Strategy as Practice & Leadership - Coursework Example

STRATEGY AS PRACTICE & LEADERSHIP Introduction Business and non-business organizations often rely on capable leadership to guide them through various unprecedented changes. However, ample evidence exists in the news, research reports, and other studies about organizations that have found it difficult to adapt to change and to implement successful strategic plans (Terrill & Middlebrooks 2000, p. 45). The turmoil experienced is due to the kind of leadership exhibited by these organizations. When the leadership approaches are not changed, then similar outcomes will continue in the future (Mintzberg 2004, 52). New economic forces are taking shape, helping countries like China, India, and Brazil to emerge as global superpowers. Surveys by CEOs from all significant companies and countries have indicated they believe that one factor crucial to their organisations’ successful growth and consistency is the quality exhibited by their leadership styles. Strategic, efficient leadership can enable organizations and institutions to create and nurture a culture that achieves success and effective performance (Nerur, Rasheed & Natarajan 2008, p. 325). This paper examines the importance of strategy in organizational management and leadership, focusing on how it influences strategic thinking and human behaviour to contribute to the organisation’s growth and success in the particular industry. Strategy Strategy, as used in business and institutional management, can be defined as a high-level or high-stakes plan that is often used in achieving one or more goals under certain conditions of uncertainty (Jarzabkowski 2004, p. 531). A strategy is denoted as having importance because resources needed to achieve certain goals in organizations and institutions are said to be limited, requiring the use of an approach that maximizes its outcomes from those available resources. Having a strategy simply means setting goals and choosing approaches towards their achievement through the mobilization of the necessary resources. For an organization, an institution, and even an individual, a strategy can be a justification of the end or final goals that are to be achieved using the minimal resources or means available (Golsorkhi 2010, p. 65). In an organisation, the people in senior leadership have a mandate to create a strategy for enhancing organizational performance and success. In an organisation, a strategy emerges as a special pattern of activities the organisation adapts to compete effectively and nurture its growth and success (Ghobadian & ORegan 2008, p. 13). From this perspective, the strategy process consists of activities like strategic thinking and strategic planning. McGill University and Henry Mintzberg have defined strategy as being a certain pattern that exists in a series of decisions; one the other hand, Max McKeown has argued that strategy is the process aimed at shaping the unforeseen future (Whittington 2004, p. 63). In this case, it is a human attempt in getting the different desirable ends using the available means. Dr. Kvint Vladimir has also defined strategy as a system that consists of seeking, developing, and formulating a special doctrine that ensures long-term growth and success when it is followed and adhered to faithfully. Analysis of Strategy and Strategic Thinking In modern times, strategy can be described as being more challenging than it used to be in the recent past due to the rise of global competition. Corporate strategies are needed to transcend international borders and other markets across the world (Reckwitz 2002, p. 251). Many organizations are trying to establish systems in which they can be relevant and helpful to all people by providing goods and services in the most effective and efficient manner. Organizations are trying to formulate approaches in which they can make use of their minimal resources. Additionally, the use of special strategies ensures proper people management within the organization for effective execution of the set strategies (Kaplan 2008, p. 738). Having effective strategies is important to reduce wasting human and non-human resources. Strategic Thinking Strategic thinking can be described or defined as the thinking or mental process that is applied by a person in the context of setting and achieving success for a certain predetermined endeavour. Being a cognitive process, strategic thinking often leads to the production of strategic thoughts (Sparrow 2012, p. 32). When it is applied in the process of organizational and institutional strategic management, the process often involves generating and applying certain unique business opportunities and insights aimed at establishing competitive advantages for the firm or particular organisation. Strategic thinking can be done as a collaborative activity involving many people who are thought to be key within the organisation; these people are often thought to have the ability to influence the organisation either positively or negatively (Floyd & Lane 2000, p. 160). The process of group strategic thinking is said to be essential in enabling a creative and proactive dialogue in which the individuals have an opportunity to share their different perspectives (Nordqvist & Melin 2008, p. 332; Cockerell 2008, p. 59). The harmonization of these divergent views and perspectives is often essential in arriving at solutions that are deemed effective in solving complex organizational issues. In this regard, strategic thinking is often seen as a benefit, especially for the fast-changing and highly competitive business landscape. The process of strategic thinking often involves seeking and establishing a certain strategic foresight for organizations through the exploration of all possible futures, while challenging the conventional thinking process and fostering decision making in modern economic times. Other scholars on this subject have observed strategic thinking is an important mental process that can be rational or abstract, and that it is expected to be better for the synthesis of both material and psychological data. In this regard, the strategist needs to have a huge capacity for both synthesis and analysis (Jarzabkowski & Spee 2009, p. 72). The analysis part is needed for assembling data, which is useful for the diagnostic process and synthesis, which in turn leads to alternative choices that are essential for organizational success. The Strategic Thinking Process The process of strategic thinking is actually a combination of strategic planning, innovation, and operational planning. The starting point of this process is often innovation, where the emphasis is always on creating an ideal future by considering the plans that are deemed essential in achieving the goals and objectives of the organisation. The innovation process is usually articulated into different strategies, all of which play an important role towards achieving the set goals and objectives. The following diagram gives a brief overview of the strategic thinking process: Fig 1. The strategic thinking process (May 2005). In the strategic thinking process, the customer’s needs are often incorporated in setting the overall strategy because they are considered essential to business growth. Additionally, benchmarking is also never left out for this important process and is regarded as essential towards the organisation’s future vision. The strategic thinking process must take an all-inclusive approach, incorporating the views and perspectives of the organisation’s important stakeholders. At each stage in the strategic thinking process, the involvement of the organization’s employees is essential. This is the point at which operational planning is needed most. It is a process that involves taking all the strategies and turning them into achievable action plans. For this reason, these plans are supposed to involve all the organisation’s staff to ensure the customers’ needs are known and effectively met. The last part of the process is measurement, and it is thought to be the most important. The measurement aspect in the strategic thinking process involves a continuous evaluation of the effectiveness of the set plans, enabling verification of those particular plans as they are being implemented (Cameron 2008, p 98). The measurement process is essential in benchmarking the original needs over the actions being implemented. For the successful implementation of the strategic change initiated from the strategic thinking process, it is imperative all levels of employee involvement be incorporated for every action being done (Jarzabkowski & Whittington 2008, p. 104). This is often achieved through the identification and establishment of principles ensuring the organization successfully attains its determined strategic goals. Analysis of Complexity Thinking and Looking at the Human Side The fast-growing discipline of complexity leadership explains that leadership often emerges from interactions occurring within the particular organisation. The nature of the interaction dynamics plays a pivotal role in providingcontext for effective leadership. Three main dimensions of complexity thinking have emerged. The first dimension is convergent context, which exists as an important solution to the pressing problems that keep emerging in the firm. When resources seem to be highly constrained, the promotion of efficiency and choosing a favourable direction for the firm are highly sought. Second, complexity leadership often leads to the availability of a certain generative context, especially when there is new knowledge and several other plentiful resources existing in the environment (Balogun & Johnson 2004, p. 527). In this regard, it leads to a situation that encourages new innovations and ideas that later become the centre of focus as far as leadership is concerned (Jarzabkowski 2005, p. 87). The people in the organization’s senior leadership are forced to decide on systems by which they can make effective use of their available resources for their present and future success. The final scenario involves the existence of a unifying context. This situation often emerges whenever there is organizational decomposition limiting space and time, as well as complicated bureaucracies in the organisation to achieve its goals. Additionally, the same is often experienced in both the internal and external limits of the organisation, including its knowledge flow and other essential resources. It is always important that effective organizational leadership addresses the need for shared values, missions, and visions that hold the firm together for achieving its goals. In order to achieve the firm’s objectives in the most effective way, various propositions have been developed concerning the implications and nature of the different dimensions that emerge as a result of complexity leadership and thinking. The theory of complexity leadership is said to answer all the demands of having an effective, integrated approach as far as leadership research that includes context and exploration of the firm’s meso-level mechanisms. Complexity thinking and leadership assume effective organizational leadership emerges from these complex interactions and does not always impose on them, especially from outside the organisation. In order to effectively comprehend these assertions, one has to consider the particular epistemological status of the prevailing complexity, science, and dynamical systems that relate effectively to the human organizations. Every time complex ideas and thinking are imported from natural science and put on human organizations, they often end up being quite useful for practitioners and researchers in their pursuit for traditional approaches to strategic and effective organizational management. For instance, frameworks that consider organizations as being complex, adaptive units and large systems have given an essential insight about some of the nonlinear impacts present in the firm’s leadership activities (Labianca, Gray & Brass 2000, p. 251). However, it is important to understand that the questions of whether the complexity ideas can effectively apply directly to the study and research of organizational leadership have not fully settled. Analysis of Adaptive Systems The complex adaptive system describes a term that was developed in 1975 by Holland in the process of describing various non-linear systems that have a behaviour determined by the interactions of its respective parts. The different parts making up the level and the structure of the interactions that happen in the system comprise the major distinguishing characteristics of the complex system (Jarzabkowski, Balogun & Seidl 2007, p. 8). The kind of complexity exhibited in the system emanates from the existing collective control in the separate parts. Often, each of the separate parts is effectively governed by simple rules so that interactions happening between the separate parts tend to bring about complex patterns of the existing behaviour. However, there are times when the absence of effective central control makes it impossible to determine the kind of attribution needed for any of the parts. This development is often due to the different confounding effects of changes brought about by one or more of the parts in the complexity adaptive system. Complex systems can be said to be a kind of sub-optimal behaviour exhibited by some of the different parts that make up the entire complex adaptive system. Strategy as a Practice and Its Roles in Leadership In modern times, the evolutions that continue to emerge as far as strategic thinking is concerned have led to the creation of various perceptions of strategy, as well as how strategy performs in different organizations over time. In the various dominant theories that exist, one shared commonality is the perception a strategy is simply something organizations possess (Carter, Clegg & Kornberger 2008, p. 87). Over the past decade, new approaches in research have led to the development of a new movement in strategy research, with the research centring on the various practice approaches towards strategy. This new development needed a framework that was later to be referred to as strategy as a practice. This is actually different from the previous dominant view about strategy, which considered it something organizations possess. Strategy as a practice is often focused on strategy being something the human resources in firms perform. In this regard, there is a special focus on people as those implementing the strategy and ensuring the set goals and objectives have been effectively met. One of the questions that has been raised more than once is how strategy actually works in different organizations. For a long time, researchers have been trying their best to give answers to this question by establishing various theories and undertaking empirical studies. Due to these efforts, various perspectives about strategy and its associated workings have emerged (Rouleau 2005, p. 1425).For instance, the different perceptions and perspectives include taking strategy as an important determinant of the many long-term goals and objectives being developed, as well as creating and adopting the necessary courses of action such as effective allocation of available resources. It is important to realize that, as a practice, strategy is simply a component of the wider practices of contemporary management science and social science theory (Bryman & Bell 2007, p. 54). Strategy as a practice has been actively imported into the different management fields like knowledge management, technology, accounting, and organizational learning. Recently, the practice has turned into the strategy field, something that focuses on the actual work of the strategists and the entire strategizing work. Strategy as a practice can be attributed to two main influences, the first one being in management science and the second happening in strategic management. At present, there has been an increasing frustration over the normative models of science, which are quite dominant in strategic management research (Blau & Rupnik 2007, p. 72). A lot of strategy theory has been generated from the many large-scale studies concerning the micro-economic traditions that reduce the complexities of managing strategy to a few casually associated variables (Jenlink 2008, p. 76). Such kinds of studies have been focusing on firms and industries, and their level of analysis offers scant attention to human actions. Strategy as a practice often reduces the actors to merely simplistic figures represented by few demographic variables, which are themselves questionably associated with firm performance. The dominance associated with economic assumptions, as far as research in strategic management is concerned, is a kind of straitjacket that has made strategy theory increasingly remote and far out of reach with complexities about strategy in practice. Roles in Leadership The process of implementing an effective corporate strategy requires the presence of team efforts that are headed and coordinated by the organisation’s senior leadership. Each of the people involved in the organization’s management has his specific responsibilities, something that requires the entire organisation to effectively comprehend the roles and functions of leadership in terms of strategic implementation and making the delegation of responsibilityhighly effective and reliable (Whittington 2006, p. 615). Strategy as a practice is important in ensuring goals are set and achieved as planned. It ensures all the people involved in the management, right from the top to the bottom, are given consideration in making decisions that enable the organisation to effectively achieve its goals and objectives (Regnér 2003, p. 71). Additionally, the process sets out effective approaches that ensure all the available resources are utilized in meeting the set targets, thus pushing the organisation towards its effective performance and success. Any kind of strategic implementation for acompany program or policy needs the participation of all the departments and people in the firm (Baum 2010, p. 87). It is the duty of the company leadership to identify all the company departments and to devise systems that ensure all of them are incorporated in the implementation and execution of the strategies. Thereafter, it is important the leadership team identifies all the affected parties and picks their representatives for the process (Mantere 2005, p. 160). The management is expected to ensure it establishes group leaders who can help in the implementation of the developed strategy. Conclusion In conclusion, the success of anyorganisation’s leadership plan depends not only on the kind of staff available and the resources in place but also on the strategy devised to guide the process. It is the duty of the organisation’s senior leadershipto examine its mission and vision and to devise strategies deemed effective in guiding the organisation towards its success and a competitive advantage. After devising such a plan, it is important everyone in the organization is actively involved in its development and implementation to ensure the efforts of all people are utilized in achieving the goals and objectives. List of References Balogun, J & Johnson, G 2004, ‘Organizational restructuring and middle manager sense making.’ Academy of Management Journal, vol. 47, no. 4, pp. 523‐549. Baum, J 2010. The globalization of strategy research. 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