The 5 stages of the strategic management

 

Achieving ambitious goals requires more than just determination; it demands an adaptable approach to navigating market complexities and internal capabilities.

As a leader, understanding and implementing strategic management is essential for driving your organization toward success. At Quantive, our mission is to empower companies to surpass their expectations by providing robust strategy management solutions. But what exactly is strategic management, and why is it crucial?

What is strategic management?

Strategic management is the comprehensive process of setting goals, developing plans, and executing strategies to achieve an organization's long-term strategic objectives. It involves a continuous cycle of analysis, planning, implementation, and evaluation to ensure that the company adapts to changing environments and maintains a competitive edge. This modern approach helps organizations align their resources and actions with their vision and mission.

Why is strategic management important?

Strategic management is important, because without a strategic plan, companies can waste time, money, and resources, without reaching their goals. 

Constructing a building without a blueprint would be chaotic and inefficient. The blueprint provides a clear plan, detailing every aspect of the construction process. 
In strategic management, your strategic plan is your blueprint; strategies, top-level goals, and action steps. It serves as a guide for the entire organization, ensuring that every effort contributes to the overall success of the business.

The five stages of the strategic management process

1. Business objectives
2. Analysis
3. Strategic planning
4. Strategy execution
5. Evaluation and optimization

Business objectives

In order to successfully frame your strategic cycle, you will need your company mission, vision, and long-term business objectives. Start by revisiting the essence of what your business is and what it aspires to be. Then think about what goals could realistically advance these fundamental principles in the medium term. From there, define clear, specific, and actionable business objectives for your strategy cycle. You can set top-level objectives related to growth, market position, or other business outcomes, providing a direction for your strategic planning and execution.

Setting objectives:

• Growth: Determine your targets for revenue growth, market expansion, or customer acquisition
• Market position: Decide on your desired market share or industry ranking
• Business outcomes: Define other key outcomes, such as product innovation, operational efficiency, or customer satisfaction

Analysis

Conduct a thorough analysis of your internal capabilities and external environment. Quantive's solutions help you review your organization's strengths and weaknesses and understand market opportunities and threats, forming the foundation for effective strategies.

Internal analysis:

• Strengths: Identify your company’s core competencies and unique advantages
• Weaknesses: Recognize areas where your company lacks capabilities or resources

External analysis:

• Opportunities: Look for market trends, customer needs, and emerging technologies that your company can capitalize on
• Threats: Be aware of competitive pressures, regulatory changes, and economic fluctuations that could impact your business

Strategic planning

Create strategic plans based on insights from your analysis. Note that the insights from your analysis may lead you to revisit your top-level goals for your strategic cycle. Creating strategic plans from an analysis of your business context is no easy fit. It requires you to frame your decisions and plans effectively. Various strategic frameworks exist to strengthen your strategic decision-making. Quantive StrategyAI helps you evaluate different strategic options and select the ones that best fit your business needs and resources, drafting detailed plans and considering various scenarios.

Strategic planning process:

Evaluate options: Consider various strategic pathways and assess their potential impact
Select strategies: Choose the strategies that align with your business ambitions and leverage your strengths

• Draft plans: Develop detailed plans that outline the actions, timelines, and resources required for execution
• Scenario planning: Anticipate possible future scenarios and prepare contingency plans

Strategy execution

Execute your strategies with precision. This step involves putting plans into action, coordinating efforts across departments, and managing resources effectively. Ensure that your strategy implementation plan includes specific actions, timelines, and responsible parties.

Execution framework:

• Action plans: Break down strategic plans into specific actions with clear timelines and responsibilities
• Alignment: Ensure cross-departmental collaboration and communication
• Resource management: Allocate resources efficiently to support strategic initiatives
• Monitoring: Keep track of progress and make adjustments as needed

Evaluation and optimization

Regularly assess the performance of your strategies using metrics and KPIs. Review progress towards goals, identify any issues or deviations, and make necessary adjustments. This step helps you stay aligned with your objectives and improve your strategic approach over time.

Evaluation Process:

• Performance metrics: Use KPIs to measure progress towards your goals
• Review: Conduct regular reviews to identify issues or deviations from the plan
• Adjustments: Make necessary adjustments to optimize strategy execution
• Continuous improvement: Foster a culture of continuous improvement by encouraging feedback and learning

Always-on strategic management

If your business is a high-performance racing car on a never-ending track, you likely aren’t relying on a single, rigid plan you laid out at the start of the race. Instead, you’re using your tech stack to monitor conditions, anticipate changes, and make instant decisions. You’re adjusting your strategy when necessary.

Strategic management must be an ongoing, rapidly iterative cycle that allows organizations to remain agile and responsive instead of a linear, step-by-step process. The speed at which businesses need to adapt and respond to market changes necessitates a more dynamic approach. This is where the concept of an "Always-On" strategy becomes crucial. 

An agile approach ensures that your organization can quickly pivot and adjust its course as new opportunities and challenges arise. By implementing a fast loop around the traditional strategic management process, you can benefit from its theoretical foundations while effectively navigating the complexities of the modern market.

The combination of AI, data connectivity, and digital collaboration tools makes this nimble approach possible:

• AI can analyze vast amounts of information at unprecedented speed, providing insights that inform strategic decisions
• Data connectivity ensures that these insights are accessible across the organization
• Digital collaboration tools facilitate seamless communication and coordination among teams

Harnessing strategic management for organizational success

Strategic management is not just a theoretical concept; it's a practical tool for achieving business excellence. Bringing strategic management to your organization will align teams and ensure everyone contributes effectively to your business’ success. 

• Informed decision-making: strategic management provides executives with a comprehensive understanding of their organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This analysis is vital for making informed decisions that drive growth and mitigate risks
• Clear objectives and direction: by defining clear business objectives, teams move with a sense of purpose and direction
• Effective resource allocation: invest in initiatives that offer the highest returns and align with the company's long-term vision
• Enhanced execution and coordination: executing strategies with precision requires coordinated efforts across various departments. Strategic management ensures that implementation plans are well-defined, timelines are set, and responsibilities are assigned, leading to seamless execution
• Continuous improvement: the evaluation and optimization step allows stakeholders to monitor progress, identify deviations, and make necessary adjustments

This iterative process fosters continuous improvement, helping the company stay agile and responsive to changes.

How do I enforce a strategic management process within my organization?

Enforcing strategic management starts with ensuring that your strategic vision permeates every level of the organization. Quantive helps you embed this context by integrating strategic goals into daily operations, making sure that every team member understands how their work aligns with the company’s top-level objectives. This alignment fosters a sense of ownership and commitment, ensuring that everyone is working towards the same objectives. 
With real-time tracking tools and dashboards that offer insights into performance metrics and KPIs, continuous visibility allows you to identify and address any deviations from the plan promptly, keeping your strategy on course.

Strategic agility is crucial

Strategic agility is essential for organizational success. Imagine your brand as a grand ship embarking on a transformative voyage across a vast ocean. The goal is to explore new territories, evolve your offerings, and adapt to the ever-changing tides of customer habits, competition, and market dynamics. With strategic management, you have a well-prepared expedition–you chart the course by studying maps, understanding weather patterns, and assessing the ship’s strengths and weaknesses. The crew prepares for different conditions and challenges, ensuring they have the necessary supplies and contingencies in place.

Without strategic management, your team sets off on an aimless drift. They face unforeseen storms and obstacles, leading to a chaotic and unprepared journey.

Strategic management needs to go beyond the traditional step-after-step model, which stretches planning over months and execution over quarters with little to no evaluation and optimization in between.

By implementing an Always-On Strategy, you empower your teams to execute your vision flawlessly whilst empowering them to navigate market changes. With the help of Quantive StrategyAI, you can identify hidden trends and uncover previously unseen opportunities at any stage to gain a decisive strategic advantage.

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How to argue

 The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.

Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected. Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing. And when you agree there's less to say. You could expand on something the author said, but he has probably already explored the most interesting implications. When you disagree you're entering territory he may not have explored.

The result is there's a lot more disagreeing going on, especially measured by the word. That doesn't mean people are getting angrier. The structural change in the way we communicate is enough to account for it. But though it's not anger that's driving the increase in disagreement, there's a danger that the increase in disagreement will make people angrier. Particularly online, where it's easy to say things you'd never say face to face.

If we're all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. So here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy:

DH0. Name-calling.

This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. We've all seen comments like this:

u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!

But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. A comment like

The author is a self-important dilettante.

is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag."

DH1. Ad Hominem.

An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. It might actually carry some weight. For example, if a senator wrote an article saying senators' salaries should be increased, one could respond:

Of course he would say that. He's a senator.

This wouldn't refute the author's argument, but it may at least be relevant to the case. It's still a very weak form of disagreement, though. If there's something wrong with the senator's argument, you should say what it is; and if there isn't, what difference does it make that he's a senator?

Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because good ideas often come from outsiders. The question is whether the author is correct or not. If his lack of authority caused him to make mistakes, point those out. And if it didn't, it's not a problem.

DH2. Responding to Tone.

The next level up we start to see responses to the writing, rather than the writer. The lowest form of these is to disagree with the author's tone. E.g.

I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion.

Though better than attacking the author, this is still a weak form of disagreement. It matters much more whether the author is wrong or right than what his tone is. Especially since tone is so hard to judge. Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral.

So if the worst thing you can say about something is to criticize its tone, you're not saying much. Is the author flippant, but correct? Better that than grave and wrong. And if the author is incorrect somewhere, say where.

DH3. Contradiction.

In this stage we finally get responses to what was said, rather than how or by whom. The lowest form of response to an argument is simply to state the opposing case, with little or no supporting evidence.

This is often combined with DH2 statements, as in:

I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion. Intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory.

Contradiction can sometimes have some weight. Sometimes merely seeing the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to see that it's right. But usually evidence will help.

DH4. Counterargument.

At level 4 we reach the first form of convincing disagreement: counterargument. Forms up to this point can usually be ignored as proving nothing. Counterargument might prove something. The problem is, it's hard to say exactly what.

Counterargument is contradiction plus reasoning and/or evidence. When aimed squarely at the original argument, it can be convincing. But unfortunately it's common for counterarguments to be aimed at something slightly different. More often than not, two people arguing passionately about something are actually arguing about two different things. Sometimes they even agree with one another, but are so caught up in their squabble they don't realize it.

There could be a legitimate reason for arguing against something slightly different from what the original author said: when you feel they missed the heart of the matter. But when you do that, you should say explicitly you're doing it.

DH5. Refutation.

The most convincing form of disagreement is refutation. It's also the rarest, because it's the most work. Indeed, the disagreement hierarchy forms a kind of pyramid, in the sense that the higher you go the fewer instances you find.

To refute someone you probably have to quote them. You have to find a "smoking gun," a passage in whatever you disagree with that you feel is mistaken, and then explain why it's mistaken. If you can't find an actual quote to disagree with, you may be arguing with a straw man.

While refutation generally entails quoting, quoting doesn't necessarily imply refutation. Some writers quote parts of things they disagree with to give the appearance of legitimate refutation, then follow with a response as low as DH3 or even DH0.

DH6. Refuting the Central Point.

The force of a refutation depends on what you refute. The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point.

Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers. Unless the opposing argument actually depends on such things, the only purpose of correcting them is to discredit one's opponent.

Truly refuting something requires one to refute its central point, or at least one of them. And that means one has to commit explicitly to what the central point is. So a truly effective refutation would look like:

The author's main point seems to be x. As he says:

<quotation>

But this is wrong for the following reasons...

The quotation you point out as mistaken need not be the actual statement of the author's main point. It's enough to refute something it depends upon.

What It Means

Now we have a way of classifying forms of disagreement. What good is it? One thing the disagreement hierarchy doesn't give us is a way of picking a winner. DH levels merely describe the form of a statement, not whether it's correct. A DH6 response could still be completely mistaken.

But while DH levels don't set a lower bound on the convincingness of a reply, they do set an upper bound. A DH6 response might be unconvincing, but a DH2 or lower response is always unconvincing.

The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read. In particular, it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments. An eloquent speaker or writer can give the impression of vanquishing an opponent merely by using forceful words. In fact that is probably the defining quality of a demagogue. By giving names to the different forms of disagreement, we give critical readers a pin for popping such balloons.

Such labels may help writers too. Most intellectual dishonesty is unintentional. Someone arguing against the tone of something he disagrees with may believe he's really saying something. Zooming out and seeing his current position on the disagreement hierarchy may inspire him to try moving up to counterargument or refutation.

But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier. If you study conversations, you find there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. You don't have to be mean when you have a real point to make. In fact, you don't want to. If you have something real to say, being mean just gets in the way.

If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier. Most people don't really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can't help it.


Thanks to Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this.

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5 Components Of Performance Management System

In today's dynamic and competitive business world, empowering employees is no longer a mere corporate catchphrase; it's a strategic imperative. Engaged and motivated employees are the backbone of any successful organization. To achieve this, modern businesses are leveraging technology to enhance performance management processes. Here, we will explore the significance of a performance management app in empowering employees, improving productivity, and fostering a culture of continuous growth.

The Importance Of Empowering Employees

Empowering employees means granting them the autonomy, tools, and resources they need to succeed. When employees feel empowered, they are more likely to take ownership of their roles, become proactive problem-solvers, and contribute to the organization's overall success. Moreover, empowered employees are more engaged, satisfied, and committed to their work.

The Role Of Performance Management

Performance management is a systematic approach to ensure that employees' efforts align with organizational goals and values. Traditional performance evaluations, with annual reviews, are becoming obsolete as businesses seek real-time feedback and data-driven insights into employee performance. This is where performance management apps come into play.

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«Хосин Канри» Йоджо Акао Инструмент #37

 

Hoshin Kanri (Хосин Канри или «Развертывание политики») — метод бережливого производства. Направлен на то, чтобы стратегические цели реально обеспечивали улучшения в операционной деятельности компании. Строго говоря, Йоджо Акао не является разработчиком модели «Хосин Канри».  Впервые эту методологию внедрила японская компания «Bridgestone» в 1968 г. А с конца 70-х – начала 80-х Йоджо Акао объединил опыт применения нескольких компаний, развил и популяризировал «Хосин Канри».

Этимология «Хосин Канри»

Слово «Хосин» образовано из двух слов: «хо» и «син». В дословном переводе с японского языка «хо» означает «направление», а «син» — «игла» (стрелка, булавка); что вместе означает «стрелка направления» или «компас». В слове «Канри» первая часть «кан» означает «контроль», а «ри» — «рассуждение» или «логика», общепринятый перевод слова «канри» — управление. В результате «Хосин Канри» можно перевести как «контролируемое направление организации».

Данная концепция подразумевает одновременное двухуровневое планирование и управление:

1. Уровень стратегического планирования. Основная ориентация данного уровня заключена в достижение значительных улучшений эффективности или обеспечение выполнения ключевых целей компании.
2. Ежедневный уровень. Это уровень текущей деятельности, на котором переводятся установленные стратегические цели на язык конкретных действий.

Х-матрица

Наиболее известным инструментом «Хосин Канри» является «Х-матрица» – пакет планов работы команд в формате А3. Форма используется для разработки и применения среднесрочной стратегии и годового плана, а также предназначена для объединения многочисленных планов команд различных уровней в единый масштабный документ. Х-матрица состоит из четырех основных блоков:

1. Стратегии – описание того, что будет делаться, как на текущий период, так и в ближайшие 2…3 года
2. Тактики – описание того как будет достигаться выбранная стратегия в период ближайших 6…18 месяцев
3. Процесс – критерии оценки, с помощью которых будет оцениваться ход развития всего процесса
4. Результаты – описание всех результатов качественного управления процессом

И трех дополнительных блоков:

• Члены команды – участники всех процессов
• Ответственность – кто за какой процесс несет ответственность;
• Взаимосвязи – фиксируются имеющиеся взаимоотношения между процессами.

На первый взгляд, достаточно громоздкая модель. Но при определенной сноровке становится удобным инструментом увязки стратегического планирования и операционной деятельности.  Тут тебе и #BSC Нортона и Каплана. А еще проектное планирование. И многое другое. Всего на одном листе А3. 

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