Thursday, March 25, 2021

Priorities & Weaknesses of Strategy

With continuous disruptions and continuous changes, it’s important to encourage people to be more effective and creative, to come up with better ideas, identify strengths and weaknesses, set the right priority, accelerate performance and unlock changes.

Today’s organizations are like the organic systems that keep evolving. They have different functions, structures, layers and systems, and their relationships are nonlinear and interdependent. To run a holistic business, it is important to involve not only putting different pieces together but also blending them in such a way that the emergent whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

 Top management needs to set good policies, guidelines, structures, and methods to drive expected changes, identify priorities & weaknesses in a variety of management and governance disciplines, catalyze innovation and improve the overall organizational maturity.

Identify priorities & weaknesses in strategy formulation: The digital world is complex and uncertain, the world boundaries close in, the business weaknesses and strengths are inseparable, opportunities are tightly mingled with threats and vice versa. Thus, business management needs to take a hard look at what's going on inside the organization as well as its ecosystem environment, including business strengths and weaknesses - analyze Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities Threats in their digital environment by doing “SWOT analysis. Today’s business strategy management is not composed of linear steps, but an iterative and dynamic continuum. Strengths and weaknesses need an evaluation in order to have a decision-making ground.

Nowadays there are lots of things happening in the company, and there are many distractions and pitfalls on the way. Prioritization is critical, as the alternative is a land grab for resources. Without effective prioritization skills, resource or talent gaps only enlarge, the business performance suffers, and further leads to business incoherence. Prioritization helps to focus the strategic concerns of the organization, and formulate a good strategy. It is important to prioritize things, make use of clear targets, communicate and facilitate discussions and ensure management for understanding the various trade-offs. Technically, strategy management with an embedded prioritization mechanism is important for selecting, scoping, and aligning specific business initiatives to overall strategic objectives and budgets.

Identify strength & weaknesses, the variety of curves in management (including strategic, tactical and operational):
Digital makes an impact on the speed to run a dynamic business, the empathy to their people, the prioritization skills to get important things done, and the orchestration of their capability in high mature digital organizations. The challenge of digital management is to identify strengths and weaknesses in strategy implementation and manage the tactics with efficiency. From a digital management perspective, they need to check: Where is the organization on the technology or process adoption curve? Learning curve, change curve, technology adoption curve? Is the organization a pioneer, mature adapter, or laggard? What are the risks in taking strategic initiatives? How much risk are you personally willing to take? Etc.

Running a business is a progressive change continuum. It’s important to identify strengths & weaknesses, the variety of curves in management (including strategic, tactical and operational). The change curve is a model of the states that people who are to change will go through. It is applicable to everyone, even those who planned and conceived the vision. Change awareness helps to understand how change capabilities are underpinned by change processes, people, and technology, and how much change capabilities are really required for the change effort you are kicking off. Transformational change needs resolute leadership, the premise behind this is more than simply obtaining senior buy-in. This is needed to support a cultural change through the change life cycle which enables everyone, wherever they are in that cycle, to accept the direction and focus on benefits realization.

Identify priorities & weaknesses in governance: Governance is about how well an organization is being run and if set upright, it should effectively oversee the achievement of the vision, strategy, and objectives. It is an internal control to monitor the path of strategy execution. A Governance Model is an architectural description that addresses the concerns of the stakeholders who want to ensure that the strategy execution is aligned with intent.

The management and governance are like hand in glove. Technically, the governance structure is independent of management structure, but the governance process/mechanism can be embedded into the business process seamlessly. Given many organizations don't view governance as "decision-making optimization," “performance monitoring,” or “accountability enforcement,” their governance efforts usually devolve into time-consuming, costly, bureaucratic constructs. Prioritization in governance discipline is a sort of “balance” skill, to know when to take the gas pedal to accelerate speed and when to take the brake to control the risks.

The business world has shifted from the industrial age to the information age to the knowledge and creativity economy. The fundamental concept of management is still the same. But with continuous disruptions and continuous changes, it’s important to encourage people to be more effective and creative, to come up with better ideas, identify strengths and weaknesses, set the right priority, accelerate performance and unlock changes.






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