Business Strategy 9: Step 6 Formulate Strategies to Manage Issues

This continues our series on John M. Bryson’s strategy change plan to help businesses

John M. Bryson wrote “A strategy  can be defined as a pattern of purposes, policies, programs, actions, decisions, or resource allocations that define what an organization is, what it does and why it does it. Strategies vary by level, function and time frame. Organizations develop strategies to deal with the issues they have identified” (p 46)

Approaches for Strategy Development

Various approaches exist to develop strategy. Dr. Bryson favors either of two:

“The first is a five-part, fairly speedy process based on the work of the Institute of Cultural Affairs:

• Identify practical alternatives and of dreams or visions for resolving the strategic options
• Enumerate the barriers to achieve those alternatives, dreams, or visions
• Develop major proposals for achieving these alternatives, dreams, and visions
  • Indirectly by overcoming barriers
  • Directly solicits proposals from key organizational units or stakeholders
• Act over the next two to three years to implement major proposals
• Create a detailed work program for the next 6-12 months to to implement actions

“The second, a mapping process, can be used when the planning team needs or desires to articulate the relationships among multiple options so as to show how they fit together as part of a pattern:

• List multiple options for addressing each strategic issue, phrasing each option in imperative, action terms
• Link the actions by arrows indicating which option causes or influences the achievement of other options. Each option may be part of more than one chain
• The result is a map of action-to-outcome (cause and effect, means-to-an-end) relationships
• Those options toward the end of the chain of arrows are possible goals or perhaps even mission statements.” (p46-47)

Criteria for an Effective Strategy

An effective strategy should meet several criteria:

• “Technically workable and administratively feasible”
• “Politically acceptable to clients, shareholders, and other stakeholders”
• “Results oriented”
• “Fit the organization’s philosophy and core values”
• “Ethical, moral, and legal”
• “Deal with the strategic issue it was supposed to address”
• “Must create value and profit” (p48)

Tuesday we analyze how to review and adopt the strategies and strategic plan