Strategy Development and Executive Responsibility Getting Things Done!

Strategy Development and Executive Responsibility

• Getting Things Done!

• Lecture 1

“A good strategic plan is a set of directions you want to take. It’s a roadmap, lightly filled in, so that it gives you plenty of room to maneuver”

• Larry Bossidy

• Chairman and CEO

• Honeywell International

What is Management’s Role?

• First job is to think through, set and exemplify the firm’s objectives, values, and goals

• Management is about making people capable of joint performance

• Making employees strengths effective and weaknesses irrelevant

• Integration of people in a common venture

• Fostering learning and teaching

• Focus on performance and results

What is an Executive?

• Executives are those KWs, managers, and individual professionals who are expected to make decisions that impact performance and results of the firm as a whole

• Effective Executive focuses on contribution

• “Contribution is the key to effectiveness in one’s own work, in one’s relationship with others and the in the use of the tools of the executive”….Peter F. Drucker

What is a Leader?

• Trustworthy

• Cowardly

• Greedy

• Dominating

• Humble

• Introvert

• Analytical

“What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and results of the institution that I serve.”

• Peter F. Drucker

Organizational Dynamics

• Organizations tend to evolve slowly through decisions with only small increments over time

• Organizational processes are a critical determinant of decision making and thus strategy

• Coalitions within the organization place severe limits on the general manager’s ability to exercise leadership-”zone of indifference”

Corporate Strategy

• Articulates the firm’s areas of focus and actions

• Fosters the exchange of ideas across the corporation

• Vehicle for allocating resources among all of the business units

• Identifies the added-valued from company-wide initiatives-six sigma,IT, HR development, etc.

• Defines the firm’s boundaries

Effective Strategy Process

• Emergent

• Evolutionary

• Intuitive

• Circular

• Fragmented

Key Questions

• What is the assessment of the external environment?

• How well do you understand the existing customers and markets?

• What is the best way to grow the business profitably?

• What are the obstacles to growth?

• Who is the competition?

Key Questions

• Can the business execute the strategy?

• Are the short and long term balanced?

• What are the important milestones for executing the plan?

• What the critical issues facing the business?

• How will the business make money on a sustainable basis?

Closing the Strategy-Performance Gap

• Keep it simple-Be clear about the strategy is and isn’t

• Debate assumptions, not forecasts

• Use a rigorous framework

• Surface resource deployments requirements

• Clearly identify priorities

• Continuously monitor performance metrics

• Reward and develop execution capabilities

Senior Leaders’ Challenge

• Picking other leaders

• Setting the strategic direction

• Conducting and reviewing operations

• Being passionately engaged and honest about the realities

“Leadership without the discipline of execution is incomplete and ineffective.”

• Larry Bossidy

• Former Chairman and CEO

• Honeywell International