Strategic Thinking
Strategic Thinking and Strategic Leadership
Abstract
The purpose of the study is to evaluate and discuss the concepts of strategic thinking and strategic leadership to gain competitive advantage for organizations. For this, every aspect related to strategy is discussed. The study starts with introducing the concept of strategy, strategic thinking, strategy analysis, strategic leadership, strategic implementation and learning organization. Thus, the challenge to managers is to decide on strategies that provide advantages that can be sustained over time.
Introduction to Strategy
The myriad activities that go into creating, producing, selling, and delivering a product or service are the basic units of competitive advantage. Operational effectiveness means performing these activities better—that is, faster, or with fewer inputs and defects—than rivals. But from a competitive standpoint, the problem with operational effectiveness is that best practices are easily emulated. As all competitors in an industry adopt them, the productivity frontier—the maximum value a company can deliver at a given cost, given the best available technology, skills, and management techniques—shifts outward, lowering costs and improving value at the same time. Such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness, but relative improvement for no one. And the more benchmarking that companies do, the more competitive convergence you have—that is, the more indistinguishable companies are from one another.Strategic positioning attempts to achieve sustainable competitive advantage by preserving what is distinctive about a company. It means performing different activities from rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways.Three key principles underlie strategic positioning.1. Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities. Strategic position emerges from three distinct sources:serving few needs of many
Abstract
The purpose of the study is to evaluate and discuss the concepts of strategic thinking and strategic leadership to gain competitive advantage for organizations. For this, every aspect related to strategy is discussed. The study starts with introducing the concept of strategy, strategic thinking, strategy analysis, strategic leadership, strategic implementation and learning organization. Thus, the challenge to managers is to decide on strategies that provide advantages that can be sustained over time.
Introduction to Strategy
The myriad activities that go into creating, producing, selling, and delivering a product or service are the basic units of competitive advantage. Operational effectiveness means performing these activities better—that is, faster, or with fewer inputs and defects—than rivals. But from a competitive standpoint, the problem with operational effectiveness is that best practices are easily emulated. As all competitors in an industry adopt them, the productivity frontier—the maximum value a company can deliver at a given cost, given the best available technology, skills, and management techniques—shifts outward, lowering costs and improving value at the same time. Such competition produces absolute improvement in operational effectiveness, but relative improvement for no one. And the more benchmarking that companies do, the more competitive convergence you have—that is, the more indistinguishable companies are from one another.Strategic positioning attempts to achieve sustainable competitive advantage by preserving what is distinctive about a company. It means performing different activities from rivals, or performing similar activities in different ways.Three key principles underlie strategic positioning.1. Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities. Strategic position emerges from three distinct sources:serving few needs of many