You are a consultant hired by an established mediumsized man

You are a consultant hired by an established medium-sized manufacturing corporation with 250 employees. It directly markets one unique product. The corporation is run by a new CEO and 11 other executives who have been with the organization for varying lengths of time. The new CEO has an aggressive growth objective for the corporation of 100 percent over the next five years. The current business model will not support this objective and needs to be updated.

Your task is to create a team that will work together over a 9-month time frame to develop a proposal for a new business model and growth strategies. The team members must come from at least three different functional areas because the CEO wants input from a variety of stakeholders. The challenge is that under the old business model, none of the functional areas communicated or collaborated, and the former CEO never asked for new ideas and seemed oblivious to issues the corporation was facing.

What strategies will you use to delegate responsibilities? Will you assign tasks or ask for volunteers? Explain the strategies.

Solution

Strategy has been studied for years by business leaders and by business theorists. Yet, there is no definitive answer about what strategy really is.

A strategy expert and professor at Harvard Business School, emphasizes the need for strategy to define and communicate an organization\'s unique position, and says that it should determine how organizational resources, skills and competencies should be combined to create competitive advantage.

Many successful and productive organizations have a corporate strategy to guide the big picture. Each business unit within the organization then has a business unit strategy, which its leaders use to determine how they will compete in their individual markets,

Also, each team should have its own strategy to ensure that its day-to-day activities help move the organization in the right direction.

At each of the levels, a simple definition of strategy can be \"Determining how we are going to win in the period ahead\"

Hence, three levels or strategy are, Corporate, Business unit and Team.

Corporate Strategy

In business, corporate strategy refers to the overall strategy of an organization that is made up of multiple business units, operating in multiple markets It determines how the corporation as a whole supports and enhances the value of the business units within it; and it answers the question. \"How do we structure the overall business, so that all of its parts create more value together than they would indivudually?\"

Corporations can do this by buidling strong internal competences, by sharing technologies and resources between business units, by raising capital cost - effectively, by developing and nurturing a strong corporate brand, and so on,

At this level of strategy, we\'re concerned with thinking about how the business units within the corporation should fit together, and understanding how resources should be deployed to create the greatest possible value.

The organization\'s design is another important strategic factor that needs to be considered at this level. How you structure your business, your people, and other resources - all of these affect competitive advantage and can support your strategic goals.

Business Unit Strategy

Strategy at the business unit level is concerned with competing successfully in individual markets, and it addresses the question \"How do we win this market?\" However, this strategy needs to be linked to the objectives identified in the corporate level strategy.

Competitive analysis, including gathering competitive intelligence, is a great starting point for develping a business unit strategy. As part of this, it\'s important to think about your core competencies and how you can use these to meet your customer\'s needs in the best possible way. From there you can use USP Analysis to understand how to strengthen your competitive position.

Team Strategy

To execute your corporate and business unit strategies successfully, you need teams throughout your organization to work together. Each of these teams has a different contribution to make, meaning that each team needs to have its own team-level strategy, however simple.

This team strategy must lead directly to the achievement of business unit and corporate strategies, meaning that all levels of strategy support and enhance each other to ensure that the organization is succesful.

The three Strategies can be summarized like,

Strategy can be difficult to define, but a good definition is : \"Determining how we will win in the period ahead\"