Three Hierarchical Levels of Strategy Management

❶  Corporate Strategy   >>>

❷  Business Strategy   >>>

❸  Functional Strategy

5 Strategic Questions

You Should Ask to Understand Where Your Business Is Going

By: Jack Welch

  • In the last three years, what have your competitors done?... More

10 Rules for Building a Great Business

  1. Surprise markets and competitors by introducing disruptive products... More

Blue Ocean vs. Red Ocean Strategy

 

3 Strategies of Market Leaders

Visionary Growth Strategies

Differentiation Strategies Business Strategies Effective Pricing Competitive Strategies 3 Generic Business Strategies: Cost Leadership, Differentiation, Focus

Systemic Innovation

7 Interwoven Areas

  1. Business Innovation

  2. Strategy Innovation... More

Value Innovation

 

 

 

Creating Competitive Disruption

7 Strategies

Strategic Innovation

7 Dimensions

  1. A Managed Innovation Process – combining non-traditional and traditional approaches to business strategy... More

The Jazz of Innovation: 11 Practice Tips

 

Business Strategy Defined

A full statement of a selected business strategy is a business plan defining:

  • the company vision, overall corporate strategy,and objectives

  • the strategy and tactics that will enable the company to reach those objectives

  • the resources required, and how they are going to be obtained;

  • what the main milestones and steps are along the way;

     

  • who is responsible for causing each step to occur;

  • what are the company's business risks and external factors that need to be kept under review for indications that a change in strategy or plan may be required.

Surprise To Win: 3 Strategies

Modern Theory of Business Strategy

Strategizing is much more than just visioning, forecasting and planning. In the new rapidly changing economy, all substantive  issues of strategy have been redefined as issues of implementation. Today, strategizing is concerned with the match between the internal capabilities of the company and its external environment. "The modern subject of business strategy is a set of analytic techniques for understanding better, and so influencing, a company's position in its actual and potential marketplace".4

As strategy today is a subject of application, rather than a discipline, the obvious underpinning disciplines for strategy are economics and organizational sociology. You should employ them to define a structure in which the process of strategy formulation and its implementation are bound together.

3Ss of Winning in Business

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."9 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.

The Methods of Business Strategy

"Even if you do see the future correctly, its timing is hard to predict and its implications are uncertain."  ~ John Kay

According to John Kay4, methods of business strategy require:

  1. Looking inward: strategic analysis of the characteristic of your company to identify your distinctive capabilities and surround them with a collection of reproducible capabilities, or complementary assets, which enable your company to sell its distinctive capabilities in the market it operates.

  2. Looking outward: strategic analysis of the industries and markets in which your company operates to identify those markets in which your company's capabilities can yield competitive advantage.

The questions are twofold:

  1. What are the origins and characteristics of the successful fit between capabilities and environment? Why do companies succeed?

  2. How can companies and their managers make that fit more effective? How will companies succeed?

Creating Sustainable Profit Growth: 9 Questions To Answer

Competitive Strategies

To be successful today, your company must become competitor-oriented. You must pursue the right competitive strategy – avoid strengths of your competitors and look for weak points in their positions and then launch marketing attacks against those weak points... 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

Business Strategy Stretching

To Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of GE, business strategy stretching is doing the best possible – and then reaching beyond.

What Welch calls "stretch" simply means figuring our performance targets "that are achievable, reasonable, and within GE's capabilities. And then raising sights higher – much higher – towards goals that seem almost beyond reach, goals requiring superhuman effort to achieve."8 Often business leaders exceed goals even as they fall short of the stretch. Don't punish, reward them. What's critical is setting the performance bar high enough; otherwise, it's impossible to find out what people can do... More

25 Lessons from Jack Welch

New Paradigm: Resource-Based Theory

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.4

The resource based view of strategy emphasizes economic rent creation through distinctive capabilities. Economic rent is what companies earn over and above the cost  of the capital employed in their business. It is the measure of the competitive advantage, and competitive advantage is the only means by which companies in competitive markets can earn economic rent. The objective of a company is to increase its economic rent, rather than its profit as such. "A company which increases its profits but not its economic rent – as through investments or acquisitions which yield less than the cost of capital – destroys value."4 The perspective of economic rent forces the question 'why can't competitors do that?' into discussion.

 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

 

 

 Discover much more in the

FULL VERSION of e-Coach

Business Strategy in the New Knowledge Economy...

Dynamic Enterprise Strategy...

Strategy Innovation: Evolution of a Successful Strategy...

Business Intelligence...

Technology-oriented Business Strategy Formulation...

Connecting Power...

Strategic Achievement...

Competitive Strategies..,

Competitive War Games...

Flying Beneath the Radar...

Innovation Strategies...

Competitive Disruption...

Cleaner Production Strategy...

Make It Fun...

Four Categories of Business Tactics...

Strategic Project Management (SPM)...

 Case in Point  GE...

 Case in Point  Silicon Valley Firms...

 Case in Point  Amazon.com...

 Case in Point  Microsoft...

 Case in Point  Charles Schwab...

 

 

Sun Tzu: The Art of War

An effective competitor has a vision
Vision: the ability to foresee the future...
More

Sun Tzu

The Art of War

Sam Walton's rules for buiding a great business

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.  >>>

Sam Walton

Wal-Mart

Confucius advice

Change

is not a process for the impatient.

Confucius

 

 

 

 

References:

  1. Strategic Management, Alex Miller

  2. Strategic Management - Competitiveness and Globalization, M.A. Hint, R.D. Ireland, and R.E. Hoskisson

  3. Strategic Enterprise Management Systems, Martin Fahy

  4. Strategy and the Delusion of Grand Designs, John Kay

  5. Successfully Devising Corporate Plans, Brian Houlden

  6. Changing Strategic Direction, Peter Skat-Rørdam

  7. The Welch Way, Jeffrey A. Krames

  8. Jack Welch and the GE Way, Robert Slater

  9. It's not the BIG and eats the SMALL... it's the FAST that eats the SLOW, J. Jennings & L. Haughton

  10. Managing Complexity, Robin Wood

  11. IDEO's Innovation Practice Tips

  12. DOs and DON'Ts of a Successful Innovator, Peter Drucker

Smart Corporate Leader

Smart Business Architect

Enterprise Strategies

Competitive Strategies

Sustainable Competitive Advantage

6 Sigma Business Strategy vs. Blue Ocean Business Strategy

Creating Competitive Disruption: 7 Strategies

7-Part Competitive Strategy of Microsoft

The  Role of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)

The Art of War (by Sun Tzu)

5 Elements of a Competitive Position and 4 Skills of an Effective Competitor

5 Things You Must Know To Win

Planning

Planning an Attack

Strengths and Weaknesses

Innovation

7 Dimensions of Strategic Innovation

3 Criteria To Assess Your Innovation Portfolio

Deciding If Your Innovation Portfolio Has Enough Stretch

Project Management

5 Factors that Make a Project Successful