BUS 499 Stayer American Express Business & Corporate Level Strategies Capstone Business-Level and Corporate-Level Strategies
OVERVIEW
In this assignment, you are to use the same corporation you selected and focused on for Assignment 1: Strategic Management and Strategic Competitiveness and Assignment 2: External and Internal Environments.
Research the company on its own website, the public filings on the Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR database, the University’s online databases, the Nexis Uni database, and any other sources you can find. The annual report will often provide insights that can help address some of these questions.
REQUIREMENTS
Write a six- to eight-page paper in which you do the following:
Analyze the business-level strategies for the corporation you chose to determine the business-level strategy you think is most important to the long-term success of the firm and whether or not you judge this to be a good choice. Justify your opinion.
Analyze the corporate-level strategies for the corporation you chose to determine the corporate-level strategy you think is most important to the long-term success of the firm and whether or not you judge this to be a good choice. Justify your opinion.
Analyze the competitive environment to determine the corporation’s most significant competitor. Compare their strategies at each level and evaluate which company you think is most likely to be successful in the long term. Justify your choice.
Determine whether your choice from Question 3 would differ in slow-cycle and fast-cycle markets.
Use at least three quality references. Note: Wikipedia and other websites do not quality as academic resources. JWI 540: Strategy
Week Nine Lecture Notes
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JWI 540 (1192)
Page 1 of 10
EXECUTING THE PLAN
What it Means
We’ve seen why developing a clear strategy for your organization is vital for its success. However, that is
only the beginning. For your strategy to mean anything, your entire organization needs to understand it,
bring it to life, and execute it. As a strategy leader, you must be able to communicate your strategic plan in a
way that gets people excited and generates buy-in, AND you must understand and manage the forces that
may resist the change. Finally, you will need to secure and allocate the resources (both human and capital)
to successfully implement your plan.
Why it Matters
•
Execution is vitally important to winning. Without an effective delivery, everything you have done to
this stage is nothing more than an academic exercise.
•
Winning takes everything you’ve got. It takes your best ideas, your best people, and the drive to get
things done. Don’t drop the ball when it comes to putting the execution of the strategy in the hands
of the best people you have (and giving them the resources they need to get the job done).
•
A failed execution is demoralizing. It undermines the effort that the team has put into the project, and
can leave the organization in a worse place than it was before the new strategy was developed.
“In real life, strategy is actually very
straightforward. You pick a general
direction and implement like hell.”
Jack Welch
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JWI 540 (1192)
Page 2 of 10
HOW DO WE GET READY FOR IMPLEMENTATION?
You’ve assessed your company’s strategic capabilities, identified your target customers, sized up the
competition, considered your strategic options, and finally settled on a strategy.
It’s time to implement, right? Call on new customers. Set up new systems. Reach out to potential partners.
Your most motivated people may already be engaging in such actions and seeing some good results.
We don’t want to squelch anyone’s enthusiasm. But you’re more likely to succeed if you have a plan that
sets out activities, priorities, and processes for implementing your strategy.
WHY YOU NEED A PLAN
Strategy initiatives are typically framed at a fairly high level of abstraction. There is usually a lot of work to be
done to bring those lofty goals back down to earth.
Many companies find it helpful to flesh out their strategic objectives by asking questions. What does success
look like? How does it feel? What are we doing or not doing to achieve our objectives? What are our
competitors doing?
To put some meat on the bones of its strategic goal of expanding into the United States, IKEA might have
depicted what success would look like by creating maps with pins indicating the locations of initial store
locations. Would they be in suburbs of big cities on the east and west coasts? College towns like Ann Arbor
or Palo Alto? Once the locations were identified, the company’s strategy planners could have sketched out
the necessary activities – for example, the creation of supplier networks, marketing campaigns, and staffing
models – needed to turn those pins into actual, profitable stores.
As you put together your implementation plan, there will likely be some conflict among different courses of
action. For example, you may discover that retraining existing staff or hiring new people is a bottleneck that
will delay all the other activities. Meanwhile, while you are concerned about hiring, one of your colleagues is
chomping at the bit to make an acquisition, and another has convened focus groups to provide input for
branding strategies. How do you coordinate these various activities?
ALIGNING THE ELEMENTS OF A PLAN
It may seem like you have an infinite number of approaches to the many strategic activities ahead, but they
can be usefully grouped into a manageable set of categories. You should consider at least five key elements
in order to successfully move from the strategy at a conceptual level toward a strategy in action.
1. The first of these is the strategy itself. Communicating the strategic objectives, your competitive
advantage, and the timing of implementation throughout the organization in a clear, memorable,
meaningful way is absolutely necessary for people to embrace and internalize the strategy. Instead
of talking about your strategy, you might try referring to your agenda to emphasize that the strategy
will shape how management spends its time.
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JWI 540 (1192)
Page 3 of 10
2. You need to ensure that people are ready to implement the strategy. Hiring, staffing, training, and
coaching must be reoriented to focus on the strategy and the activities supporting the company’s
advantage. You may have the right people, but they may need to be reassigned, which may require
putting their current projects on hold or eliminating them altogether. You also may not have the
number or type of people you need. If that’s the case, not much can get underway until the
necessary people are brought on board.
3. The organizational structure of your business may also need to be modified. For example, the
structure of a law firm shifting from a local strategy to a national strategy might change so that the
firm’s profit centers would be organized around individual offices, rather than firm-wide practice
areas focused on different areas of the law. The organization of offices, regions, and practice
groups, along with internal reporting relationships, would have to shift to better support the strategy.
4. Much of what needs to be mapped out during strategy planning, and carried out during
implementation, are processes. A geographically expanding law firm, for example, might need to
rethink its process for hiring new associates in order to reflect the firm’s national reach. Or it may
want to change its IT processes in order to monitor potential client conflicts across all geographies.
5. Metrics, such as quality-control measures or customer feedback data, are needed to track activities
tied to the strategic objectives and determine where adjustments are needed. When they are linked
to a meaningful rewards system, metrics also can help coordinate and motivate the actions of
diverse groups working on different aspects of the strategy.
SETTING PLAN PRIORITIES
Now that you’ve made decisions related to these five factors, it’s time to get busy, right? Wrong.
Many organizations go astray at this point. They’re busy working on the implementation of their strategy, but
busy is not necessarily productive. There’s one last step you need to take.
You need to prioritize. If you’ve been successful in communicating your strategy and generating enthusiasm
and support throughout the organization, you’ll have plenty of people eager to move forward. But remember,
everything can’t be done in the first week.
Setting the top priorities for strategy implementation can be done in various ways. One of the most effective
methods is to frame the situation in the negative. Ask yourself, “What specific aspects of our organization
have the potential to derail this strategic initiative?” Now’s the time to consider whether you’ll have difficulty
hiring people with the right skills fast enough or identifying an acquisition target that meets your agreedupon criteria, for instance.
At first, your list of barriers to success may seem discouraging. But systematically group and analyze them
until you have a manageable list of necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for success. From this list,
generate five top priorities that must happen for your strategy to succeed. These priorities deserve significant
managerial attention.
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JWI 540 (1192)
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Clear priorities offer several benefits. They help align the organization, making it clear what needs to happen
first and where scarce resources should be allocated. They can also make the difficult decisions, such as
shutting down a project, closing a plant, or laying off people, easier to accept, because they provide a
rationale for controversial moves.
Remember, a task isn’t a priority if it can’t be accomplished. Make sure you’ve identified doable tasks. Then,
make sure you do them. If you’re having difficulty tackling the top five priorities on your list because of limited
resources or time constraints, don’t bother with the other items on the list. People will often go after lowhanging fruit and keep busy with strategic activities. Don’t fool yourself. If it’s clear you’re not up to the task of
achieving your top priorities, go back and revise your strategy and the expectations you’ve been setting
before taking action again.
COMMUNICATING THE PLAN
To carry out the plan, managers throughout the organization will do the heavy lifting of translating the
important activities you’ve identified into specific actions that they and their people will carry out. Therefore,
it’s crucial that all employees have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve. Your
communication of strategy objectives needs to:
Be Received: Cutting through the noise of the work environment is difficult. To be noticed, deliver
your message through multiple channels, including in-person, print, digital, and social media. The
message should be somewhat provocative or surprising. When employees pause with thoughts like
“That’s crazy!” or “That’s what I’ve been saying all along!” you’ve achieved part of your goal.
Be Understood: Once you have people’s attention, buzzwords and jargon will only confuse and
annoy them. Even clear language can be misunderstood or misinterpreted. Sometimes, a picture is
worth a thousand words. Sometimes, you need to tell a story. Remember, any lack of clarity you
have around your core message will come through to your audience.
Be Credible: Even if your employees are raptly attentive and understand your message clearly, they
need to believe in it. If there is a credibility gap of any type, it is unlikely people will make any real
commitments. And if the strategy is a departure from the past, some people may doubt whether the
firm’s leaders are serious about implementing it. Others may wonder whether the funds and skills
are available to pursue the strategy.
Be Actionable: A clear, step-by-step process for moving from concepts to activities to results,
identifying appropriate resources, metrics, and timelines, conveys how the strategy will actually get
implemented. If each employee can see how they can tangibly contribute to the strategy through
their personal efforts and without taking unsupported risks, your communication is making a real
contribution to the firm’s success.
Be Timely: Some news grows obsolete quickly. Other messages are timeless. By the time you craft
your internal communications plan and perfect every word, the message may have grown stale.
Recognize that tradeoffs will have to be made between thorough preparation and timely
communication. When it seems appropriate, use word of mouth to spread messages virally.
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JWI 540 (1192)
Page 5 of 10
With a clearly communicated translation of your strategy into a prioritized list of activities, you’re well on your
way to putting your strategy into action.
HOW DO WE ALLOCATE RESOURCES?
You’ve created a prioritized list of activities designed to further your strategic objectives, but as you go
through it, you realize something’s missing. Money needs to be directed to projects. People need to be
assigned to teams. Plant capacity needs to be committed to product lines. Prime office space needs to be
dedicated to departments.
Notice what’s unsaid here. Money needs to be directed to specific projects and not to others. People need to
be assigned to specific teams and not to others. You get the idea.
The activities you’ve identified as important to your strategy must be translated into budget items, whether
for a specific project or as part of the annual budget of a division or department. And because resources are
limited, they must be allocated among various activities. Not everyone will get as much as they think they
need.
Even if your company’s existing resources are pretty well matched with your plan, the details and sequence
of their allocation will be challenging to work out. If the strategy is ambitious and requires adding people,
doing an acquisition, or opening new plants, then the process becomes more complex and anxietyproducing.
TOP DOWN, BOTTOM UP, TOP DOWN
The allocation of resources is an iterative, two-way process. As we noted in the previous lecture, the
company’s leadership must vividly communicate the specific aims of the strategy – the types of activities
needed for it to succeed – to the entire organization.
Managers in the individual business units take these overarching directives, translate them into proposed
projects and activities, and then seek the resources to make them a reality. Actions must clearly link to the
strategy in a meaningful way. Although it’s tempting to try to cram a pet project into a strategic plan, it’s
difficult to defend a new plant in Dallas as supportive of a U.S. company’s global expansion. Senior
managers will, in turn, consider the funding requests for these projects and activities, accepting some and
rejecting others. The back-and-forth may require several rounds.
For example, senior management at a European insurance company communicated its strategy throughout
the organization, along with a portfolio of opportunities that might further the strategy. The key message from
the senior leaders was that they wanted to see more proposals for projects farther from the core business.
These more innovative – albeit more uncertain and unfamiliar – projects were expected to collectively result
in higher returns, outweighing the higher associated risk.
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JWI 540 (1192)
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At first, the business unit heads continued to propose safe projects that represented incremental changes
away from the core business. Such a response isn’t unusual. Often, a combination of existing financial
incentives and self-preservation instincts leads managers to propose low-risk projects with reachable
targets, despite senior management’s request for more ambitious ideas.
The senior leaders rejected these projects and called for more creative and far-reaching proposals, which
they ultimately started getting. But the desired results did not come from static planning documents that
publicized strategic priorities. Managers brought the message to life and communicated their priorities both
in words and in deeds.
Indeed, communication played a big role. Senior managers told admiring stories of crazy, off-the-wall
proposals they had received. Actions reinforced these messages. For example, leaders earmarked funding
for some of the riskier proposals and assigned high-profile people to work on these noncore efforts. They
were stingy in committing funds to ongoing business-as-usual projects.
HOW TO GET BETTER PROPOSALS FROM MANAGERS
Inevitably, ideas must also flow in the opposite direction – from top down to bottom up. Many companies use
a formal proposal process to communicate needs back up to senior leaders. At this stage, managers must
get the attention of upper management in order to successfully compete for limited resources.
Leaders want to see documentation, arguments, and plans that are clear, quantifiable, and logical, in support
of your desired priorities. Such details not only help you gain the necessary resources, but also create
strategies that are more easily aligned with other company activities.
Proposal templates sometimes help to clarify the information needed and spur movement toward the firm’s
goals. Templates also have a potential downside, though. They can transform the planning process into a
fill-in-the-blanks exercise that fosters conventional thinking. In the best case, managers and employees
develop templates at the business unit level, rather than having them imposed from on high or, worse yet,
from outside advisors or consultants.
Timelines and a bit of well-placed pressure can also move the process along. When bottlenecks develop,
senior managers must be ready to step in to get the planning process back on track. In the case of the
European insurer mentioned earlier, each business unit was asked to propose specific projects under the
strategic plan, and support the proposal with a business case and a budget. One business unit was slow in
pulling its information together, and the overall resource-allocation process ground to a halt. Midlevel
managers and administrators sent a number of messages (both pleading and threatening) to the head of the
errant unit.
It may be that the business unit head thought the deadline wasn’t real and was waiting to hear when his data
were really needed. Perhaps he didn’t think his proposal would be an integral part of the overall planning and
budgeting process. In the end, it took an unexpected visit from a senior leader and a one-on-one discussion
to break the logjam.
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be copied, further distributed, or otherwise disclosed in whole or in part, without the expressed written permission of Strayer University.
JWI 540 (1192)
Page 7 of 10
PLAYING THE BUDGET GAME
Allocating resources is a bit like a game with many moving pieces. In that spirit, consider a hypothetical
situation in which you take four friends to lunch and have just $200 to spend. Would you:
1. Ask everyone what they would like to order, and if the cost of their selections totals less than $200,
order and enjoy your meal?
2. Ask everyone what they would like to order, and if the cost of their selections totals more than $200,
reveal your limit and ask the group to make different choices?
3. Talk to the restaurant ahead of time so that it only offers your group meals in your price range?
4. Tell your guests in advance that they each have $40 to spend on the meal, including tip?
5. Ask everyone to share the portion of the bill over $200?
This example may sound a bit silly, but in reality, it illustrates the many ways in which group decisions about
the allocati…
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