Note from the M3 Team:
Welcome to this month's StrategyCheck! As you can see, we have redesigned our newsletter to provide you strategy secrets you can quickly put to work. Look for our tips every Wednesday. Happy Strategizing!
Do You Know Where To Allocate Your Time And Resources?
If you want to make the biggest impact on your bottom line there are some fundamental activities that all companies must master to successfully grow in a competitive marketplace. The Business Report Card assessment is a great starting point for the decision-making process. It provides strategic activity benchmarks for a company’s comparison and is the basis for more effective strategic planning.
The full Business Report Card is included with our online strategic planning software, but you can receive a complimentary Summary Report Card by clicking here.
 STRATEGY CHECK:
Drive your strategy by aligning bottom-up processes with top-down objectives. |
EVERYDAY DECISIONS AND YOUR COMPANY’S STRATEGY
“The cumulative impact of the allocation of resources by managers at any level has more real-world effect on strategy than any plans developed at headquarters,” Joseph Brower and Clark Gilbert remind us in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review. They provide a striking example of a company where division managers had built an entire plant (minus only the chimney) by using work orders that did not require corporate approval. This story is a great example of how business really gets done has little connection to the strategy developed at corporate headquarters. In fact, according to the authors’ research, strategy is crafted “step by step, as managers at all levels of a company commit resources to policies, programs, people and facilities.”
So what should you do as a CEO, senior-level executive or managers? Here are a few tips:
- Focus as much on formal strategy as you do on the processes by which your company allocates resources. Provide coherent direction to how resources are allocated and, by doing so, align your bottom-up processes with top-down objectives.
- Identify and empower the managers at all levels that can forever alter a company’s future. You can announce a strategy to become global, change core technologies, or open new markets, but that strategy will only be realized if it’s in line with the pattern of resource allocation decisions made at every level of the organization.
- Pay close attention to the impact of external forces on a company’s resource allocation and strategy evolution. Clearly the most powerful of these forces are your best customers and the capital markets and they can drastically alter your strategic decisions.
We hear a strong argument for a strategic planning process that includes serious consideration of internal and external forces as well as a strong connection between senior-level executives and business unit managers.
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