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Strategic Management
Enterprise strategy can be formulated and implemented at three different levels – corporate, business unit, and functional or departmental level. At the corporate level, you are responsible for creating value through your businesses. You do so by managing your portfolio of businesses, ensuring that your businesses are successful over the long term, developing business units, and sometimes ensuring that each business is compatible with others in your portfolio. Products and services are developed by business units. The role of the corporation is to manage its business units, products and services so that each is competitive and so that each contributes to corporate purposes. Corporate Strategy fundamentally is concerned with selection of businesses in which your company should compete and with development and coordination of that portfolio of businesses. Corporate level strategy is concerned with reach; competitive contact; managing activities and business interrelationships; and management practices. Business Strategy includes battle plans and tactics to fight your competition. A strategic business unit may be any profit center that can be planned independently from the other business units of your corporation. At the business unit level, the strategic issues are about both practical coordination of operating units and about developing and sustaining a competitive advantage for the products and services that are produced. Business strategy deals with positioning and differentiating the business and/or products against rivals; cross-functional process management; anticipating changes in technology and customer perceptions and adjusting the strategy to accommodate them; influencing the nature of competition through strategic and political actions; and building strategic partnerships and co-innovating with other business units, partners, and customers. Functional Strategy deals with operational methods related to functional business processes and value chain, and value adding activities that you choose for your business. Functional level strategies in R&D, operations, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and human resources involve the development and coordination of resources through which business unit level strategies can be executed effectively and efficiently. Top Manager, CEO Six Attributes of Successful, Long-term CEOs 1. Creating, Communicating and Executing a Clear Vision, Goals and Strategy. An executive's success is affected by the ability to communicate a vision for a company's future, helping employees to navigate through change and motivating them to achieve specific goals. 2. Delivering Results. Today's businesses – especially those publicly held -emphasize the bottom-line more than ever. Tolerance levels for poor performance are dropping. There is little margin for error. That makes the ability to produce results a very important factor impacting tenure. 3. Acting with Integrity. Those who operate with integrity consistently adhere to a code of conduct and have an underlying value system that is manifested through their behavior. 4. Maintaining Key Relationships. To have a long-term view you need to have strong political ties, good shareholder relations and the skills and knowledge to allow people to understand and buy into the long-term view. A successful relationship with the board of directors is of particular importance. 5. Exhibiting Appropriate Leadership Style and People Skills. A poor leadership style and people skills ultimately have a negative impact on an executive's tenure at their own firm. Some executives can clearly get the job done quickly, but the 'dead bodies' left in their wake can take years for the organization to recover. 6. The Cultural Fit. A candidate for a top job might look great on paper, but must be culturally compatible in order to build relationships and add true value. Often, hiring managers or boards emphasize the need to challenge old thinking and move in new directions. But if an executive is too far out of step with an organization, the resulting culture clash can overwhelm the benefits. Business Processes, Business Process Management
Michael Hammer defines business process as "an organized group of related activities that together create a result of value to customers.“
An effective way of transforming the traditional functional mindset is to embrace enterprise business process thinking and install enterprise business process management (EBPM) practices. What does this involve? Frankly, it requires a lot of very hard work, and concepts which will make some of your executives very, very uncomfortable. Why do it? Simply because the benefits of making this mental model transition are significant. |
