Read The Chief Strategy Officer by R Timothy S Breene Paul F

Read The Chief Strategy Officer by R. Timothy S. Breene, Paul F. Nunes, and Walter E. Shill October 2007 as following website: https://hbr.org/2007/10/the-chief-strategy-officer Answer for your INITIAL posting and discuss the following questions 1. Executive Summary for THIS article 2. Which are the three most CRITICAL ISSUES of THIS article? Please explain why? and analyze, and discuss in great detail. 3. Which are the three most relevant LESSONS LEARNED of THIS article? Please explain why? and analyze, and discuss in great detail.. 4. Which are the three most important BEST PRACTICES of THIS article? Please explain why? and analyze, and discuss in great detail... 5. How can you relate THIS article with the TOPICS COVERED in class? Please explain, analyze, and discuss in great detail. 6. Do you see any alignment of the concepts described in THIS article with the class concepts reviewed in class? Which are those alignments and misalignments? Why? Please explain, analyze, and discuss in great detail

Solution

1.Executive Summary

Thought CEOs are the ones who are primarily responsible for strategy, they do not have sufficient time to work for it. Here comes the role of chief strategy officer. These are special executives assigned to create the strategy as well in executing and communicating them. Usually, these are guys with several years of seasoned background with a wide range of skills. Several of them are employees of the same company or from the same industry who have achieved professionally through execution. These are not pure strategists working in isolation for strategy but rather they are doers. They participate in communicating, executing and managing strategy. They are people who have held operations for many years with a strong strategic orientation.

They do three critical jobs at their organization. First, they get clarified with the company’s strategy and they go all the way down to explain in clarity to all the business units. They make sure all the employees understand strategy and how their work is contributing to strategic goals. Second, they are drivers of immediate change. This involves a shared alignment along all employees along the company’s vision and managing the change effort. Third, the CSO helps in decision making that sustains organizational change and is aligned with the strategy. After agreeing on a strategy, the decision makers may lose focus and go out of alignment. The CSO makes tests and makes sure that decision in business units is in alignment with the strategy. If it is not aligned the CSO tries to learn why and he has to decide whether to stay on track or choose a better alternative.

Strategy officers use some principles for successful execution. They split their time. Majority of the time is spent for the medium term, followed by long-term and then monitoring short term. They split their time evenly between strategy formulation and execution. but there is slightly more emphasis towards execution. They are adept at exerting influencing skeptical executives either directly or indirectly through others. They have deep knowledge in two functional areas – IT and HR.

In short term the CSO helps in monitoring decisions are aligned with strategy and the go-to person for strategy related enquires. In the medium term, they help in building strategy development and execution capabilities. In the long term, some of them success as CEOs

2. Critical issues

3. Lessons learned

The following three points tell what a CSO actually does and his main principles

4. best practices