Strategic Skills For Senior Managers

Strategic Skills For Senior Managers - will enable you to discover how you can integrate the strategic considerations of marketing, operational, finance and change issues when making critical business decisions. 

Course Overview

Booking Information

Dates	Prices	Book This Course	Discount
01 - 03 Dec 2010	£ 1595		-

 

This course will be held on the above listed dates in central London. For more information about venue please click here.

Programme Details

"Strategic thinking skills are a vital part of a senior manager's toolkit - alongside financial and people skills… but middle managers often fail to progress their careers because of their perceived deficiencies in this area."  

‘SETTING THE SCENE AND GETTING THE FOUNDATIONS IN PLACE’

Strategy Thinking and Mindset

• A strategic stretch and warm up to get the mind ready for action

- Considering the significance of ‘frames of reference’
- A high level review of people’s thinking styles
- Assess the concept of the ‘big picture’
- Culture and it’s influence on strategic planning
- Discuss ‘what is creativity’ and has it a place in strategic thinking?
- What is strategic leadership and its relevance for the future

“The devil is in the detail”

• A hands-on exercise to link the operational issues to strategic objectives
  
  - Experience how to link the soft and the hard issues
  - Observe the disconnect in the current approach to corporate strategy
  - Gain an insight into how to obtain buy-in from your teams
  - Strategic Activity Trees (SATs); a formal way to logically link strategies

Strategy – Schools of Strategic Thought

• A rapid walk through various schools of thought of the last 40 years, linked to the Mintzberg et al concept
  
  - The Prescriptive Schools
  - The Descriptive Schools
  - The Configuration Schools

What is Strategy? – Strategic Framework

• Strategy and some of the core ideas behind it

- What is strategy and what are top teams looking for from their strategy process?
- Forms of strategic development
- The 5 Ps of strategy coupled with the benefits of planning
- Competitive advantage and a discussion on its sources
- The critical difference between corporate and business level strategy

Using Strategic Visioning to Explore The Future – Evolutionary Transformation

• Vision and success factors

- The importance of keeping ‘the future in mind’ in the personal/corporate planning cycle
- Finding the answers to the why? what? how? and who? questions
- The distinction between important and/or urgent actions
- A core strategic paradigm: Linking corporate value to individual/team values
- Recognising passion and the energy that it creates
- Brand religion- the future or just fad

 

‘REVIEWING THE COMPONENTS THAT POPULATE THE STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK’

Strategic Value – Is it Important?

• A concept of corporate value to underpin your strategic decision-making

- Consider how corporate value affects your governance duties as a senior manager
- Review of financial analysis and discounted cash flow (DCF) to see how it impacts on value

• Is ‘managing for value’ (MFV) appropriate for management teams?

Understanding Your External Marketplace

• Understanding vision, sustainable competitive advantage and managing uncertainties.

- Understanding customer value and how to work backwards from this
- Look at needs gap analysis and perceptual mapping
- Assess the role of competitors’ mind-sets, and what they might do next
- Aligning your strategy, using “wishbone” analysis
- Political, Economic, Social and Technological (PEST) analysis
- Using the uncertainty and importance grid

Analysing Competitive Marketing Strategy

• How do we understand external markets, the mind-set of the industry and strategic change?

- Identifying your competitive advantage.
- Understanding market and competitive dynamics
- Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix
- Ansoff and modified Ansoff matrix
- Financial BCG development matrix
- GE/McKinsey multi-factor matrix
- Directional policy matrix
- Porter’s five forces
- Porter’s value chain
- Growth drivers
- Competitor profiling
- Avoiding organisational complacency and strategic drift

Generating Options Using Creative Thinking

• Looking at the area of developing creative solutions

- The enablers of creativity
- Creating strategic options
- Initial screening - using the ‘Attraction-Implementation Difficulty’ (AID) grid
- Adopting the process of ICEDIP for creative option building
- Mind mapping and usefulness to the creative process

Improving Business Performance

• Using scenario techniques to test strategic options

- Diagnosis of current situation using a prioritised dynamic SWOT analysis
- Strategic option grid for generating and evaluating options
- Wishbone analysis and the uncertainty grids for testing alignment
- Scenario storytelling – The first ingredients of a business plan
- Implementation difficulty: force field analysis
- Uncertainty and risk: the uncertainty-importance grid
- Stakeholder acceptability: stakeholder analysis

Evaluating Options and Risk within Your Organisation

• Generating and evaluating strategic options for a project which you are involved in

- The scope of business and personal options for the Strategic Option Grid
- Using the “value-over-time curve” for assessing financial attractiveness
- Using the “difficulty-over-time curve” to assess implementation difficulty

‘ MAKING IT HAPPEN’

Influencing and Driving Change

• Diagnosing strategic change

- Understanding the dynamics of change
- McKinsey 7 Ss framework
- Using the Strategic Option Grid - for generating novel options approaches
- Fishbone analysis of turnaround
- Introducing force field and stakeholder analysis (for influencing)

Identifying and Overcoming Obstacles to Implementation

• Applying Attractiveness - Implementation Difficulty (AID analysis) to your own issues, plus force field and stakeholder analysis.

- Strategies based on stakeholder agenda analysis
- Identifying, understanding and prioritising stakeholders – Using the Balanced Score-Card (BSC)
- Stephen Covey – The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
- Richard Barrett - The Seven Levels of Human Consciousness

Developing Winning Business Plans

• A synthesis - what should go in your business plan - and how to your desired destination.

- The difference between a strategic plan, a business plan and budgets/forecasts
- Length, style, format of the business plan
- Using “From-To” analysis to communicate it
- Dealing with ownership issues - and influencing stakeholders
- The corporate alignment model

 

 

Course Leader

The course will be lead by Malcolm Lewis, a graduate (BSc-Business Administration and MSc-Financial Management) and Chartered Accountant (FCA). He specialises in the process of ‘Strategic Evolution’ for organisations and individuals through the alignment of strategies, action plans and finances to their spiritual essence and purpose. Malcolm has combined his past business life as a finance director, corporate financier and company trouble-shooter with that of a former international sportsman to deliver top team performance in the UK, Middle East, Far East, South Africa and USA. He is a strategic guide and coach as well as a visiting lecturer at Bristol University (Visiting Fellow) and Henley
Management College in financial strategy, leadership and culture.