavy investment in capital
equipment provides managers an incentive to adhere closely to their
intended strategy.
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Tightly coupled operations: operators in a tightly
linked network must adhere precisely to prespecified plans in order
to avoid mass confusion.
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Powerful external control: organizations under tight
control by outside forces have a built-in motivation to adhere
closely to intended strategies.
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Diminishing Viability of
Old Mechanistic Organizations and Command-and-Control
Approaches:1
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Externally,
global competition is
forcing agile competitors to adjust to fragmenting markets that
require greater flexibility in adapting to emerging needs, and
mechanistic organizations tend to adapt to such changes slowly.
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Internally, knowledge workers empowered by advances in
information technology encourage organizations to get more people
involved in planning and decision making so that planning becomes
intertwined with doing.
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Problems with
Strategic Planning:
it may be useful in bringing
about incremental change within your organization, but it does not
promote radical changes in strategic direction or
organizational transformation.
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