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Objective
Shaping the future of an organisation involves every part and
everyone. Strategy considers things inside and outside the organisation that will make a difference to its success. The strategist also
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looks for opportunities and threats to the future of the organisation. Ideally these are explored with imagination, ambition and
a creative understanding of customers, products and resources.
To shape the future requires a combination of thinking, planning
and reacting to events that emerge along the way. These provide
key strategy questions:
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Context
Shaping the future depends on context. You cant control the
waves of human desire and endeavour with strategy, but you can
create strategy that surfs those human waves, contributing to
them or benefiting from them. It follows that you need to understand the context for any attempt to create strategy.
There are probably some low competition, high stability places in
the world. But it is safer to assume that the external context your
strategy will face will be high competition, low stability. So this
book will make the same assumption and give advice on strategy
that can be effective in such a world.
Each section answers questions that are needed to create a strategy
that can be used to shape the future. There are sections that
explain how to create strategy, think like a strategist, win with
strategy, make your strategy work, build a strategic organisation
and troubleshoot your strategy whenever it stops working.
Challenge
A lot of organisations still set in motion grand plans to a better
future. The larger the organisation, even now, the more likely it
is that they have a strategic planning team who produce strategy
documents as a result of lengthy financial analysis.
This plan is then cascaded or passed down the hierarchy until it
reaches middle management, at which point it often disappears.
The front line may have to work in structures, processes or role
descriptions that were designed as part of the plan. This planning,
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command and control approach often leads to out-of-date strategy and out-of-touch leaders.
Some people argue it isnt even possible to plan because events
are so unpredictable. They claim it is better to just organise as efficiently as possible. Then you just hope evolutionary market forces
(what people want interacting with what people sell) will be a
natural fit to whatever you are doing.
The trouble with this evolutionary approach is that it doesnt
really address what you need to try to do to make it more likely
that your company is a natural fit. And thats why clever strategy
is somewhere between the extremes. It does try to plan deliberate actions to shape the future, but also tries to stay close to local
events and to react to them. In this way, strategy is transformed
into a learning process that becomes at its best smarter through
experimentation.
Success
Progress is made when the organisation moves towards strategy
that learns its lessons and adapts to new opportunities. In this
way, you can benefit from strategic thinking that is clever rather
than one-size-fits-all strategy. You will also see people at all levels
more involved because managers are interested in what is really
happening at the front line.
Your strategy efforts will use strategic principles and tools to better
prepare the organisation for shaping the future. Your strategy will
craft a response to external waves, needs of customers and actions
of competitors. Your strategy will consider the nature of the
business (its purpose, style and products) and the ways that it
organises internal resources, processes and people.
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Pitfalls
Its important that efforts to introduce more strategy dont lead to
less strategic thinking (or worse results). There are lots of naturally
strategic people who see opportunities, see new patterns and
adjust the work of the organisation to take advantage of these.
Its also important not to simply replace one set of words with
another. The idea of strategic thinking is to improve results.
Strategists checklist
Remember that inward-looking planning is not sufficient
Related ideas
For Professors Howard Thomas and Taeb Hafsi, strategy is a
mixture of rules of thumb and creative methods. It helps people
understand and transform reality. This means that strategy tools
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